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!

Not-red tail and the quilt, all hail!

We're rushing to get the yard stuff done before the real heat of summer hits, so we've both been out working in the yard.  Mulch, gravel, and sand delivered, and we both have lots of blisters on our hands from hoeing and raking.

Lots of blisters, and lots of bites!  I was bitten by a fire ant again.  Thankfully it was just one bite, on the top of my foot, but there was a 4" diameter of swelling around the bite.  No hives, no ER, just a super stiff and sore foot.  Poor Todd was bitten/stung over fifty times by fire ants, working in that same bed where I was bitten.  We haven't seen a nest mound, and the ants were so small that Todd didn't even see the swarm on his ankles.  Thankfully he didn't have a reaction...just pain and itching. He was standing up, weeding...and his wrists and ankles are still peppered with welts.  This is why I'm afraid to get into those beds now!

From my "safety zone," I was still able to get some good observations in.  Love all the mushrooms that are coming up.

All sorts of flies are attracted to the mulch.  These tiny grey flies are everywhere.

I thought this was a hornet at first.

I was totally fooled because of his markings.  I realized, though, that it's a type of fly that uses protective coloration to fool predators.  I think he's a kind of syphid fly, although they're normally about a quarter inch long, like this one:

This fly was about 1 1/2 inches long.  His coloring really gives him a LEG UP on the competition (bada BOOM!).

First came the ladybug larvae, and now...the ladybugs.

Ladybugs are beetles, but they look a lot different from this black beetle on our driveway!

Love seeing the wide variety of leaf hoppers.

They're so tiny...no more than a quarter inch long...but have such an amazing variety of colors.  I love their "Muppet" eyes, too!

We've had a bit of a nature mystery around here.  There's a hawk that has been shrieking from dawn 'til dark almost every day for weeks.  It's maddening.  At the same time, I've been seeing a hawk that looks like a red-tailed hawk, except for the conspicuously not-red tail feathers.

He looked so much like a red-tailed hawk, though.

What a beauty!

I consulted some on-line forums and discovered that despite his size, he is a juvenile red-tailed hawk. And I was finally able to find a recording of the non-stop shrieking (fast forward to second 21).  Lord have mercy, I hope he matures quickly!  That shriek!

Incidentally...my personal observation has been that most birds defecate immediately before flying, although I can't seem to find any internet confirmation.  Still, when I saw this hawk lift his tail, I knew he was getting ready to take off...and I was right!

Finally, in crafty news...I finished my quilt!  I love it.

I think the half inch quilting makes it look kind of contemporary...and I love the texture.

Here's a picture of the whole thing, although the light is harsh and it's not a very good representation of how it actually looks.

Quilting is kind of amazing to me.  With knitting, I critique my work pretty harshly, and I'm never fully satisfied with the finished project.  But with quilting, I easily overlook the imperfections.  It's a long run-on sentence in my head:  "I picked the colors...picked the fabric...sewed each line...those margins!...did the block layout...managed to sew the top together...made the quilt sandwich...then quilted every inch of it...all of the disparate elements and little mistakes came together to make something beautiful!"  I try not to romanticize it by saying that quilting is a metaphor for life, but I have discovered that if I'm patient and don't become crushed by discouragement, little steps forward really do tend to culminate in something surprisingly good.  Hey, I'll take encouraging metaphors wherever I can find them!  :)

Have a great week!

Let Them Eat CAKE.

We had company last week, so I made a homemade cherry chip cake.  The resulting crumb was a little too dense for my liking, so I'm tossing the recipe.  In the future I'm going to take a basic vanilla/white cake recipe and replace part of the milk/liquid with pureed maraschino cherries to give it that extra kick, and use some puree in the frosting, too.  Still, the taste was all right, and it looked pretty:

After everyone left, Todd and I went down by the water.

It was a relaxing morning, just chit chatting before work.  Even though it's been roastingly hot, there was a nice breeze.  Borga came with us...she loves to be a part of things.

Mainly she loves being close to "Dad."

Yesterday, a surprise...R - A - I - N.  Only the second time this summer for us!

I had to go outside today before work, because I know that insects and small creatures are much more active after it rains.  Only a few feet from the front door, I saw a small carolina mantis under a fern frond.

They aren't as disturbingly huge as the ones we had in Indiana (Chinese mantids).  Still, just like the others, this one kept his eye on me the entire time.
 

Near the base of the fern I saw a tiny young anole.  He was only a few inches long!

 

Look at his teeny head!  So cute.

 

I've let the spearmint grow wild in the front beds, so we had lots of buzzing insects on the flowers.

A beautyberry bush is sprouting right in the middle of our front azaleas.  I was going to root it out, but Todd loves beautyberries and volunteered to move it in the fall.  So right now it remains a bit of a bully in its spot.  The flowers are gone and the berries are ripening.  Soon we'll have great color here!

 

My most exciting discovery occurred just a few feet away.  Now, we have a LOT of hawks around here, and I've identified several.

However, I've heard one call that's been driving me crazy.  It's not the traditional hawk scream/screech that everyone knows.  It's more of a prolonged series of whistles.  Worse, I haven't been able to see the hawk making the call, so it's been nearly impossible to make an identification.  Today I was taking pictures in the front bed and heard the call...almost directly overhead!

I had my macro lens and not the zoom, so I wasn't able to get a good close shot.  But I was able to quickly identify him as a common red-tailed hawk.  I couldn't see the red tail feathers from this angle, but he's got a slightly reddish chest and the other markings help with identification.

But how to explain the call?  None of the traditional bird call sites had this particular call associated with a red-tailed hawk.  I checked website after website and learned that what I was probably hearing was either a courtship or territorial challenge call.  THIS is as close as I've been able to get to the whistles that we hear all day, every day.  I'm SO glad to solve this little mystery.  It's been driving me crazy for weeks!

Even with the recent rain, it's heating up here again.  We're expected to reach 102 degrees by the weekend!  We've been watering and watering the hostas and ferns, who are unused to such glaring direct sun and heat, but they're slowly crisping up all over.

 I just hope they hold on until things cool off a little.

I haven't had time to do much craft work, but I did dig a really cute fair isle baby cardigan out of the .25 bin at Salvation Army.  

 This is an inexpensive inspiration for future projects.  I also found a really cute polka dotted A-line skirt.  It's several sizes too big, but I'm going to try to cut it down and sew it into the right size.  It was only a dollar, so great practice for me.  I am very partial to this dark mustard color.

Hopefully I'll have time in the next few days to get more done.  Have a great week!