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Last year, or perhaps the year before, a lady friend who previously blogged under the nom du net of Jo Gillis sent me a batch of sunflower seeds harvested from some she’d grown that year. This is the first one to present itself among the mostly smaller lemon queen sunflowers that surround it.

It is magnificificifitrifiwificent. And I photographed it not just because it is bodacious, but because the squirrels are apt to come get it, behead it and take it away any minute. Literally: at any time.

Having decimated the backyard patch, they’ve now quit ignoring the flowers of Coyote Corner and have started their path of piecemeal destruction. And I am doing my level best through clenched fists, teeth, and sphincter to leave the pellet gun alone and understand that squirrels are a part of the econiche and are just exploiting the resources made available.

But it’s hard. And it’ll be harder when I look out the window and see this beauty gone.

It’s roughly 80 seconds this phoebe (I think) spent at our bird bath, but through the magic of Quicktime I’ve put the way brief timelapse on an endless loop. Now all it needs is the appropriate musical accompaniment… “Rockin’ Robin” perhaps?

I missed capturing the latest cereus cactus flower’s nocturnal opening Tuesday night, but yesterday morning I set up my cam before the bloom  at 6:40 a.m. and timelapsed the following two sunrise hours of it slowly — almost imperceptibly — closing up shop.

There are certainly lulls in the activity, but it’s fascinating (to me, at least) not only how the bees frolickingly  interact with the blossom but also as the opening gets progressively smaller how they seem almost hyper-aware that their time with the flower is fleeting.

There’s a jumping spider who hangs out on the edge of the petals at one point, and keep an eye out near the middle for the big carpenter bee — especially nearer the end when it barrels its way inside through the almost-closed petals for one last round.

The scale upon which I have been weighing myself these last four years (and these last 43 — and counting — days) has been an off-the-shelf, 9-volt-battery-powered digital model purchased from Rite-Aid… or maybe back then it was still Sav-on.

Wherever it was acquired I’ve never really cared whether it was ultra-accurate, just that it was within a pound or two of whatever my ever-fluctuating specific weight was at the time.

Lurking in the shadows of the spare bathroom is another digital scale that I haven’t utilized this time around, in part because in 2006 during the course of my six-month 52-pound drop from 260 to 208, on the one or two occasions I stepped on it, its measurement varied from mine by as much as five pounds… in the wrong direction — and that was not only a blow to the momentum, but also a seed of doubt planted. “What if that scale’s right and mine’s wrong?”

Sturdier dieters than me would discard the more forgiving scale and start using the less forgiving one, but I clung to the scale I’d been using, of course not without always wondering what the other one might read.

Well, about a week ago I finally manned up and ventured into the spare bathroom, where I hauled out that long-bothersome sucker for a comparison. Sure enough, my scale read 228. That scale read 231.

So I said to hell with both of ‘em and their discrepancies and went research on their varying asses. Googled up “most accurate scale” in my web browser and bless them, I found Consumer Reports had done a test to find the best one out there and the result was the Taylor No. 7506.

I told Amazon to ship me one and it arrived this morning.

Stepping to it I was ready to accept whatever it calculated my weight to be. But first I took to my go-to old scale, which read read 226, and then the possessed one in the spare bathroom, which listed me at 232. The respective bipolar bastards dared deliver a six-pound spread.

Then came the new scale’s verdict: 227.6 (its 10ths of a pound are new and a nice touch).

So while it would be nice to list 226 as my weight today, I’m sucking it up and recalibrating to 227.6. Maybe that extra 1.6 pounds is the confidence I have of it being a more realistic assessor.

Whatever biological elements conspired to limit our property’s usual orb spider inundation this past year or two are not in effect this time around. These awesome arachnids have been out and about the yards early, albeit smaller in size than I typically see.

Until this morning, when I found this fine large specimen working on its web under the backyard bougainvillea (click it for the bigger picture):

For all you arachniphobes out there… sorry. It can’t all be hummingbird chicks and butterflies.

If it’s any consolation there is of course the drawback that I’m walking  face first into far more webs strung across walkways and such. But doing my exceptionally erratic version of the spiderwebfacefreakout dance is mostly a small price to pay to get to hang with such amazing creatures.

Mostly.

It’s that time of year and the neighbor’s fence-sitting cereus cactus is wonderfully at it again. I noticed the blooms-to-be about a week ago, but wasn’t expecting them to open up so quickly.

And when they do, the early-morning bees drop any interest in sunflowers and literally go swimming in them. So of course I stuck my iPhone’s cam all up in the bloom to catch the action. It’s pretty cool:

Sorry to cut off right at that particular moment. My iPhone shut down right then… either because it’s afraid of bees or I was holding it wrong. Or perhaps it was just trying to spare you from listening to me blather on.

After weeks of counting pollinators as part of my ongoing involvement with the Great Sunflower Project, I thrill with every bee I see. But I have to say, I’d been hoping for a little more variety beyond just honeybees.. Well, that variety arrived with my count including my first carpenter bee — and my timelapse captured its arrival to the flower beautifully (click it for the bigger picture).

So, while I was up on the roof last night getting this shot to the west of the Moon, Saturn, Mars and Venus all gathered together in the western sky, before I came down I also pointed the camera to the northwest and got this shot of that view (click it for the bigger picture):

For my timelapse observation of today’s sunflower, instead of the backyard, I chose one of the recently opened ones at the front of the house, a tall and healthy and large specimen not in Coyote Corner proper, but just outside the boundary to the right of what you can see on the Sunflower Webcam I have pointed at that section.

So I set up the cam and began recording a few minutes after 10 a.m., only to be somewhat amazed upon reviewing the two-hours of timelapsed footage (one frame taken every second) that not a single bee landed on it during that time. In fact, it only drew the attention of one bee, who buzzed in front of it, as seen below, before flying off (click it for the bigger picture).  And the flower in the background had only two bees physically land on it.

I’d hazard these flowers are still young enough in their bloom stage not to yet have what the bees are looking for, but still when I’m used to observing at least five bees on a flower in a 30-minute period it’s surprising that these two proud representative would draw so little in the way of bee interest over four times as long a span.

Here’s two hours in the afternoon of one of my Great Sunflower Project sunflowers, timelapsed down to eight minutes. In addition to all the bees that visit it as it bops around in the breeze, at one point (about 1:35 in) this bloom gets the attention of a spotless ladybug, and later (about 6:52 in) the camera picks up the blurred-out shape of a squirrel cruising across the top of the fence in the background. Blink and you’ll miss ‘em.