wabi sabi

this feather is perfect. perfectly damaged. perfectly imperfect. for me, far more interesting than an undamaged “perfect” feather.

we have a pair of nesting sandhill cranes in our cattails. it’s thrilling for us. The pair have been tending to a nest with two eggs for three weeks. One more week to go before we will have little chicks (called colts!) running around. Mom and Dad are working hard. alternating incubating the eggs in two hour shifts. and, on top of all that, they are also molting. this is the seventh wing feather i’ve found. molting, like incubating, is also incredibly hard work for birds. they only molt when food sources are abundant. dropping flight feathers puts them at all sorts of risk. at first i thought “really? incubation and molting at the same time. so not fair!” but it makes sense in that they can’t leave the nest anyway—they are more or less grounded by their need to protect the nest. this 13 inch long feather was floating in the reeds this morning. steve scooped it out and presented it to me. a perfect gift. perfect in its imperfection.

sandhill crane wing feather

yay!

i’m easing into languid summer mode over here with all the heat and humidity. how are you doing?

dandelion blossoms

humble and useful beauties

in my csa share this week i got a jar full of dried chive blossoms. they are edible–with a very mild onion-garlic flavor. i’ll use them to dress up salads, and maybe infuse a vinegar. but first i had to photograph them. i have never taken the time to see how varied the colors were: pale purples, lilacs, and pink, and magenta. delicious for the palette and the eyes.

a few tidbits about chives from wiki: chives (A. schoenoprasum) is the only species of allium native to both the new and the old worlds. its english name, chives, derives from the french word cive, from cepa, the latin word for onion

dried chive blossoms (Allium schoenoprasum)

squirrel or fox?

now that my son it out of school for the summer, i often do not know the day or date. so, i missed wishing you all a happy summer solstice. as many of you know, i love the equinoxes and solstices. living on the 45th parallel as i do, makes these days just a little more special, i feel. in the twin cities, we get 16 hours from sun-up to sun-set on the solstice. if you add in twilight on both ends, it’s over 17 hours of light!  i love it.

on a completely unrelated note, these grasses gracing our roadsides right now always capture my attention–their long silken hairs shimmering in the sun. i have seen them called both foxtail and squirrel-tail grass. i think foxtail may be a catch-all for many types of bushy grasses. so i am choosing to call these particular grasses squirrel-tails. what do you see? fox or squirrel?

squirrel-tail grass (Hordeum jubatum)

a simple patch of daisies

making this photo of a patch of roadside daisies was tricky. you could say it has taken me ten years of STILL to make this deceptively simple photo. first of all, photographing white flowers on a white background is hard. it requires a little backlighting in order to not loose the whites of the petals, but not too much that the photo looks unrealistic. secondly, wildflowers start to wilt the instant you cut them. so, it has taken me several years to learn the very obvious trick of photographing them hanging upside down so gravity is assisting me rather than fighting me. duh, right? i don’t know why it took me years to learn that trick. this not-so-simple photo of a patch of roadsides daisies is hard won.

roadside daisies