Daily Archives: 2017/08/09

20170804-5 Burwash and Hwy 529

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Quick trip to Burwash to visit with the Burwashians who had their annual reunion on the long weekend.  Nice re-visits.

On the way in we saw this American Kestrel looking for prey from the top of a fence post…

On the way back we saw this Eastern Kingbird from the Old Still River Road …

Then down to Hwy 529 to get this pair of Spiraea spp side by side  …. tomentosa and alba ….

Yellow Goatsbeard plume is always interesting to photograph.

Changing chlorophyll …

Queen Anne’s Lace seen from a different point of view …

Common milkweed pods are forming quickly …

I made the above picture because I was wondering about the pollination processes of the Common Milkweed.

In my research I came across The Nature Institute (  “The question is not what you look at — but how you look and whether you see.” – Thoreau )     Craig Holdrege is its Director and has written this fascinating Story of an Organism: Common Milkweed.   It is downloadable and is becoming a valuable reference for me.   He begins and ends his Story with this quotation from Aldo Leopold:

All I am saying is that there is also drama in every bush, if you can see it. When enough men know this, we need fear no indifference to the welfare of bushes, or birds, or soil, or trees. We shall then have no need of the word “conservation,” for we shall have the thing itself. Aldo Leopold (1999, p. 172)
I am beginning to realized that the Common Milkweed is much more instructive than only being a bountiful source of nectar for a legion of pollinators and the host of Monarch Butterfly Larvae.