Insects, Flowers And Even Some Birds With My Macro Lens.
It’s the peak of mushroom season here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. So I was out walking with my macro lens again. As regular followers of my blog would know, I don’t share the location of my hikes when in search of wild mushrooms. Unfortunately, once again, I found more insects and flowers than I did mushrooms. 
The weather has been dry and there haven’t been an abundance of mushrooms like there are in some years. I did find a few puffball mushrooms,
and a couple of nice ‘red top” mushrooms at the start of my hike. The aspen scaber bolete and birch scaber bolete are the mushrooms my dad thought us to pick. I need to find these mushrooms for soup on Christmas Eve. My nieces Kelly and Cassidy carry on this wonderful tradition. I have to find the mushrooms. And it gets harder each year because of the continuing loss of the woods they grow in. 
Although I wasn’t finding any mushrooms I continued my hike, enjoying the late Summer sunshine and the flowers and insects I saw along the way, including many bees visiting the last flowers of summer.
The flowers growing now are not as showy as the many spring flowers but some, like the purple milkwort of still 
very pretty.
Other, like the many varieties of goldenrod, found in our area are not so pretty but still attract, and provide pollen, for many insects. 
Many types of grasshoppers
and katydids hopped along the trail as I passed, sometimes resting long enough for me to get a photograph. 
The trail I followed led to some wetland area. Located in some isolated former strip mine areas, I was glad to see a family of Canada geese swimming in a pond. These geese most likely raised their family in this isolated area. Usually you find larger flocks on the lakes closer to farms and urban areas were the birds can supplement their natural diets with food provided by humans. Not this geese. They lived their lives here free of human influence. 
And nearby I saw four, I believe, spotted sandpipers darting along a puddle looking for insects. Again I was pleased to see these wetlands birds here in an area once devastated by coal mining. 
Growing in this wetlands area were large areas of cranberries. 
The berries will ripen slowly over the next few weeks. I have picked them in November to make cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving Dinner. 
This delicate yellow flower was growing nearby. My Iphone app tells me it is a yellow eyed grass flower. 
Of course if there are wetlands there will be dragonflies, although there were not as many as I thought there would be.
There also seemed to only be this one brown species, not like the many different colored species I find in the wetlands. 
I also saw some butterflies on the late summer flowers. 
I left the wetlands and continued my search for mushrooms. Not much luck did I have. Too dry. I did find a lot of teaberries but no more red top mushrooms. 
I returned to my jeep with only a couple of mushrooms. But September is also a good month for mushrooms. And a steady, heavy rain is falling as I finish this blog. Rain in September usually produces an abundance of mushrooms. and I will be out looking for them. Here is a link to some more photographs from my hike. Macro Lens Hike August 31 2019.
In every walk in with nature one receives far more than he seeks. John Muir
Categories
Recent Comments