“Hairy Iopas, says the citizen”

That strange oath from the Cyclops episode of Ulysses has always puzzled the hell out of me. But it's very striking.

Unconnected by anything but name is Picoides villosus, the Hairy Woodpecker on the suet feeder today

I've been planting sedums in my stumpery this afternoon. The Webbed Hens and Chicks in the big stump hollowed out with a hand axe and the others in beds made using split logs. More planting to come.

More Fluttering

Snapped this yesterday while walking into the village. My first blue in Maine. It looks like a Spring Azure.

Then today , while making the same trip with my camera I saw nothing worth chasing but a sulphur of some sort on the opposite side of a stream. After 2 days without the camera and 2 straight days seeing the big green beetle...no big green beetle.

Euphoric

After yesterday's metallic foreigner comes another new one to me. This is the Bumble Flower Beetle (Euphoria inda) one of the flower scarab beetles.

Sitting on a tarp.

Catching Up

Well it started snowing back December 10th 2017. It stopped in March. Well on and off. And by the middle of April it had entirely departed.

And now the spring sun is with us and time is taken up with planting a garden. There is a big yard ( 2 1/2 acres) but there was nothing but some grass and a hell of a lot of trees. A small forest would be a good description. So now there are three raised beds (4x7, 4x14, 8x8 feet) full of nice new loam and well rotted farmyard manure. These are being planted with perrenials and a stumpery constructed. Now it does occur to me that with some acre and a half of woodland we don't have any shortage of stumps but stumperies are very fashionable on Gardeners World these days. Yes we now get Gardener's World on Friday night just like the Brits. I think Mrs. B. may be in love with Monty Don.

Besides gardening there is still wildlife to photograph.

Carabus auratus 

Actually a European import brought here in the 1940s to control Gypsy Moth. Not a success but still resident in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont . Big and green and lightening fast I only managed to capture it on my phone.

We have the regular grey squirrels of course but we also have red squirrels and vast numbers of these , the chipmunk.

We also have a bunch of new birds. A couple of the same woodpeckers as Virginia although with far more Piliated in the yard. Many Black Capped Chickadees, our state bird. And this one the Eastern Phoebe.

Winter is Here

Well they threatened snow a few times this last month but it always melted from the forecast before the day came around. But after lunch yesterday it really arrived. Slow and steady, no blizzard, but between 2.30 pm Saturday and waking up this morning it left us this. And it'll likely be here until the spring now with more to come. I'll be off to start my snow blower now and clear the drive.

It'll be 15f at noon Thursday and Friday and over night it'll be -2 or 3. That's degrees F, so it's about 35f below freezing.

Colourful When Wet

We took a trip out the Western part of the state this weekend, to our old vacation stomping ground of Bethel. It's just about 20 miles from the New Hampshire border. It's leaf peeper season up there right now and the colours really are spectacular. It wasn't too spectacular weather-wise, being the first weekend in a couple of months when it mostly rained its ass off, but it still looked great. We took a 120 mile round trip leaf colour and moose spotting tour. We didn't see too many moose, well ANY moose, but a lot of colour. 

We also stopped in a little town called Rangely which is, bizarrely, home of the Wilhelm Reich museum

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https://youtu.be/x4Ve4rrnfz0

Ice Age 5 - Day of the Triffids

We went out to the Bangor City Forest and Orono Bog on Sunday. The forest is a nice wander through mixed woodland with some very nice dragonflies at this time of year. Particularly numerous were the White Faced Meadowhawks seen here happily mating.

And then the rarely resting Canadian Darner honoured me with a lengthy rest and pose.

The bog is not at all what I was expecting. You step out of the forest on a nicely maintained boardwalk and the whole vista just opens up. It's amazing, this is a remnant of the last ice age; largely unchanged since the glaciers retreated.

And they made a big deal of the fact that they have Pitcher plants. So I set out determined to track down these elusive things. I was surprised when I stepped into the boardwalk that about half the plants making up the bog were the very thing I was looking for. And they are BIG with flower stems about 18 inches tall. Triffids indeed!