Ordinary Magic: Le Spectre d'une fleur morte

We've got ants. Well, I suspect they have always been with us. Though in the last month or so they've been with us a lot more than we welcome them to. Luckily, though, booming ant population also means plenty of food for formerly starving ant-eating creatures... like spiders.

 So, aside from having to make sure that there are no food scrapes left around for ants to find (or to compel them to redouble their ongoing invasion efforts of the cupboard and kitchen area), we are also regularly walking into spider webs of varying degrees of invisibility. There are some good sides to that, of course. 


How else can dead flower still be dancing in the wind, detached from its old branch, long after its natural demise?


The increase in the number of spiders and other ant-eating bugs also means the increase in the number of the birds that eat those bugs. I've seen more exotic birds in the wild in the last few weeks than I have in a long time. This American kestrel has been hanging out on the next door neighbor's roof almost every morning. 

He is a rather cool bloke (blue wings mark him as a male. Female kestrels have reddish rufus color wings). I think I also ran into him walking home a couple of weeks ago. He came gliding out of the park nearby and landed on the top of a lamppost and just perched there to people watch. I am endlessly aggrieved that my camera doesn't zoom well enough to have captured a good clean shot of him yet. One of these days!!!