behold!

The earth is full of the goodness of God...
Psalms 33:5b

Hello, dear friends.  The laptop is back in my lap and so I take a moment this morning to say hello and share some simple photos of some little creatures in the great outdoors.  I was thinking recently, that it has been a while since I've taken a good long hike.  Maybe you are like me, in a stage of summertime life with lots of busy children around, and there is no time for walking for hours through the woods and fields.  Thankfully, there is a lot to see and observe just around the yard.  All of these pictures were taken down at the bottom of our property, not far from the stream.  I was down there again last night, snapping away, and thinking how blissful it was to be under the twilight sky and hearing the (MY!) little ones running around the house above me, laughing and calling to one another at the end of the day.......

Yellow swallowtail butterfly on a lavender Joe-Pie-Weed flower.

A tiny yellow spider, gripping a helpless bumble bee around the neck.  On goldenrod.

My son in the stream.  He was watching a frog.

Frog in the afternoon sun, in a cozy wet spot by the edge of our pond.

Lady bug.

Bumblebee on Joe-Pie-Weed.

This is a common garden spider, commonly known as the black and yellow garden spider, writing spider, or corn spider.  I am familiar with these from childhood and often came very close to running through their webs as I played across the road in the blueberry patch.  I hated them, they filled me with the creeps and their webs always seem to be right at my waist, impossible to avoid.  They still give me a shiver, but as I was reading about them this morning I found myself fascinated.  One interesting fact is that they eat the middle of their web every evening (perhaps because of tiny particles and insects which have been caught during the day) and spin a new one in the morning.

Queen Anne's lace is abundant at this time of year and is a very interesting flower.

Groundnut



dragonfly; it was sitting so still that I gave it a poke to see if it was alive.  It was.

The brownness of the Queen Anne's lace against the purple of the Groundnut, so beautiful.

A brown mama spider, guarding her babies.  I'm pretty sure this is a harmless Grass Spider. 


 

"O Lord of love and kindness,
who created the beautiful earth
and all the creatures walking and flying in it,
so that they may proclaim your glory,
I thank you to my dying day
that you have placed me amongst them."

St Francis of Assisi