Nothing good can come of this.

Poor Squit, there in back, was sacking out in the 100+ degree heat of the day, trying to stay a little cooler on the front porch. Leona seems to have decided that there is nothing better than a good cuddle, and maybe a bath. This won’t last long - there will be harsh words and a couple of slaps.

We’re right about the time of humpday, that magic time of summer when the average temperatures (purple line) are in the middle of their peak, and will soon be trending downward. Our average high temperatures, against which you must compare the blue and red lines and dots, are normally 90 degF during all the month of July, and a little into August.

The blue (2010) and red (2009) dots are the actual temperature measurements throughout the day and night.

The blue (and red) lines are 25-point moving averages, and should be compared with the purple line. The moving averages give us a good indication of warm and cold periods, compared to normal. It’s pretty clear that we’re having a VERY warm summer, and that last year was just a little above normal. We’ve already exceeded 100 degF on four days, and are likely to experience 100+ temperatures today through Sunday.

That will put this July at about the 6th or 7th hottest since 1900, with high temperatures averaging 5 degF above the normal high average.

Yesterday we did officially break a 101 degF record set for Athens in 1925, when temperatures went over 103 in the mid afternoon. Around 3pm, though, a storm southeast of us expanded to cover our little area, and temperatures dropped 30 degrees in an hour. There was a lot of lightning and thunder, but the heaviest part of the storm was south and east, so we only got 0.20 inches in all. No complaints here!

Sometimes I can go for a long walk and run across nothing significant enough to photograph. Other times I can sit on the front stoop reading and significance finds me.

That proved to be the case yesterday afternoon when this very furry jumping spider acrobatted across the chair and onto the wall. It looks to be a Phidippus putnami, and there are some very fine images at that Bugguide link. That’s a new one, for me.



Like just about all the salticids I’ve run across, this one was fearless and bold. I could tell that it was gauging the distance from where it was sitting to the lens of the camera, and half expected it to jump onto the camera.



The extra-furry front pair of legs were in constant flagging motion. There is a lot of variation in the species, with some of the photos not very closely resembling this individual, but some do, like this one. I’m guessing, but it looks like at least some of those differences are due to a dimorphism between male and female, and that this one is likely a male.



Looks like I missed, once again, Niches' anniversary - this year, the sixth!

Yesterday’s high was 102 degF, and similar predictions are made for each day through Thursday, at least. Taking a look at the record highs during this period, we stand a pretty good chance of matching or breaking them each day.

Here’s a pretty bug.

I should write a book on all the arthropods that have landed on my books as I read them outside. That’s where this one was. It was easy to identify - it’s a lace bug, and it’s a true Hemipteran, family Tingidae.

From the general shape of the “helmet,” the covering plate, and the patterning, it looks like it might be a cherry lace bug, Corythucha associata. All that elaborately lacy top plate is a facade - fairly regular looking bug hides beneath it. So skillfully that none of my photographs revealed it, but this one does.

Those who garden probably already know this insect, or one like it. They’re plant suckers, but not, apparently, in a passive way like aphids. More like in a spider way, injecting digestive enzymes in their saliva pumped into the plant’s interstitial space, and then sucking out what gets digested. In doing so, they probably also transmit viruses, which cause leaf yellowing and spotting.

Whatever the problem with mushrooms, one thing’s for sure - people love photographing them. Who wouldn’t, with such fantastic architecture begging to be immortalized?



Most amazing is how a largely amorphous, permanent and unseen body of tiny filaments can, within a day, mobilize and assemble nutrients and structures, and then construct them into a distinctive and complex fruiting body.

So there are many, many (too many!) photos available to sift through, if you’re trying to match up to a particular species, without having done the grunt work of spore prints, chemical tests, or microscopic examination. And maybe your particular specimen is not so representative of its species.

Surely this one would be easy. Several were emerging from the floodplain, deeply shaded by hardwood oak and beech, just above Goulding Creek last Saturday. The free gills, the ring just below the halfway point, the fine scaling of stipe and cap, and (below) the terminal bulb would surely be sufficient for identification. This mushroom isn’t huge, but it isn’t tiny either - perhaps two inches across and four or five inches tall.

Rogers Mushrooms website has a nice visual key, that gets you into the major groups of mushrooms, which in turn lead you to a selection of photos within those major groups.

The presence of a ring and bulb suggested either the Amanita group, or the Lepiota. The alarming amanita group, though, has not a bulb like this, exactly, but a cup or a bulb with a rim that is evidence of previous attachment to parts above.

The Lepiota/Macrolepiota group, on the other hand, tends to have the ring higher up on the stem, more robust and fleshy cap and stem, and scales on the cap.

While I went through many photos, the only ones to match were some I took, just about four years ago, of Lepiota leutea (aka Leucocoprinus birnbaumii). These are the entertaining mushrooms that also pop up out of potted plants, very yellow when just emerging, and then lightening to an off-white color. The dusty scales coat all parts of the mushroom.

A search on “lepiota lutea” yielded quite a few clear matches, such as these, which probably peg the species. My specimens here are simply older, with the umbrella caps turned gradually outward into a slightly concave flat surface, and with the yellow color faded almost to white.

(Continued unexpectedly from mid April, because flowers come back to haunt you.)

On Saturday, I encountered a small tree overhanging the creek, and these pretty fruits, several inches long, were hanging from the branches (some clearly already being chewed on by arthropods). I looked at the bark, and sure enough, they are the fruits of the flowering of silverbells, Halesia tetraptera. The fruits reflect the specific epithet - tetraptera - four wings.

Oddly, this was the only individual I could find, out of dozens coming close to hundreds, that was making fruits. I’ll have to check more carefully on that, but the pendulous fruits are pretty obvious.



I collected a short branch, and later that hot afternoon we happily dissected the fruits, on the front stoop. The seed is shown in the bottom of the composite, from one of the fruits (shown atop). The two panels are not to scale - the green fruit is around three inches long and the lovely spindle-shaped seed is about an inch long. You can see the form of the seed inside the green fruit. The seed, by the way, has already achieved its very hard texture, characteristic of the stony seed of a fruit that is a drupe.



In the above composite, the fruit is indeed fleshy, though quite tough, and the inner tissues are very firmly affixed to the seed inside. We had to really scrape to get the fruit layers off the seed.

Is this seed mature? Since the fruit is still green and not ready to drop off, it’s a good bet that the tiny embryo inside isn’t ready to go into the cold cruel world, either.

Fast forward four days - the branch, left alone, displays the fruits now looking like this. The green fruit layers have browned and dried - they’re not crispy, but rather, still pliable. The fruit on top is intact, and I’ve scraped away enough of the one on the bottom to begin to expose the seed inside.



Even so browned and dried, the fruit tissues are still very firmly attached to the seed. Now what has transpired here is not natural, since normally you don’t have to cut off branches to mature the fruit. And it’s quite possible that there were weeks left to go before the fruits still on the tree, with their baby plants inside the seeds, begin to senesce and dehisce and drop off on their own. I had thought that maybe the fruit would become papery and the now mature seed might separate from its enclosing fruit and rattle around in its little cage.

But maybe not. The whole business may go throughout the next few weeks, maturing madly with the fruit still firmly attached. Apparently squirrels will go after the fruits, presumably chewing away the fleshy green delicious outsides. Whether they care about the seeds or not is unclear, or maybe they are most interested in the seeds. Eat some, bury some, and from some of those come new silverbells.

Whichever. I’ll take these half-dozen seeds and bury them in a planter and see what happens in the spring. And take another look at the tree in a few days.