Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Beauty and the noxious weed

A Male Eastern Tiger Swallowtail feeding on Musk Thistle flowers across the fence from an unmowed horse pasture between William B. Umstead State Park and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

As a larvae, he may have eaten tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) leaves in the nearby forest, as my Grandmother Memommy (Jackson) Frink explained to me when I was a child in her garden on the Honey Hill Road in Columbus County, learning the names of butterflies.

There were two of them Saturday, as oblivious to the bicycle rider with the digital camera as their ancestors once were to the nearsighted child and his patient, doting grandmother. She would have pulled that (noxious, invasive, European) weed up, as will I when next I pass by the spot. There are, however, a lot of them along the roadsides in that area.

Friday, August 03, 2012

Velvet still on his antlers

Grazing beside a Meredith College athletic field early Sunday morning, this white-tailed buck was unconcerned until other bicyclists labored up the hill, derailleurs clicking.


copyright george frink

Then he and a smaller doe gamboled across the field together, dancing over the brow of a slight hill and meandering into the woods.

I grew up hunting them with Walker Hounds and shotguns. Cameras are better for both of us, I suspect, and the sight and sound of Walker Hounds and of deer, however widely they may be separated from one another, is no less a delight.