Flowers

I decided to gather the flower photos from the trip. I tend to focus on bugs and birds before plants, but I still took a lot of flower photos. I apologize in advance for the overdose.

I always check out milkweed plants looking for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, although spring is probably the wrong time to see them here. Milkweed plants are toxic, so often the leaves are untouched. Monarch caterpillars eat them because they are toxic - to become toxic themselves and therefore less attractive to predators. The milkweed I know to recognize and see most often is Showy Milkweed.

Yellow iris are pretty but they are an introduced plant that has escaped into the wild and become invasive.

One of the campgrounds we stayed at had lots of Beargrass.

Tamarisk is another non-native plant that is a problem in some areas. Around Five Springs there were only scattered plants. I might not have noticed it if it hadn't been flowering.

Sego Lilies (native) are always a pleasant surprise in the high desert.

Scarlet Globemallow

In Saskatchewan, the Prairie Pasqua Flowers ("crocuses") come out while there is still frost and even snow. These ones are later due to the altitude.

Prairie Smoke or Three-flowered Aven are another one I used to see in Saskatchewan:

and Shooting Stars

and Paintbrush

There were tons of lupines around, probably multiple kinds.

Higher up in the Bighorn mountains one of the view points was surrounded by these little blue flowers. I think they're Pale Alpine Forget-me-nots.

We have Stonecrops around Victoria so it was interesting to see this mountain variety.

Beardtongue seems like a suitable name for these flowers. They are related to snapdragons and foxgloves.

I think this is Linearleaf Phacelia. It doesn't seem to have a less technical name.

Last year it seemed like almost all the prickly pear cactus was blooming. This year I only found a few flowers.

I think this is Alpine Golden Buckwheat. (spot the Mormon cricket) It was at Five Springs, but it makes a good transition to our later stop at Craters of the Moon, where there are a variety of wild buckwheats (unrelated to cultivated buckwheat).

Cushion Buckwheat is common at Craters of the Moon. It varies in color from yellow to pink.

I think this is Parsnipflower Buckwheat.

And Sulfur Buckwheat

Dwarf Purple Monkeyflower has tiny flowers but they're quite pretty up close.

I think this is Hoary Pincushion - a suitable name for the appearance of the flowers.

I think this is Silverleaf Phacelia, another scorpionweed like Linearleaf Phacelia above.

Larkspurs are common and also have interesting flowers up close.

Away from the desert, foxgloves were blooming all over.

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Butterflies

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Bugs

I've been taking lots of insect photos this trip. At the campground near Yakima, Washington I spotted a milkweed plant so I checked it out, hoping for a Monarch caterpillar. No luck with that, but there were a few other insects visiting.

I also spotted this one on a tree nearby. I think it's a common Boxelder Bug nymph.

At Five Springs, one of the first hikes we did was to Painted Canyon. Around the parking area there were cicadas everywhere. I've seen individual cicadas here before, but never so many. I think these are Putnam's Cicadas, in which case they live 3 to 5 years, but all but 4 to 6 weeks is spent underground as nymphs.

Although lots of them had obviously emerged, I only spotted one of the "skins" they shed when the nymphs emerge from underground and transition to adults.

Even the ants were taking advantage and were hauling this piece of a cicada.

I didn't see a lot of caterpillars, but there were some Western Tent Caterpillars.

There were lots of grasshoppers around, but they are always skittish and even with a photograph, they are hard to identify.

I always search the flowers for insects. In this dry country the flowers are a focus.

I watched this wasp visit several flowers, crawling inside to feed. But then it stopped inside one flower and didn't budge. I thought maybe a crab spider had ambushed it, but I couldn't see anything. Even when I peeled the petals back, the wasp didn't move. I later found another one also "sleeping" inside one of the flowers. Strange.

Several times, something green flew up from the ground but it moved too fast to identify. Finally, one flew up, but another stayed on the ground. It was a green tiger beetle which apparently are sometimes purple and therefore the name, Purple Tiger Beetle.

From a distance I thought this was a plant gall, but it turned out to be a crab spider, waiting patiently for its prey to visit. It wasn't very well camouflaged, maybe it was normally on a different type of flower.

These photos were almost all taken with the little Olympus 60mm macro lens on an OM-1, a great combination for this kind of photography, and very compact for travel.

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