Note-taking with a Camera

 When I leave the house with my camera, it's not always with the goal of capturing gallery-worthy images.  Sometimes I think of it as a lazy way of taking notes.  We're in another one of those periods that one might call "between storms."  We don't know if spring is really here, or if another blizzard or two will materialize.  In that spirit, when we have a relatively warm day I wander around to see if any plants or animals are waking up, cautiously testing whether spring is here.  The top photo, taken at the side of North Mill Creek Road, is of new leaves of Filaree or Storksbill, one of the first hardy weeds to emerge after a snow melt at this elevation.  Filaree is a kind of wild geranium.

 The next item that stood out against a mostly brown layer of last year's weeds was a shiny penny.  When I was a kid, such a discovery was considered a source of good luck.  On this day, what first came to mind was that at today's copper price, it costs about 1.7 cents to make a penny.  Somehow that doesn't seem like a symbol of good luck - unless you run a copper mine.  I left it there.

 Then I came to an area with lots of pieces of bark and old boards more or less embedded into the surface.  They looked like they had been undisturbed long enough that they might be good hiding places for the first ground-dwelling invertebrates to approach the surface safely.  I tipped over a few and found Earwigs, including a pair that had just mated or were about to.  Not the difference in size of the pincers, the male being the one with the larger pair.

 Under a nearly rotten board I found a very young Pill Bug.  This one was no more than 1/8 inch long.  They have direct development so the tiny young have the same basic anatomy as the adults, the latter reaching lengths of 1/2 inch or more.

Either I'm being careless or my blogging software is rebelling because the last photo I thought I had loaded is not here.  It was a pair of slugs on the underside of a Pecky-cedar board.  If I find the photo worthy of the trouble, I'll put it in my next post.