Herons & honeysuckle

I could hear the Green Heron belch again yesterday morning as I walked down to the marsh but instead of one lone burper, two birds flew up from the open area in the middle. There was also a quoguing Black-Crowned Night Heron there as well plus another one on the pond and several Great Egrets in bare tree branchs back of the pond. Both Black-crowned and Yellow-crowned Night Heron were on the pond this morning; it was the first Yellow-crowned that I've seen in a couple of weeks.

More flowers: the weedy Vine Honeysuckle, Day Lilies (suddenly everywhere), one or other of the Yellow Wood-Sorrels (Oxalis), and a white flower that is either Night-blooming Catchfly (Silene) or Evening Lychnis. John Heidecker points out that the Catalpa flowers have a notable scent. My guess is that a tree filled with scented white flowers attracts evening or even night-flying insects, that the two yellow markings (which are on a kind of bump or ridge inside the flower) serve as landing lights and that the purple lines indicate the runway so the insect can taxi inside the flower where some sort of reward (for fertilizing the flower) awaits.

The wild roses are actually blooming in a large stand of canes on the further right-of-away and, after a careful examination of their thorns, I've decided that they are mostly recurved and not straight. Also the calyxes (is that the right plural?) look fairly bristly. And they mostly appear on the marsh fringes where ground water is near the surface. So I'm opting for Swamp Rose, Rosa palustris.

The surest sign that summer is really here: mosquitos all over the place.

Eric Salzman