Night before last we were all sitting at dinner table in the kitchen when all of sudden Lorna shouted "What's that?" A huge moth -- dark with rows of light spots across the wings -- was fluttering around the exterior light just outside the kitchen window. Everybody jumped and then we all rushed to the window to get a good look. I grabbed the new Peterson moth book but I couldn't find anything like it. The rest of the family had a simple explanation: it was a butterfly, not a moth! How embarrassing! What was a Black Swallowtail doing on our windowsill in the dark of night? Or, more accurately, in the light of the nightlight? As my daughter Eva said, "butterflies have to be somewhere at night". Black Swallowtail it was.
The local female Belted Kingfisher was seated on a dead stump overlooking the pond yesterday morning -- it's one of her favorite spots -- when another Kingfisher came ambling along. Her mate? Not a chance. In a state of righteous indignation accompanied by the loudest kingfisher rattles she could muster, our local heroine vaulted off her post and took off after the intruder, chasing it all the way up the creek until they were both lost to view. Five minutes later, the creek cleared of trespassers, she was back on her original post.
The showiest of the current bloomers are the four-petaled Clematis virginiana vines climbing all over everything in a lot of places (a plant with some lovely common names including Devil's Darning Needles, Devil's Hair, Love Vine, Traveller's Joy and Virgin's Bower). Also pretty showy but easily overlooked because they have a dandelion-like look: Maryland Golden-Aster (we used to have Sickle-leaved Golden-Aster as well but they seem to have been shaded out). The Saltmarsh Asters, with many small white or lilac colored flower, are all over the marsh and the Evening Primrose are in their prime. You have to look hard to find some of the other late summer wildflowers: Horseweed with its tiny tiny flowers that never open, the strange Enchanter's Nightshade also with tiny flowers, at least one of the plebian Smartweeds, as well as a vine with reddish stems, arrowhead-shaped leaves and greenish flowers coming out of the leaf axils. Climbing False Buckwheat perhaps?
Eric Salzman
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