Summer Azure - Celastrina neglecta - I pfoto- graphed this specimen for more than ten minutes at 8:30 in the morning. The light was good and it stayed on the same dandelion the whole time, but never opened its wings to display the wonderful blue on the other side, which gives it the name Azure, until it flew away.

 

Tilden Industrial Park pond was swollen by recent rains which greened up the foliage nicely. Curiously, though, not one single waterfowl was about when I visited last Saturday and only one Painted Turtle.

 
Mallard - Anas platyrhynchos - an immature female, I believe - found this week in the pasture.

 
Honeybee on clover - they seem to be making a comeback this year after dire predictions on the Internet last summer that they would all soon be gone with massive losses to agriculture.

 
Cooper - like a pitcher checking the runner on second base - looks over his shoulder at Scotty, one of our tomcats, trying to sneak up to Cooper's water bowl.

 
Black-winged Damselfly - Agrion maculatum - at least I think that's what this is. I am nowhere near as experienced with odinata as lepidoptera. Whatever the proper classification, this individual was spotted on the old Schuylkill Canal in Hamburg.

 
Hamburg EMS responds to a recent call on State Street in Hamburg. Last week I was a patient riding in Unit 547, but 15 years ago I was a volunteer driver with that service for about two years, putting in two weekday mornings each week and occasional overnight shits as well. The work was generally rewarding, but the internal politics was often frustrating. In rural areas and small towns, modern life would be much more difficult without the many hours of service provided by volunteers in emergency medical services, firefighting and auxiliary police service.

 
4th of July weekend traffic started at mid afternoon on Thursday, July 3. There were a lot of police vehicles on the roads and the Pennsylvania Turnpike's safety patrols were much in evidence. But this was something I had not seen before, an insurance company safety patrol responding with Pennsylvania State Police to an incident on the Turnpike.

 
Smoke rises from a fire five miles away in Shoemakersville. It was only a small mechanic shop that burned, along with several automobiles, but it produced a great deal of smoke and thoroughly snarled late afternoon traffic on the main highway from Reading to Pottsville.

 
Zettlemoyer Bridge over Maiden Creek is under repair. I'm glad to see it being restored, so many of these graceful old stone bridges have been replaced by iron or steel truss bridges over the years.

 
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail - Papilio glaucus - female - feeding on Canadian Thistle which has been in bloom lately. That day I also got some nice shots of some sort of bumblebee and a Silver-spotted Skipper on thistles in the same pasture.

 

Fickle female feline - the new mother on the left here first showed up with her kittens in the company of a tom I call Scotty because he looks rather like a bowl of vanilla ice cream liberally covered in butterscotch. Not long after, Scotty disappeared and was replaced by this grey cat called Tiger for obvious reasons. Recently, Scotty has been seen around again, but so has another tom called Blackie. One of these three is almost certainly the father of her four kittens, but I have no idea which one it is. One kitten looks a bit like Tiger and another a bit like Blackie, but the other two don't resemble either their mother or any of these three males.