Thistles and critters

A patch of thistles between the blackberry bushes (with burdock alongside; it was a prickly field!) was a-buzz with flying and crawling critters.

Skipper, and a syrphid fly. I think the skipper is Ochlodes sylvanoides, the Woodland Skipper, very common here in BC.

The bees were busy, but in a great hurry, never parking on a flower long enough for me to focus on it. A lot of work to be done; there are blackberries and flyaway thistle fluff to be made, and it all falls on the bees' shoulders, or at least their leg buckets.

More thistles, more critters.

Most thistles are edible, but grazing animals, such as the deer that was browsing in the blackberry patch, usually ignore them. The leaves are spiny, and those spines are sharp, where the blackberry leaves are mostly thornless.

Orange and yellow

Woodland Skipper on tansy.

Comes with his own "bendy straw" for sipping tansy nectar.

Skipper on dry grass

Another flying jewel from Reifel Island

Orange and green, with a two-tone antenna

Lazy moth and fluttery butterfly

I removed a moth from the wall over our bed, and stored it in a bottle, then forgot to look at it for two days. When I finally remembered, it seemed dead. I shook it out into the lid, and took a couple of quick photos. Just in case; skipping that step has made me lose too many interesting critters.

Moth on orange lid in morning sunlight

I wanted a better background, and shook the lid over a plate. The moth stayed stuck on the lid, so I brushed it off. And no, it wasn't dead; it flew away before it even reached the plate.

Five minutes later, I discovered it on the curtain beside the table.

"That's enough activity for today, thank you."

Laurie shook it off after I'd taken the photos, and shooed it out the door. In the afternoon, I found it on the backside of the curtain. It's still there, unmoving, two days later.

Any flower bed I've investigated in this area has at least one of these busy butterflies:

Skipper on mint

They're never still, even "resting" on a stem; they're always turning from side to side, adjusting their wing angle, looking here and there, then springing up to jitterbug from bloom to bloom again. We have taken umpteen photos of empty butterfly parking spots.