I Should Apologize Now For All My “Cinns”

I might as well apologize now, because it’s just possible that the rest of my photographs for the remainder of the fall and summer might all be of this, my new favorite flower.

The Cinnamon Sun sunflower is now blooming, and I can barely draw myself away.

I had a little trouble getting the pictures I really wanted, because this bloom is the first on the plant, and it’s about 10 feet off the ground. I had to stand on a ladder. Oh, but there are so many more blooms getting ready to open… and they are much more accessible.

 
Not only is the bloom gorgeous, but the colors are exactly the same as those on my house, not that you can tell from the back of the house. But might it be too matchy-matchy to have a flower match my house? I think not.

At times during the day, the flower appeared almost black — in fact, the gloominess of the dark flower early this morning almost had me worried that I’d made a poor choice. Then the sun came up a bit more, and wow. Take a look at this next photo, where the flower appears dark. See what else showed up?

That’s a Green Lynx spider. I guess when I got so excited about it being Pollinator Week, the spider did, too — but for a different reason. The last time I saw a Green Lynx spider, it was much better camouflaged.

But then Ms. Spider today moved to the back of the sunflower, and there was her camouflage. I’m impressed with her capture, even if it is one of my bees. Can you see her?

I did manage to pull myself away from the sunflower long enough to capture a quick picture of a hummingbird before my battery died. I also successfully managed to take the picture without falling off the ladder. Must be my newfound ladder skills from painting the exterior of my house…

I also caught a hummingbird today visiting the new blooms on the Standing Cypress. I always get a thrill of justification when I see hummingbirds at my flowers instead of just at the feeder — like it was all worth it, this gardening stuff. Alas, I had no camera in hand at the time. But here are the blooms.

This morning, over at the Gregg’s Mistflower, I saw that this patch of flowers is becoming quite the spider hangout. Not too long ago a spider caught one of my beloved dragonflies in this popular insect hangout. Today I found another kind of spider waiting patiently on its zig-zag recliner. I think it’s a male Argiope spider.  Edit: Having later found a larger Banded Garden Spider, I now wonder whether this is a juvenile female, species Argiope trifasciata.

I think that if I were an orb spider, I’d go for this kind of web. That zig-zag is called a stabilimentum. It just looks extra secure and comfortable. On the other hand, the spider is probably more noticeable, but the rest of the web could barely be seen. Maybe that’s a plus for the spider — if the prey avoids the visible spider by flying to the side, it gets caught by the invisible web. Anyway, it worked, because the next thing I knew there was frantic movement going on in the web — a grasshopper had made an unfortunate jump. Try focusing with a zoom lens on a spider that’s moving and spinning and wrapping its prey — what a challenge!

Now this time I can say yay for the spider — it caught one of my nuisance grasshoppers. It can have all the grasshoppers it wants. I’m sure the green lynx spider eats grasshoppers, too, but so far I keep catching it with its paws in the honey jar, so to speak.

Enough spider pictures. Let’s go back to the Cinnamon Sun, shall we? Oh to be a bee visiting that sunflower… well, preferably without the spider there, too.