WALKING ON SKIES OF BLUE

May 2015

Nature, with a splash of blue taken from the sky, covered the scars of the old logging road

until it looked like a meandering stream with bouquets of flowers tucked between the trees along its banks. 

Wood anemones

and trilliums

with yellow bellworts

followed the stream on down the hill

until it reached the valley below.

AUTUMN SLIPS IN

Autumn slips into our lives during warm, butterscotch days

and creates ripples of rainbow waters.

Blue skies tease into eternity

And foggy mornings kiss the earth.

 Then leafy flowers rest on pastel colored trees

 

while mountains sculpt their image

 across the sky.

           The leaves begin to drop one by one 

from tree to ground

till trees stand dark and shiver in the cold

and winter bears down with claws of ice.

EARTH DAY 2014

This view from Bickle Knob in Randolph County, WV, is a reminder of the fragile yet magnificent beauty that we enjoy. Although it has changed much over the years due to logging and commercialization, we must protect what remains and keep it the unique place that it is. Greed for oil, gas,wind power and other more subtle forms of destruction must not prevail.

A Glorious Morning

What a beautiful morning. 

About 7:00, the clouds diffused the early

 morning  sun giving everything a pink hue.

Even this weathered pole had a soft, warm glow. 

Jewelweed, browneyed Susans, phlox, asters and goldenrod.

Disorganized and weedy, a chaos of color, yet delightfully
 pretty in the early morning's light. The butterflies
 gracefully drifted about this buffet of  flowers, while
 hummingbirds performed aerial combat overhead
 for the rights to the nectar plants.

This feels just like the mood set in  a 

famous poem by Robert Browning:

Morning's at seven;

The hillside's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in his heaven--

All's right with the world!

And the Sun Spilled Onto the Mountains

The sun spilled onto the mountains,

 and they reflected back to the heavens.

Just Flying By

A Magnolia Warbler in the birch tree.

In May, while I was fixing dinner, I saw a pretty, little, yellow and black bird looking back at me through the kitchen window. I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures.

I had no idea about the species of this bird because I am a neophyte in birding. This visitor wasn't hard to identify with the yellow stomach and distinctive head coloration and eye band.

I learned that my new friend was a Magnolia Warbler, a wayfarer on the way to Canada and the summer breeding grounds. Although it was new to me, the bird is considered one of the most common of the warblers.

The Magnolia Warbler was given this name because the first specimen was collected among the magnolia trees in Mississippi around 1800. An insect eater, the female will lay three to five green or white eggs with brown markings.


I finally decided that this was possibly a female beyond her second calendar year. I used an interesting website for identification that was created by the McGill Bird Observatory, a project of the Migration Research Foundation in Montreal, Canada.

http://www.migrationresearch.org/mbo/id/mawa.html#asymb

ON THE EVE OF SUMMER