The heat of passion burns brightly in the garden despite - or perhaps because of - the chill in the air that now settles each evening and lingers well into the following day.

 

Flowers at Blue Mountain Wildlife butterfly garden at Kernsville Dam make a pleasing background for my computer. Something new will replace this in a few days, but I will probably bring it back a few times during the coming long months without flowers.

 
The Birds - looking like a scene from that Hitchcock film, a mass of birds suddenly took flight and swirled over the field across Old 22 from the "Smoke" Church as I was driving by Saturday afternoon.

 
Variegated Fritillary - Euptoieta claudia - from this angle it cannot be confused with Great Spangled Fritillary or Meadow Fritillary.

 
Variegated Fritillary - from this angle, it very closely resembles several other Fritillaries also found in this area.

 
Common Buckeye - Junonia coenia - a much better view of the underside of the wings than I have posted before.

 
Furball is getting bigger and looking less odd as its long hair no longer takes up as much space as the kitten herself, but she is only marginally braver than her calico sister. When I open the door to bring out food, this one doesn't run quite as far or as fast and it comes back sooner, circling around until the door closes behind me.

 
Black Swallowtail - Papilio polyxenes - male - one of two at the garden on Labor Day, much more striking and distinctive than the female from the day before.

 
Great Blue Heron - Ardea herodias - again, but this time from fairly close range showing off the reddish brown and white markings of the neck and breast and with its mouth open. I sat in the vehicle and watched this one for about an hour as it stalked the end of the pond near the road. This is the longest one of these has allowed me to observe it without flying off which I was certain it would do if I got out or tried to get closer.

 

FREE the sign says - if you are interested in this offer, these items were displayed on Pennsylvania Route 143 at Greenawalts on Labor Day. If you don't know where Greenawalts is, it's probably more trouble than it's worth for you to drive there for these treasures.

 
My Labor Day butterfly "safari" ended by crossing the ridge on Kunkel Road in Albany Township. No much in the way of butterflies on the Albany Township leg of jaunt except some photos of Variegated Fritillary - good enough to confirm the identification, but not nearly good enough to share.

 
Black Swallowtail - Papilio polyxenes - female - this one (sighted September 3) was the first of this species I had seen in the Blue Mountain Wildlife garden. This sighting was so unexpected that when I saw this specimen I started explaining the markings of Spicebush Swallowtail to a nice lady named Kay who had stopped at the garden to take a few photos of her own, but then I looked more closely and saw my error. The double row of of orange spots on the underside of the hindwings with blue between looks rather like Spicebush Swallowtail (you can see one in the August 19 entry below) but the second row of white spots on the forewings of a Spicebush does not extend as far front and there is no third row.

 
Moth - undetermined species - I don't usually post the many moths I encounter while looking for other things. I have a large number of them that I will post when I have been able to identify them - a good project for long winter nights on the internet. But this was a particularly good photo (click on it to enlarge) and I wanted to share it now.

 
Silver Spotted Skipper - Epargyreus claris - a heavily worn specimen. This illustrates the fact that the chitin which forms the basic structure of butterfly and moth wings is virtually transparent. What gives them the colors and patterns that we admire for their beauty are layers of scales on the upper and lower surfaces. Over time, these can be worn away and they are not replaced. Here you can see spots where the scales are gone from both the top and the bottom so that the flowers it is perched on show through.

 
Clearwing Sphinx Moths - mated pair - but I can's tell you for certain which species these are - Hemaris diffinis, I think.

You have to click on the photo and look at the enlarged version to see just how well this one turned out.

 
Insult! That's what I call it. The birds ignore the cats that hang around my door begging for food and pay little attention to the dog. But me - the one who puts out all those sunflower, saffron, thistle and other seeds for them - how do they treat me? They fly away if I so much as look at them through a window.

 
Cooper got a chance to play with the stray puppy that was found near the farm last week. The pup was apparently healthy and cared for, but had no collar or tattoo for identification. People frequently abandon cats in farming areas, but the same happens to dogs sometimes. My late pal Beau (a Great Dane mix) was abandoned in our neighborhood by someone who thought he was cute as a puppy but rapidly got too big to keep in an apartment. Something like that probably happened to this little guy. No reports of a lost dog of this type were found and a relative of one of the neighbors decided to adopt it.

 
Puppy looks pretty fearless in his roughhouse play with Cooper. He can afford to be so aggressive because he has figured out that Cooper is about as gentle as they come.

 

Canada Geese on the march moving to the pond in the llama pasture at a residence near here. I counted over 40 of them, but a few at either end got cropped out of this version of the photo. This is a popular area with Canada Geese during the warm months and sometimes year-round. We had a neighbor who would get wilted lettuce from the grocery to feed them at his pond. I put out birdseed for Mourning Doves, Cardinals, and smaller birds, but I draw the line at encouraging Canada Geese to stick around. They are so thick at Blue Marsh Dam on Tulpehocken Creek a about 10 miles southwest of here that the Corps of Engineers often has to ban swimming after summer rains because of all the e. coli from goose droppings that washes into the lake.

 
Great Blue Heron - Ardea herodias - hardly a new entry on these pages, but this was an unusual posture I had not observed before.

I hate to say it, but it reminded me of my college days when I worked the overnight shift at Peoples Drug Store #188. (I know, it sounds like a Soviet state enterprise, but this was in Charlotttesville, Virginia.) Twice on nights when I was working there were "flasher" incidents in the parking lot. The way the wings are held here seemed rather like one of those deranged fellows opening his raincoat before an unwilling audience.

 

The Lama
a poem by Ogden Nash

The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.*

*The author's attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.

This (two-l) Llama is one of two kept as pets at a home near here. Those heavily-lidded eyes and that black marking visible around the lower half of the muzzle give it an expression at once sleepy and amused. They share a couple acres of pasture and a pond with a flock of Canada Geese and some other feathered visitors like the Great Blue Heron above.

 
Spider and victim - some sort of dragonfly or damselfly, I've barely scraped the surface on that complex field - found on the side of the shop building next to my house in Pennsylvania.

 
Wheel Bug - a type of Assassin Bug - found in the garden on August 27 which was not a very exciting day for butterfly photographs. They were there, but nothing new or particularly stunning. but this was the first Wheel Bug I ever saw. Head to tail, this specimen was about an inch and a half and it was perched about four feet above the ground.

 

Sign giving a brief history of the canal here. You will find a parking area and access to the canal trail on Port Clinton Avenue just north of Mountain Avenue in Hamburg. the trail runs south, passing the municipal park, to its junction with the former railroad which forms the route of the trail which is planned to eventually link Philadelphia with Pottsville. It took a bit of work to make this image readable, the sign itself has faded quite a bit as it faces south and gets a lot of direct sun at all seasons.

 
Cabbage White - Pieris rapae - a species which I have posted before, but usually from the garden or in farm fields where the direct sunlight overwhelms the more subtle features. This one was on a blade of grass under the canopy of trees overhanging the entrance to the canal.