Bees of several types were about the only things flitting from flower to flower in the garden Saturday. On that visit I saw only a single Sulphur and no other butterflies or skippers.

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Rains since Tuesday have swollen the placid pool for anglers at the base of the dam seen two photos below to the rushing tide seen here in a photo made on Saturday.

 

Fall foliage above the Kernsville Dam on an overcast day in October.

 
Anglers fishing the Schuylkill River immediately below the Kernsville Dam. On the very steep left bank of the river, you can see houses on Port Clinton Avenue at the northern end of the Borough of Hamburg.

 
Painted Lady - Vanessa cardui - another first for my life list, this one was spotted 22 October in the Blue Mountain Wildlife butterfly garden.

 
Canoe run aground in the Schuylkill River - eloquent testimony to how low the river is these days during a period of generally below normal rainfall. This photo was taken through trees from the road leading to the butterfly garden at Kernsville Dam.

 
Variegated Fritillary - Euptoieta claudia - a much clearer photo than the one from early September.

 
Fiery Skippers - Hylephila phyleus - male and female - another recent addition to the list of species confirmed as visitors to the Blue Mountain Wildlife butterfly garden.

  '49 Plymouth Business Coupe - if this is your dream car, you are in luck; it's for sale. I met the owner while shopping at Rite Aid in Hamburg on 12 October. It is a beautiful restoration job and he is asking only $6,500.

 
Ruins of a lock on the old Schuylkill Canal. The canal functioned for just over a century and played a major role in the economic development of the region carrying millions of tons of coal, as well as agricultural and other products south and manufactured goods back to the north. The canal stretched from Port Carbon (near Pottsville the county seat of Schuylkill County) to Philadelphia serving the cities of Reading (Berks County) and Pottstown (Montgomery County) and many smaller communities some of whose names preserve a bit of that heritage (Port Clinton and Leesport, for example). At its peak, the Schuylkill Canal moved more tonnage than any other canal in the country.

 
Cryptic inscription on one of the ruined stone structures remaining from the days of the Schuylkill Canal which was abandoned during the Great Depression.

 
Schuylkill River looking downstream from about the farthest point you can reach walking the trails south from the Kernsville Dam.
[Remember, you can click on any photo to view a larger image.]

 

True colors of the butterfly garden are rather impressive. But that didn't stop me from posting two color altered images from the garden this morning.

 
Thread-waisted Wasp with its prey. These wasps sting and paralyze a caterpillar and then drag it into a burrow where its eggs have been laid. The eggs hatch and begin to feed on the caterpillar which is still alive. A grisly sort of business, but an effective way to provide fresh meat for their offspring. I watched this little drama for about twenty minutes as the wasp enlarged the hole to accommodate the size of the caterpillar, dragged it underground, and then backfilled the hole. The neat pile of excess dirt was four inches away.

 

As if the butterfly garden wasn't colorful enough, I had to go and do this.

 
Canada Geese flying over the industrial park. This absurd false color image resulted from an attempt to fix a problem with my longest lens. The image was too poor to fix, but it did yield this result which I find pleasing to the eye.

 
Norfolk Southern locomotive number 6714 leads a freight into Allentown on the line running between the Lehigh River and the old Lehigh Canal.

 
Wood Duck - Aix sponsa - male, in all his gaudy plumage, with two of the less colorful females standing on rocks in the pond.

 
Red Admiral - Vanessa atalanta - my first sighting of this species in the blue Mountain Wildlife garden. The only other place I have seen one is about a mile downstream on the opposite bank of the Schuylkill River.

Compare this to the rather similar American Lady - Vanessa virginiensis - posted on 14 July.

 
Silver-Spotted Skipper - Epargyreus clarus - was getting a bit boring to photograph as they are so abundant, so I decided to play about with the colors on this one.

 
Wood Duck - Aix sponsa - female - landing on the water at the industrial park. The focus is only fair, about as good as it gets at the distance the subject was from the only vantage point, but this does show the colors of the wing plumage rather well.

 
Painted Turtle - Chrysemys picta - basking on a rock in the afternoon sun. Pond turtles need basking areas to help them regulate their temperature but where the relative safety of the water is close by. The pond at our local industrial park is perfect in this regard as there are large rocks like this one, as well as some less picturesque construction debris and old tires, that are exposed most of the time. I wish I had seen this one coming out of the water, it looks like it must have been a strenuous climb for a critter not known for its agility.

 
Orange Sulphur - Colias eurytheme - female - this is the white form female which characterizes a minority of the females emerging in summer. Technically, it is not possible by mere visual inspection to definitely distinguish Orange Sulphur from Clouded Sulphur females in this form, but I have not confirmed sighting of Clouded Sulphur at this location, so the odds are this one is Orange Sulphur.

 
Orange Sulphur - Colias eurytheme - male - in the Blue Mountain Wildlife garden. These are fairly common from early spring into fall all over the area, only slightly less common than Cabbage Whites. There is enough backlighting in this view to see that the wide black border on the upper surface of the forewing is solid; females have several areas within the border where the base color of the wings is not covered by black scales.

 
Great Blue Heron - Ardea herodias - flexes its wings before taking a stroll from one favorite perching stone to another at the Tilden Industrial Park. At lower right you will see a somewhat shorter wader - Killdeer - Charadrius vociferus.

 
I-78 reconstruction work proceeded through the night for about two weeks. This photo from shortly after 4:00 AM on 22 September shows about half the material that had been stockpiled at that place; it's all gone now and work is back to a daylight schedule now - no more backup alarms on dump trucks disturbing the peaceful rest of the neighborhood.