Yesterday, my walk started out with a surprise visit from an Eastern Coma butterfly that landed on my hand, and spent some time poking around with its proboscis. It is a dark orange butterfly with some dark spots on the upper part of its wings and black on the lower edge. Its body has a greenish hue making it look slightly mossy. When the wings are folded, you see a very different design of light and darker brown that resembles woodgrain. It gets its name from a distinctive small silver coma- shaped marking in the woodgrain pattern. One of their food sources is nettles which are certainly around here!
Further along my walk, a coyote ran across the road no more than 50' away from me. He was not interested in me, and I quickly lost sight of him in the tall weeds. I have seen coyotes in fields when I've been out driving but never one this close. In the fall and winter, we sometimes hear them yipping at night not too far away from our house. Our cats are inside then and the dogs are in a fenced yard when they are outside-we don't need any nasty encounters .
Later, as I proceeded on my way, I was treated to a jazz concert by a big crowd of frogs who have been enjoying all the wet weather we've been having. The frogs were in the tall weeds near a wet area and didn't stop singing (as frogs often do) when I walked by. They were so loud that |I could hear them a quarter mile away.
