Rayetta's Thoughts for the Day - oak hairstreak (Satyrium favonius)

No Ray, you have to walk. Olwen and Hope have gone shopping already. You slept too long. So you have to walk.

But Rayetta, I am still afflicted with a chafe.

That's too bad Ray. If you want your cinnamon bun, you have to walk over to the cinnamon bun vendors. Put on some nylon jogging shorts. Then you can practice walking bowlegged. That combination, nylon jogging shorts plus walking bowlegged should prevent further aggravation of your chaffing event.

All righty then, Rayetta.

Hmmm. Why are you still standing there gawking at me Ray?

I'm thinking.

Go think somewhere else Ray. I'm busy. Go on. Bowleg yourself out of here.

All righty then, Rayetta.

OK. That's better. There Ray goes, cowboy like, into the dusty hallway.

Now then. Yesterday was a good day for espying new butterflies, but a correspondingly poor day photographically. Nevertheless, the name of the game here is documentation. So here's another butterfly photo that will not stand up to much magnification. Not only was the wind whipping the Marshallia, but I forgot, in my excitement, to zoom in on this gray hairstreak look-alike. But see, it is brown, not gray, and has a shiny light blue patch on the hind tip of the ventral forewing.

Now, the Crumby Ovate and gainfully employed bird enumerator has a short presentation for this venue. Crumby. The venue is at your disposal.

Thank you Lovely Druidess Rayetta (LDR) and Dr. Pistrum. Many are the perils I engage almost daily out in the terrible wilderness. Among those many perils are chiggers. So to keep myself distracted from the chiggers, I look about for orchids during the short intervals when I have few or no birds to enumerate. Lately, that is over the last week, I have espied 11 orchids at four locations. Eight of the orchids were at one location and the other three orchids were at three disparate locations.

Wherever those orchids occurred they all looked alike. They are the same kind or species of orchid, whichever, little doubt of that. But what are they? What kind of dang orchids are they? You see, they are obviously Hexalectris orchids, but these that commonly come up on the cusp of Hope Remains and Beelzebubberriffic, the seasons, have no flowers. So, by the process of elimination, that makes them H. nitida, the self-fertilizing format. But, later on, during the cruelest depths of Beelzebubberiffic, the H. nitida comes up again and some of them actually flower. That is my hypothesis, maybe. This photo is the electric incarnation of one of these orchids I espied yesterday. Notice how crowded the infloresence is.

Here's a closeup of this one. Usually, the infloresence is not so crowded.