Yellow - Pond Peeps

January 2017 ~ Yellow, today’s theme is inspired by my first bird feather of the year. I’ve seen hawk, owl, osprey and Ibis feathers but I think this bright yellow beauty belonged to a Northern Flicker, a woodpecker. In the woods around the St Augustine Road Fish Management Area, we see quite a few woodpeckers including Flickers and a pair of rather noisy Pileated Woodpeckers, but this is the first of their feathers I’ve found.

These photos are from the past few months. I have quite a few pictures of wildflowers that need names and I figured this is a good time to dig out my identification books and try to commit a few to memory. My favorite wildflower book is still The Guide to Florida Wildflowers by Walter Kingsley Taylor. The flowers are grouped by color to make it a little easier to find a mystery flower and that got me started on grouping my images by color.

Doug showed up one morning in a banana panic with armloads from his plants – they were ripening faster than they could eat them at his house. These are small and tasty – we ate them in granola, on toast with peanut butter, in pancakes and smoothies. We froze the rest to use in smoothies.

This striking lotus is also courtesy of Doug. They thrive in his pond so he had some to share. We returned home after an extended trip to find one planted in our pond. It produced three successive blooms before the weather started cooling down and its growth slowed down.

The Black-eyed Susans in the front garden were pretty but the subject of my photo was actually the small green Sweat Bee on the center left blossom.

The remaining images here were taken over the past couple of months around the ponds at the St. Augustine Road Fish Management Area (a..k.a. Earl Johnson Park). My goal for 2017 is to learn the names of as many of the plants around the park as I can.

Showy Rattlebox, Crotalaria spectabilis: