Boogie-woogie flu

There's a mature beech tree just outside my office window, and a few weeks ago I idly noticed that the branches seemed awfully pale.  This weekend, I was startled to see that many were pure white.

Beneath each white branch was an irregular black spot in the mulch.

I love a good mystery, and it didn't take long to discover that the branches weren't encased in fungus, as I originally thought.  They were covered in teeny tiny insects - beech blight aphids.

These tiny insects are constantly dropping honeydew, a sugar-rich secretion that becomes a sooty mold on the ground.  Despite their numbers, they don't pose too much trouble to an established tree and can be blasted off with a jet of water from the garden hose.  One fun fact - they are commonly referred to as "boogie-woogie aphids," because they shake their woolly tails in response to a threat.

If you jar their branch, it suddenly comes alive with thousands of "dancing" aphids.  I found a great video that shows them in action.

I also found a really interesting fungus called Fuglio septica on one of our front trees.  Fuglio septica has a couple of interesting aliases:  dog vomit or troll cat fungus.  The reason for the dog vomit moniker is pretty obvious to anyone who's owned a dog:

But what is a troll cat?  In Scandinavian folklore, a troll cat is created by a witch from hair and fingernails to do their bidding.  Troll cats typically sucked milk from goats and cows and spit them into a container provided by the witch for her use.  Their droppings apparently resembled this fungus, and so the name stuck.  Fuglio septica is a slime mold and sometimes draws insects, like this European hornet.

Another cool insect I found recently is this green June beetle, or Cotinis nitida.

He's a grizzled old fellow...check out those battle scars!

Like Japanese beetles, these are kind of a pain to have around.  They do terrible injury to fruit trees, and also take sap from oak and maple trees.  He's a beautiful guy, though, and I didn't kill him.

It's hummingbird season here.  They fight constantly over the feeder.

The females have white throats.  Here's a young male, with his colorful throat feathers just starting to come in:

They are incredibly territorial and don't like to share.

I love to watch them.

Our red-tailed hawk is finally outgrowing his juvenile squawk, but is still staying close to home.

Check out those talons!

He doesn't stay in one place for long, though.

I've been working a lot on craft things lately.  I put the borders on my Garden Snail quilt:

It's ready to be made into a sandwich and quilted, and so is my Wallflower quilt.  I've been dragging my feet, though.  The Wallflower quilt is so big, and this quilt has so much open space that will showcase the quilting method.  I'm afraid to tackle quilting them.  I've been trying to put in a few minutes a day of practicing free motion quilting designs - echoing teardrops, meandering flowers. But my efforts are all jagged and rough, and under the optimum condition of a small square of quilted fabric, not a gigantic quilt flopping everywhere and pulling to one side.  So I'm going to keep practicing until I finally bite the bullet and go for it.  Fingers crossed that it will happen within a week or so, because I'm a bit antsy to start my next quilt!  It's a total addiction!  I'll try to get those buttons sewn on my cardigan, and finish knitting my fair isle mittens.  There's always another project in the queue.

Have a great week!