Summer is moving right along. Too fast. Wood ducklings and other birds have fledged. The variety of flowers is changing.
The deer showed herself again. This time mid-morning and just briefly as crossed the trail. I was late getting to the best spot and missed a photo of her.
A female wood duck was sharing a log at the entrance to the trail. Some teenage ducklings were not far, likely hers.

The great blues weren't co-operating very well. One was in the middle of the Lake and was mistaken for a stick. A second was bit closer as we walked around to the far side.


While there were two green herons, then one 😊..... on a branch at the entrance, they were a distance away and really just silhouettes.

However we found another green heron working hard to devour a large bull frog it had caught. We watched for about 10-15 minutes while it maneuvered the frog into its beak head first. (Both photos below are crops of the full frame shot, the second an extreme crop that required some upsizing from a very small file, thus the loss of quality.)


The chickadees and nuthatches were still making themselves available for hand feeding. They were taking turns until one aggressive chickadee dive bombed a nuthatch and claimed the seeds




Chickadees normally take one seed, fly off, eat it and come back for another. One chickadee was saving time by not flying off. It pecked at and ate one seed and then took another, repeat, and another...
A mother black (?) duck had a clutch of 8 ducklings on her tail. They were perhaps a week old - a quite late hatch

I hadn't seen an obvious hybrid duck for quite a few years, but was at the bridge showing off its white bib. LIkely a cross between a mallard or black duck and white domestic escapee

Many of the young wood ducks have fledged. The only way to tell the difference between a young fully fledged wood duck and a male adult in full molt is the colour of their eyes.. The young ducks' eyes are black until the fall. The adult males' eyes are bright red.


The adult male wood duck was foraging for food amongst the water lilies
It seemed the young phoebes had fledged and their parents were encouraging them to find food for themselves. The parents would go off and catch an insect, return to the same branches, but never feed the kids - just holding the insect as if to say: See, go catch one for yourselves.


We never saw the very young mergansers riding on Mum's back earlier this year, but we found the five, now teenagers, resting on a log.


A wood duck family that we had fed several times spotted us before we got to the usual spot where we feed them. They came charging over to where we were. Whether they recognized us as having fed them before, or simply bipeds who might have food, we'll never know
Lots flowers in bloom (and some berries) , scroll over for ID

Fleabane

Golden rod

burdock and mullein

Evening primrose

Bladderwort

Purple flowering raspberry

Purple flowering raspberry

Spear Thistle

Spear Thistle

Deadly nightshade

honeysuckle

honeysuckle

Hawthorne

Walnut
I have not seen a monarch butterfly this year, but there was a monarch caterpillar feeding on some Joe Pye weed.

A recently deceased green darner butterfly was lying on the grass. "They" say that the green darner is one of the most common dragonflies,. This was only the second one I have seen in over 25 years. They are larger and brighter than many other dragonflies.


Seemed only one frog was wanting a portrait taken. A green frog.

Some different looking fungus was on the cut end of long ago fallen tree



Another fungus, with slightly different underside was on a tall stump which normally has fungus in its top

A tree on the path up to the ridge has been growing bracket fungus each year and each year people knock them off. The fungus is trying again this year

For whatever reason, a slug was out on a bright rock in the hot sun
