June brought in a nice variety of sights in the Britt neighbourhood.

Here is a Songsparrow on a dead cedar tree in my field.   I usually hear them first thing in the morning …

Common Cinquefoil in all of its glory blooming on the shoulders of Riverside Drive…

Hummingbird (or Snowberry) Clearwing Moth nectaring on dandelions at Steve and Barb’s turnaround.

The pale legs indicate that it is a Hemaris thysbe

Its proboscis is starting to unfurl as it approached the dandelion blossom…

I am beginning to think that this unknown dragonfly might be a white faced meadowhawk(?).   Who knows?

Here are two views of a Dreamy Duskywing(?), I think….

Click on the images to get a bit closer ….

A little patch of Solomon’s Seal near the end of Riverside Drive …

The bold black eye stripe and white eyebrow identifies this nuthatch as a Red-breasted Nuthatch.   It is nesting in a dead Jackpine tree over a clump of junipers that protects the Solomon Seal above…..

This is what a small silvery blue butterfly looks like through a zoom lens set at 200 mm Effective Focal Length.

And this is what it looks like when the lens is zoomed to 800 mm EFL:

This is a crop of the above from 4608 x 3456 pixels to 2341 x 1756 pixels:

And this is what the butterfly looks like at 8oo mm EFL cropped down to 1150 x 863  pixels:

This side view of the undersides (ventral) of the wings helps to identify this active little butterfly as a Silvery Blue.

Flitting around nearby was this female Silvery Blue…

A nice little clump of starflowers …

Chalk-fronted Corporal resting on the roadside …

This Eastern Fox Snake was crossing the road, heading for the shrubbery along the shoreline, probably in pursuit of birds eggs in the nests there.

Different colour, head shape and no rattles make this easy to differentiate from the Massasauga Rattlesnake.

The Ontario (Carolinian and Georgian Bay) populations of Fox Snakes is under stress so every effort should be made to protect them and their habitat.

A week of pleasant weather is forecast.  Maybe I’ll get Floatboat II (my trusty pontoon boat) organized for some tripping out on Georgian Bay!