Rewilding My Lot

The only camera I have is the one in my phone. For the convenient little device that it is, the quality of the photographs that I can get is pretty good.

However, when my friend Ken Harvey visited the garden with his proper camera, the images he was able to capture were so much better than what I can achieve! Here are some things that caught his eye.

The first photo above (laden with pollen!) and the one below are of Western Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) on Beach Sunflowers (Helianthus debilis).

These next two photos are of a female or immature male Black-Chinned Hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri). The red-flowered plant is Standing Cypress (Ipomopsis rubra).

Mealy Blue Sage (Salvia farinacea) attracts bigger bees, like these Eastern Carpenter Bees (Xylocopa virginica). They buzz very loudly!

I have a lot of Frogfruit (Phyla nodiflora) here — it’s a resilient ground cover. Its tiny flowers attract a wide array of little visitors, like this Phaon Crescent (Phyciodes phaon) butterfly with a mere 1-inch wingspan. Frogfruit is this butterfly’s host plant, so I see a lot of them.

Also on Frogfruit this is a Poecilanthrax lucifer, a member of the Bee Fly family. They look and behave like bumblebees, but they are flies.