Flights of Fancy

While Skye and I were taking a short cut this morning to avoid a confrontation with another dog, I spotted a pair of Red-Shafted Flickers and a beautiful butterfly I haven’t seen before.

When I returned with a camera, and without Skye, a little while later, though, I couldn’t find the butterfly, or the flickers, for that matter.

Instead, I was greeted by a squadron of dragonflies, most of which were impossible to get a shot of, though this brown dragonfly managed to settle long enough a could get a decent shot:

Common Whitetail

Though I could hear the flickers calling back and forth to each other, I didn’t see one until I got home, and it was high on the top of a fir tree in my back yard, taunting me by staying too far away to get a good shot.

To console myself, I grabbed a cola and sat on the back patio with my camera, waiting until another Tiger Swallowtail landed on the purple flowers,

Butterfly Bush

my reward for spending a day and a half transplanting the giant plant when I had to rebuild the fence last year, a small price to pay for the joy of watching a steady stream of butterflies, bees, and, yes, hummingbirds flock to the flowers.

And, if I couldn’t manage to get a better picture of a flicker, I could still sit on my front porch and make another attempt to capture the perfect shot of one of the many hummingbirds that always lift my spirits:

Anna's Hummingbird

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