It's That Time of Year!

 After a summer of daily hikes, I am definitely not used to sitting at a meeting for three hours.  And, I don't want to get used to that much sitting.  It's not healthy.  What did we do before the invention of the chair - much less the couch?  We were not potatoes.  So, late in the afternoon I joined my wife and we walked the dog up Boyle Ravine a ways.  I brought the camera, thinking I'd try to get a few aesthetically pleasing shots of plants.  I found the spheres of seeds of the Mountain Dandelion attractive.  This Agoseris sp. is a native dandelion, unlike the one that is the scourge of lawn keepers.

 The Lemmon's Wild Ginger .as bloomed and gone to seed, but the leaves look as fresh and beautiful as they did in the spring.  So far so good.  But, when we entered the patch of Tansy by the green water tanks, what a surprise!  Virtually every plant had one or more pairs of mating Ambush Bugs. 

 Note, the smaller and darker males are on top except for this one couple (below) that was not engaged.  I watched them for a few minutes, undecided about whether they were "finished" or about to get started.  They never moved, so I continued onward.

 Looks like there will be another good crop of Ambush Bugs next summer.