Jesse was sprawled out on the floor of the porch this morning watching P repot a plant. He seems to have picked up a little bulk this summer. On the right are a series of close observations of some little cocoons from our front garden. Most of these are empty except for the first two, which still have moths or butterflies inside. They were attached to our toadflax plants, very delicate and beautifully articulated. Number 5434 is a curious black, white, and orange beetle that was sucking nectar from a flower in the monarch butterfly area of the bird sanctuary down by Beaver Lake. The beetle is colored exactly like a monarch butterfly.
I had gone to kill some time in the bird sanctuary by walking while waiting to go to my friend's house after running a bunch of errands in town. I was walking all around areas that seemed to have been newly opened up for trails off of the main boardwalk. I was walking off-trail at one point, trying to get through a place where the trail was overgrown, and I saw a woman walking along just above a slope so that she was at eye level and on the other side of a chain link fence. I saw a place where a steep slope led up to a break in the fence, so I clawed my way up the slope and found a straight, well-groomed trail leading along the edge of the nearby lake! In all the years I have wandered through the bird sanctuary I've never seen this trail or anyone on it. So I mapped it as I walked it. It turned out to be a perimeter trail for joggers and runners and fast walkers that joins up with the well-known trail around the grassy lawn-like lake shore. There was at one point an old wooden picnic table in the woods beside the trail. It was an interesting vantage point on the lake that we have canoed on so often.
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