I’ve noticed more bear scat on the local mountain biking trails than normal. Over the weekend, I saw two big mounds a few hundred yards from the trailhead of a trail that parallels a county road (maybe 30 yards from the road). I’ve seen a fair amount on trails that are more remote.
We’ve had very little rain this summer. On my bike ride this morning, I stopped at our local reservoir to take a photo of what it currently looks like. Snowy egrets and great blue herons clustered around what remains of this part of the reservoir.
I was finally able to positively identify the exact species of frog we hear all Summer, thanks to the opening track from Henry Rollins’s radio show of a couple of weeks ago
This one will be flying from New Jersey to Mexico, and then back into the US. Instead of living for three weeks or so, this one will live for six months.
We raise monarchs whose eggs we find on our milkweed plants, but this is the first time we’ve seen eclosed monarchs in the wild (actually, the first was yesterday). This girl has two friends who came out today (hard to see in this picture).
Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - I was running down the street one fall morning when I heard a rustling of leaves high up in an oak tree about a hundred yards ahead of me. The shaking was followed by a loud wooden *clunk! *… a pause … another clunk! and another; each sounding lower in the tree as I ran toward it. The clunks came steadily until finally silence as I ran beneath the tall tree
… And I got beaned right on top of the head!!!
A malicious and dangerously clever squirrel must’ve been in the tallest branches of the tree, shaking acorns out in such a way that they fell, bouncing off branches on their journey, in perfect time for one to plunk me right on the noggin
There’s a wooded stretch of road toward the end of the second day of the City to Shore where I’ve seen that happen to enough riders (and experienced it myself a couple of times over the years) that I swear it’s deliberate on the part of the squirrels.
Circling back to the acorns, because there are a lot of them in the road, I always remind myself of a particularly clever post I made about my morning run a couple years ago
In Thor voice: “Many hundreds of Acorns were vanquished beneath my heel before the Dawn; their cries of Mercy came to my ears as mere pops and cracks, for Mercy I had none”
In Tony Stark voice: “Plus, I was in kind of a hurry”
