On my way to the bus...

...yesterday I saw these yellow daises and just wanted to share them...

2 angles on a wasp

I took several pictures of this wasp last weekend. She seemed quite patient and endured the pictures with and without flash with an amazing degree of aplomb. Maybe she's modeled before...

I can't decide which I like better. The first one shows the face better but the second pic gives nice detail on the thorax that is lacking in the first.

Path

Just walking down a path, soon after a light rain, admiring the blooms...

Spring flowers

April showers bring May flowers but nearly a month of almost no rain is making them quite rare. This picture was taken in May. The area around my well isn't so green now!

peaceful path

This isn't really a path, of course, it's a picture I took looking down the slop of a conifer branch. However to me it looks like a peaceful path that one could walk down and encounter nothing but fragrant pine breezes and the satisfaction of being at one with the world. Maybe that's what it's like for a squirrel--I'd fall through to the ground. Damn.

A bee and a yellow flower

I had to make a quick run up to north Durham today so I stopped briefly at Sarah Duke to take a few pictures. It'd been lightly raining on and off again so the plants were greener than usual and water drops were everywhere.

I happened to catch this bee just before he landed on this flower. If you notice, his wings are still moving so fast that the camera only caught a blur even using the flash.

lily pad

Just another picture from my walk around the Sarah Duke Gardens on Sunday. The lily pads were on a koi pond. I was going to take some pictures of the fish also but I didn't see any. Just little minnows. It was a hot day and the koi were probably hanging out on the bottom.

pink flowers dying

On Sunday Naomi, over at Here in the Hills, posted about the colors of drying flowers and compared it to the fading out of people as they age. Her pictures of the flowers are beautiful and her observations of the aging process are keen.

I bring this up due to the nature of this picture here. I took it on Sunday at Duke University and it was well nigh impossible to find a good bloom in the rose section without having a dead one next to it. That juxtaposition of life and death reminds me of Naomi's post.

Orange flowers

I was at Sarah Duke Gardens today with Chris and I saw these pretty orange (salmon?) flowers. I have no idea what they are--I'm sorry, I'm not a botanist!--but these look really pretty. As pretty as Chris? Not a chance but still as pretty as a picture. This picture, in fact.

Dragonfly

Here's a dragonfly from my backyard. I took the picture last week while inspecting how bad the drought was affecting parts of my lawn. As you can see here, at least some of the grass was still green.

Cardinal in Hiding

This bright red fellow didn't want me to see him. Silly Cardinal. You're too brightly colored to be able to hide! If you look at the large version you'll see the berries in his beak.

Grackles on High

I took this picture last week of a bunch of grackles in one of my backyard trees. By my count there's 12 of them but not all are easy to see in this picture. I have the advantage of having taken 5 pictures of the bunch over the course of 15 seconds or so and some of them are hidden in this particular frame. Note, for example, the second grackle at the very top of the picture--hiding behind the other one. You can just see a little tail and the beak. There's another one almost directly below that one--and you can just see a little slice of the head.