This past week Robin Alden of Penobscot East Resource  Center  gave the sermon at the Sunset-Deer Isle Congregational Church. She began with a reference to our Island's clamming industry, surely one of environmental management's outstanding success stories.  She gave this talk first as a TED talk. Go to June 25 Laity Sunday's sermon at
http://sunsetucc.wordpress.com/ to read her inspiring words for yourself.
And then you might check out the web site for Penobscot East.

We heard a purple finch singing and from the house watched the male display up and down the walkway. He dragged his wings on the ground and fluttered them constantly while all the time a cascade of warbling notes simply poured out of him. Back and forth, back and forth for minutes on end. We could not see the little female but you can be sure she was watching him too. As the dapper little bird strutted back and forth like some tropical bird on its lek, a bower bird or bird of paradise, Ken whispered appreciatively that birders pay huge sums and travel miles for a show like he was putting on.

Later, when I wanted a photograph to share with you all I took out my new iPad with the fabulous app called iBird Pro  that allows you (something like 99 cents for the app!) to call up the bird by name, press on the spot for speaker, and presto! the bird's song. I played it once and he appeared atop this spruce. Not only that, a nearby male immediately started to challenge from his spruce top. Who indeed was this new intruder, they queried, that dared appear where these two had already declared the boundary line was between their two territories?  Chastened, I quickly snapped the picture, closed the iPad and retreated.  I certainly did not want to be responsible for either of their mates deciding that these guys were anything less than heroes.

Solstice Afternoon

While a hermit thrush
sings in the shadows
trees draw quiet lines
across the summer road
on which the Pearl Crescent
scribbles
a hasty butterfly
autograph.

Dooryard lilacs are in bloom so of course there are tiger swallowtails galore. This one is enjoying the blackberry bloom along a woods road.  One might think that these swallowtails are suburban dwellers, but in fact they are species of the woodland edge. Fortunately for us here on Deer Isle,  that goes for robins as well. We have lots of spruce forest edge and you can hear robins singing deep in the shadows. Every poplar grove might display tiger swallowtails spiraling high up into the sunshine. Aren't we lucky!

The sun is out and so are the several species  of moths in our region that fly by day. One of our most common is the spear-marked black, named for the white chevron on the wings. I see them now on our bunchberry blooms. Did you ever notice that the leaves of a blooming bunchberry are in sixes, whereas the younger plants, not yet mature enough to bloom, have only four leaves? Bunchberry is a dogwood relative. That shows, doesn't it?

Yesterday we made our annual trip to Birdsacre to see the pink lady slipper orchids. Hundreds of blooms are established along the wooded trails lacing this remnant of forest on the edge of Ellsworth. Well worth scheduling some time after all that shopping...