Donna, could you please credit  the author of your posts?  This is so nicely written, it would be nice to know who wrote it.  Thanks.

Gayle

Crediting the author might also help you avoid trouble posting copyrighted material without giving credit to the author...

I love your posts, but I worry about some not-so-generous author or publisher deciding to grind an axe on your head.

Thanks Patti!  Either the mountain shots or the butterfly ones would have made a wonderful album by themselves, so the combination was really outstanding.  I recognized lots of Tiger Swallowtails, but many of the butterflies were unknown to me, including the blue ones.  Can you tell is what they were?

Paul

I am not a butterfly expert, but I think all of the non-yellow butterflies were either:
1) the black form of the female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, which, as you correctly surmised, is what all the yellow ones are.
or
2) a Pipevine Swallowtail.  The one that's mostly black with the iridescent blue on the upper wing is a Pipevine Swallowtail, which is also shown elsewhere with it's under-wings showing, which have orange spots on them:
http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species?l=1350

I went back and added the species identification to the captions where I could figure it out.

Jeane and I took a labor day weekend jaunt to the Smoky Mountains, where the butterflies were the highlight of the trip!  So, if you enjoy photos of butterflies, there are lots here for you!

Thumbnail format:
http://bellhanley.smugmug.com/Weekend-Fun/Smokies-2010

Slideshow format:
http://bellhanley.smugmug.com/photos/swfpopup.mg?AlbumID=13828059&AlbumKey=M8DNN

How many of these do you remember??

 Gardening or growing things  
 Pond dipping or looking for tadpoles
 Climbing trees  
 Building a camp or den  
 Making a daisy chain
 Collecting rocks, shells or fossils
 Looking for insects, butterflies or minibeasts
 Feeding the birds
 Exploring rock pools on the beach
 Visiting a farm
 Swimming in a river or lake

Yep, I think I did all of those.  I have a friend who volunteers for the local Girl Scout council as a "Certified Camper."  To explain, GS troop leaders have to attend certain levels of training to take their troops camping, but if the leaders are not interested, don't have time, etc., they can put in a request for a volunteer to camp with their troop who has had the requisite training.  Usually these folks have expert camping skills.  So my friend who takes these troops camping, finds that the leaders (or mothers who come along as chaperones) are massively germ-phobic...they don't want their kids to touch anything, or are always chasing after them with the hand sanitizer if they do!

It seems like part of my childhood exploration involved getting nice and dirty! 

Another friend, who is teaches microbiology at a local university, says there is an expanding body of research suggesting that the reason for an increasing incidence of allergies, asthma, and auto-immune disease is that we're too sanitary...that our immune systems need to be kept occupied, and if they get "bored", they'll start overreacting or attacking our own tissues.

Got a little off-topic there, but those things seem a little bit related to me.

Just don't understand how people get pictures where there are lots of them all at one feeder.

I read, somewhere, that hummingbirds will stop defending a feeder or patch of flowers when the energy cost of defending outweighs the benefit they would get from the nectar source.  Along those lines, I went to a hummingbird festival in Western Kentucky (Land Between the Lakes, since you may be close enough to know about it), where during peak migration (early August, for them), they can regularly see 200 hummingbirds in a day.  The hummingbird expert there said there are just too many hummingbirds for any one bird to attempt to defend a feeder, so while they do spar with each other and engage in some chases, they seem to generally get the futility of the effort and will share feeders.

On the rare occasions when I've seen two birds land on my single feeder...it's more like a game of chicken...they stare at each other, and then it's just a matter of time to see which one will launch to chase the other first.  The only way I would ever get a picture of two birds on my feeder is if I'd been standing there with the camera poised and ready...possible, but unlikely.

My own Rules for Identification: I have seen many birds in my ancient life - HOWEVER! I do not add them to any sort of real "list" til I can ID them myself. I have, for example, been "shown" a Bonelli's Eagle... looked like a flying postage stamp to me... So I have seen one... but can I ID one? Uhhhh... nope!

I am slightly more lax with my rules for listing.  My rule is that I have to have a nice satisfying look to really feel like I've "seen" the bird, can appreciate the bird.  It would be the sort of look that would allow me to identify it, if I knew more.  For example, if I'm on a birding tour and my guide points out an Elegant Trogon, a bird I'm not familiar with, and I get a nice, luxurious look at this bird which makes my eyes pop out of my head, with nice definitive identifying colors, shapes, and markings visible, I'm definitely going to list it.  Could I identify it again?  Probably, but I'm not going to wait to see the bird again to test myself before I'll list it.

But I agree with you, if I see a flying postage stamp or only get brief glimpses of an unidentifiable bird, no matter how much I'd like to add a bird to my life list, I don't.

Patti

FOS is???

Yes, First of Season...I'm on a Kentucky birding listserve, and it's a commonly used and very handy expression for those times of year when our wintering, migrating, or summering birds arrive.  We've been having big quantities of migrants pass through now, but as winter approaches I'll start seeing posts like "FOS Junco", "FOS White-throated Sparrow", or "FOS YB Sapsucker", which are birds we only get to see in winter.

Extremely cool, Dale!

[World's most expensive book goes back on sale]

Wouldn't we all love to have a copy of this?!


World's most expensive book goes back on sale

A book that sold for a record-breaking price of $8.8m (£5.7m) a decade ago is going back on sale at Sotheby's, the auction house has announced.

John James Audubon's Birds of America will go under the hammer along with other items from the collection of the late Lord Hesketh.

The book contains 1,000 life-sized illustrations of almost 500 species.

Only 119 complete copies of the 19th-century book are known to exist, and 108 are owned by museums and libraries.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11242275

I got to see one of the 119 copies at the John James Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky.  Of course it's under glass so you can't actually sit and turn the pages with your grubby little hands, but the museum there has lots of other interesting Audubon artifacts, including original watercolors, one or more of the original copper plates used to print the engravings, clothes, guns, letters, all of the usual stuff celebrating someone's life.

It's a nice little museum with a lovely nature center and small wildlife refuge in the middle of an urban environment.

Patti

Very cute...I'm envious, though I do have a backyard where I get to watch the hummingbird yards daily.  Sad that it'll only last a few more weeks.

Patti

(In the Totally Inappropriate category, does anyone remember Tom Lehrer's song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"?)

Yep...we have some Tom Lehrer albums (haven't bothered to replace them with CDs), and they're classics.

Patti

Perhaps it's a personal problem, but neither of your links is working for me...

Patti

Thanks...very interesting.  Evolutionary biology seems to be a booming field of study right now, which I love, 'cause I find it fascinating. 

Is this nuts or what??
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100820/ap_on_sc/eu_russia_saving_seeds

Yep, nuts is a good word.     Especially since this summer is providing such a good illustration of how unstable our weather is becoming: record temperatures, severe droughts, massive floods.  Low genetic diversity doesn't lead to much success in adapting to new climactic conditions.  Perhaps rather than saving for retirement I should be filling up my basement with dehydrated food.

Tonight (the evening of August 18th), whenever I click "reply" to reply to a comment (I haven't actually followed through), I get the following warning:

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 30 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

This happens even though I'm replying to threads that have been modified since I last read them...in fact a couple of the threads were started today!  

Is this a personal problem?

Update:  I just noticed that the date at the top of the forum says September 18th -- up at the top next to the line that says "Hello Patti from Kentucky".  So obviously that's why the warning is getting triggered, because it thinks today is September 18th and not August 18th.