Yellow Clintonia (Clintonia borealis) is blooming now in the mountains. I found these beautiful flowers when I hiked the Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail last weekend.
Clintonia is a member of the Lily family named for Dewitt Clinton, a naturalist and governor of New York. Its fruit is a dark blue beadlike berry from which it acquired its third name: Bluebead.
(photo by Kate St. John – using my cell phone. Click on this photo to see Chuck Tague’s close-up of the flower.)
All day today on my deck I had cardinal parents & their fledglings, finches & theirs , grosbreaks & theirs. It was so noisy & beautiful to see all these chicks fluttering their wings, keeping their beaks open & asking for food & their parents kept showing them the feeder. They would go & get 1 seed for them & then fly off, letting the children learn themselves. Its the first time I ever saw so many on the same day. So I may have missed the peregrines so the “other guys” let me have a look as to how they do it which is probably mostly the same except with dead pigeons instead of sunflower seeds. Nature certainly has made a grand entrance into my life this year. Faith C.