Hard freezes before Thanksgiving seem early to me, but I’m a newcomer to the Piedmont.
The only blooms I’ve seen in the woods are small asters. In the garden, some Mexican marigolds came through. With few flowers, most of the pollinators have disappeared.
While trying to find bees, wasps and yellowjackets, I’ve found red-femured spotted orbweavers everywhere.Neoscona domiciliorum is a common, beautiful spider. The first segment of each leg is red. The lower leg has alternating bands of gray and black.
I don’t know if this population explosion is seasonal, something purely local or observer bias. (I suspect these spiders have always been here, and I have been too dense to notice.) These spiders prefer the woodlands of the Southeast. They like to build webs around houses, especially under the eaves. They sure like Stone Mountain, a village in the woods.
The nearest pond is covered with pollen.
Most of the leaves in the forest are gone. But while we were visiting the pond, a gust of wind hit a big maple, and the falling leaves reminded me of the kind of heavy snowfall you see around the Great Lakes. Everything came down at once.
Robert Louis Stevenson said this:
Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably.
I wonder if that’s true. And I can hear the voice of my old professor, warning of observer bias.
• Source: The quotation is from “On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places” in Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by William Lyon Phelps; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Project Gutenberg’s edition is here:
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