Flowers and a new feature...

I took some more photos at work today. A squirrel, a lot of new flowers, and a beautiful insect struggling very hard to hang on in a strong wind! I'm posting the photos below, and hopefully a short video of the insect - if it loads you can see its antannae blowing in the wind and its wings getting pushed out of place. I haven't tried this feature until now, so we'll see how it goes! Testing in one, two, three...

This cute little squirrel was taking advantage of the snack bar - elm seeds blown up
against the grass at the edge of the parking lot. I've also seen chipmunks going for these.

More shiny buttercups and a few late forget-me-nots.

Orange Hawkweed. These are blooming anywhere there's grass - along the roads, in the picnic area. 

More leaf galls. They come in a lot of shapes and sizes. 

Salsafe, or Goats-Beard. The seeds make a big puffball like a dandelion, but much, much bigger!

Yarrow. The leaves have a very pungent aroma when bruised. 

Almost all the plants growing in the grassy part of the picnic area had these little blobs of foam on them. 

These are spittlebugs - the nymphs, or babies, create these blobs and hide inside them for protection from

 predators, temperature extremes and dehydration. (I looked that last part up...)

Plain old daisies! These weren't too hard to identify!

I thought at first this was a flower called "Butter & Eggs", but it turns out it is Bird's-Foot Trefoil!
It's in the legume, or bean, family.

More Hawkweed, but yellow this time. Turns out it's called Canadian Hawkweed.

There were some huge shelf fungi on this tree, and what looked like a strange bird perched on top of them!

Turned out it was not a strange bird, just a very strange fungus posing as a bird!

I had thought this was baneberry, but I checked and it doesn't match up. I will have to look into this.

Remember those yellow Bluebead Lilies? These are the "beads", the berries - still green yet.