Now for the rest of the photos – to see if I can catch up!

First some flowers.

Shinleaf is a lovely little woodland flower that’s fairly common in our woods, but usually each stalk has only a few blossoms.  This year the stalks are full of flowers.

A closeup of the flowers

Butterfly Weed

Another milkweed – Whorled Milkweed

Our lower prairies are filled with Spiderworts this year – they must like lots of rain.

More blue flowers – these are Harebells in one of the bluff prairies.

Silvery Checkerspot

Mating European Skippers – a new species for the farm

Silver Bordered Fritillary – a fritillary that likes wet meadows

Some friends came over one day to hunt mushrooms.   There was a whole hillside of Chantarelles, which was really what they were looking for.

We also found lots of other interesting mushrooms – some they could identify, some they didn’t know.

This is a bolete – with pores instead of gills

A different view of the same mushroom

They didn’t know this one, but I like the pattern that the gills make.

A Purple-gilled Laccaria

It does have beautiful purple gills.

I’ve seen these mushrooms before and have never known what they were.  They grow in large groups on rotting logs.

A few more mysterious fungi.

These were orange inside, and very rubbery – maybe some kind of jelly fungus?

Many of these

And many Coral Fungi

I visited MJ in Iowa last week.  We talked bugs for nearly 24 hours without stopping.  Here are her rearing jars.  The carrot is for a burrowing moth larva.  The larva is inside the carrot – all that shows on the outside are some flakes of carrot that it has pushed out of the hole.

A large snail we found in her woods.  It was over an inch in diameter – she says it’s a common one.

One of MJ’s planted prairies – she calls them her “faux prairies”.  How nice to live in a place where Pale Purple Coneflowers are native!

Mike and I finally went on our first boat ride of the season.  We stopped in this quiet backwater to have lunch, and watched a mink run across the log and swim the rest of the way across the stream.

There were damselflies skimming over the water and resting on the patches of duckweed.  Blackbirds and Catbirds were hopping along the logs and snapping them up to feed their babies.