June 10

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Walking home from yoga.  Yellow begonia, with friends, in a fancy pot.

Catalpa tree at the east end of West Park.  These are big trees, with big heart-shaped leaves.  This one was full of flowers on the 10th.  And they smell good, too.

Both of my pics of the flowers were blurry, alas.  But at least you can see how many there were on this little section of the tree.

A fallen flower.  I bet this is two inches across, or maybe a bit more.

Most of my pics of the young ducks in the pond were disappointing.  They were eating.  There is a ton of green stuff of various sorts in the pond.  I think they were eating plants, but it's entirely possible they were eating bugs in the plants.  Or something.  I have never seen any indication that they are interested in eating tadpoles.

Heads under the water, looking like two brown blobs amongst the green...........

This time you can see the backs of their heads/necks, at least........

I happened to catch this one shaking the water off its head.......

At last -- a clear (and reasonably exposed) shot.  You can see that they are busy growing big-duck feathers.  There is still plenty of baby fuzz, especially back near their tails, but they are working hard on turning into grown-up ducks.

Here's their mama.  You can see what I mean about lots of plants in the water......  Mama is oddly lit, by the strong evening sun.  She's really the same sort of color mix as her kid, above.  Tan and brown, not shades of gray.....

The kid ducks are now about half her size, I think.

I didn't *look* for tadpoles in the pond, but I didn't see a single one.

I noticed last year that the baby frogs/toads came out of the water in droves when it was raining.  We had some rainy days just before the 10th.  I bet that's when all of those hundreds and hundreds of froglets left the water.

I was happy I got to see one, as I walked away from the pond.

These are teeny tiny little guys.  Their heads and bodies together are no longer than the very tip of my forefinger, if you look straight on at the very end of my finger.  Itty bitty little critters.

I tried without much success to urge this one off the pavement into the grass.  Finally it did go in the grass, where it's less likely to be crushed by the next oblivious pedestrian.

Good luck, little frog.  You're going to need it.

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