Just because

There's no rhyme or reason to this post. I'm suffering from brain overload.

These are photos from this past week, in no particular order.

Pair of flies on a hawkweed flower.

A tiny bird's nest left over from last year. It is about 2 to 3 inches across. Beach Grove.

From my back yard, a blue snail. I've never seen one this colour before. The camera sometimes lies, but this is what my eyes told me, too.

Cat on a cement wall, Beach Grove.

The wall and cat were far across the dunes. Something down the crack had his attention, and I stood on the beach shouting like an idiot, "Kitty, kitty! Look over here, kitty!" He finally deigned to give us a quick glance.

A huge forsythia grew in front of an old farmhouse down the street. Untrimmed, it hung over the sidewalk, causing pedestrians to duck under it or step into the road. Every year around this time, Laurie brings me an armload of its branches, loaded with buds. Not this year. They're building a new retail/housing complex there, and have torn out every scrap of vegetation.

I cut a few twigs from the bottom of a shrub in Crescent Beach. At home, they burst into happy bloom.

Lbb, Beach Grove

Moss sporophyte, spore case.

A few days ago, we walked down Crescent Beach in the teeth of a vicious wind. The birds, gulls and eagles mostly, were out in force, playing in the currents. A flock of young eagles would fly out of the trees, then rest on the air, letting the wind blow them sideways back into the forest. Or they would fly far up until they were just dots in the sky, then drop to tree-top levels.

And somewhere in the evergreens on the cliff, a couple of eagles were announcing their romance to the world. He screeched, loudly, over and over. Then she would join in with the bubbly, warbling mating-readiness cry. Hard to describe; a lower tone, liquid, softer than the usual rusty-hinge scream; almost an amplified version of the voice a mother cat uses to greet her kittens. But amplified; very. We could hear her from a good kilometer down the beach.

They would sing their duet for a few minutes, then lapse into silence. Not for long. Again and again they broke into triumphant song.

We kept scanning the trees, looking for a sign of them; we couldn't find them, not even by the shaking of branches, since the wind was tossing everything about. We got photos of playing eagles; dots in the sky against the light. No photos of the mating pair.