The flower is yellow, like large dandelion, with pointed sepals that are longer than the petals. Then it forms a globe shaped seed head a couple of inches across:

The plant hsa many names salsify, goatsbeard, oyster plant. I like calling if goatsbeard, an earthy name, but salsify is more appealing. A favorite image subject, the seed head doesn’t don’t last, birds devour the seeds quickly.

A closeup of a perching Variable Dancer about to pounce on an insect:

This insect gave me lots of interesting poses, all more or less cat-like. This is pretty close, the damselfly is a bit more than an inch long.

Least skipper is a tiny butterfly about the size of a dime. They have a fluttery, weak flight, but they are pretty easy to disturb, so they are a tricky subject. I find them in grasses near wet areas.

Happily I found a couple of them recently on a cool cloudy day - they weren’t flighty at all. I could rearrange grasses around them without them flying away, even move the tripod in closer in the thick waist-high grasses.

Sometimes you have to take a trip to see somethng new, sometimes it’s right there in your yard. I found this Copper Underwing moth caterpillar munching on my oakleaf hydrangea:

It was the afternoon of a blue sky day. I was lucky it was in a shadowy spot, there was just a bit of light on its face. That night I hit the books to find out what it was. I used a great recent caterpillar book, Caterpillars of Eastern North America (Wagner, Princeton Field Guides). Fortunately, the hump made this one fairly easy to identify. Nice caterpillar, though there are other moth caterpillars that are more exotic and colorful. The adult Copper Underwing is just another brown moth.

I kept an eye out for it, hoping to see it pupate, but it disappeared by the next day. Some moths drop to the ground to pupate, but it might have become bird food.

A prolific mustard family flower that puts splashes of white, pink, and purple in the landscape:

I indulged myself in some out of focus color by shooting through a cluster of the flowers…

Halictid bees are a small colorful bee I see all summer, usually in circumstances that make photographing them difficult. I saw this one on a cool, cloudy spring day:

The cool day meant this bee just sat there for a few minutes instead of racing around, clouds reduced the reflective highlights from the brilliant metallic body. They’re quite small, I had to use a 2xTC with a macro lens to get this close. After a few minutes it crawled off to hide from me, and I packed up the camera gear.

I went back to my wood poppy spot looking for a vertical image with out of focus flowers in the background. A nice cloudy day, great for flower photography:

Starflower has started to bloom in the woods - pretty soon it’ll be ladyslipper time. Just a couple of weeks ago or so I was whining about it being brown - it’s green now, beautiful things everywhere you look.

A garden flower from a week or two back - spring is glorious, I just can’t keep up with it:

A common flower, but I thought I’d try an interesting angle at close range, and use a neighboring flower the background.

I found a great new location for wildflowers in a nearby town. There were large patches of yellow Wood Poppy, Trilliums of different species, Wood Anemone, Spring Beauty.

Spring is blooming - wildflowers and garden flowers as well. Here’s a complementary color scheme for a favorite garden flower:

I had a great day outside in the yard, getting wet in the drizzle, taking in all the flowers. Bluebells blooming, trillium, grape hyacinth, violets, an explosion of flowers.