It's picture spam!

[hellziggy]

Some pictures from my weekend at the cabin, playing with the new camera (although not being smart enough to pull out the tripod so they are all done hand-holding the 300mm lens...)

Make a little birdhouse in your soul...


Hey, stoney321, I could use some help from you on flower identification... Is this Canada Hawkweed (Hieracium kalmii)?


Also Stoney, if you know what kind of flower this is? My inner zoology major dork is going insane at not being able to put the scientific name for it up on my gallery!
Bumblebee Bombus spp on a purple flower.


Summer Azure butterfly Celastrina neglecta


Dragonfly (there are so many thousands of dragonfly species and no good guide that I could find so there's no scientific name for this one...)


Now, on to the birds!

Coming in for a landing:
American White Pelican Pelecanus erythrorhynchos


And touchdown!


I'm pretty sure he's a Great Blue Heron Ardea herodias






And last, but not least, we've got mammals!

Eastern Chipmunks, adult & adolescent Tamias striatus


Muskrat Ondatra zibethicus

Comments

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

Being a Texan, I have to say that I can't tell you one way or another if that's Canadian hackweed. :-D Looks like it belongs to the dandelion family...

The other plant belongs in the mint family - and that's what my mint looks like when I let it flower. Most likely it's a type of sage - meadow sage, etc. Salvia spp. X. The bee appears to be a carpenter bee, Xylocopa spp.

Course, these are just my quick guesses...

[hellziggy.livejournal.com]

But I thought the title "Master Gardener" meant you knew everything about everything! *grin*
I stopped at Barnes & Noble on the way home and got some more identification guides because it's so much easier to thumb through a real book than to hunt on the internets! You were spot on with the mint family thing. It is Stachys palustris.
Although I can't tell the species I have decided that the bee is definitely Bombus spp. because it doesn't look anything like the Carpenter bees in the Audubon book.
Now I just have to try to figure out for sure what kind of "looks like a dandelion" plant that is...