Each more perfect than the previous…

I really don’t know how the weather could have been any better this morning. The sky was clearer than yesterday, and I think Sunday morning car traffic might be lighter than Saturday mornings. How sweet it was.

As I approached the river, the quite was interrupted by the call of this peregrine falcon again, and I’ll take that interruption just about any day.

The beaver on the island seem to be getting more comfortable, or, as with my dad, the urge to keep busy is just too strong to ignore. I don’t know what this one was up to this morning, but it kept at it long after the sun was up and shining down on its front yard.

Just around the corner, a great blue heron was fishing in a new spot again.

On my way back south, just below the falls and down the bluff from the beer garden, these pretty little larkspur blossoms have opened. Perhaps they are (Delphinium carolinianum).

While cleaning up some leftover fishing tackle, I inadvertently stuck myself on a fishhook, so I popped into the beer garden to borrow their sink and a bit of soap to reduce my chance of infection. As luck would have it, look what magnificent creature I found in the drain! That is a reddish-brown stag beetle (Lucanus capreolus), it was over an inch long, and those pincers are not purely ornamental. I quickly fetched a little stick for it to grab onto, since I already had enough wounds for the morning, and set it out on the fence in the sun to dry off and make a nice picture.

I had just wrapped up with the beetle and glanced up to see this blue jay uncharacteristically ignoring me from barely ten feet away.

Earlier in the morning, I came across this ruby meadowhawk, which we haven’t seen in a while, but I didn’t want to lead this report with a bug.

Before the meadowhawk, I found this enormous leopard slug gliding across the path, which I usually see every summer but don’t always include in a report, and I really didn’t want to lead with a slug.

Finally, I didn’t see anyone new at the pollinator garden or the thistle patch beside the soccer fields, but I was glad to get a nice portrait of this painted lady, especially because I finally got around to reading Tuesday’s ScienceTimes yesterday, and it had an article about a bunch of painted ladies who appear to have flown across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil from probably North Africa “without any place to stop and refuel.” Amazing!