A potter wasp mama puts the final touches on her vessel-like clay nest, and lays an egg inside. These beneficial insect ceramicists are not aggressive and can help protect nearby plants from caterpillar damage. So if you see a tiny pot appear unexpectedly in your garden, you might want to leave it be!
A robber fly celebrates a successful heist by slurping out the liquefied innards of its ambushed prey.
Mystery of the Alien-Pod
A couple of weeks ago, Seán found a mysterious, silvery pod on the ground beside the house, about the size of a lime. It appeared to have been there for a while, as it was very light and seemed dried out. We took our guesses: was it a plant-pod? Some kind of egg sac? I thought it might be an owl-pellet, due to it's hairy outside texture, shape and size. We decided to lovingly refer to it as the “alien pod”:
There was only one thing to do in order to solve the mystery – cut it open:
Little Paintings: Robin in the Bath
Seán and I have recently been scheming new ways to creatively capture scenes around the Hill, so I halved some card-paper offcuts I got from an art store. Now we have a nice stack of 3x3.5'' pieces that we're gradually making into tiny paintings.
One of my first attempts is a common sight around here: a fluffed-up, staring robin soaking in the bath:
A tiny metallic green cuckoo wasp timidly peeks out of a habitat log hole, taking in the world beyond through its periscopic antennae.
Pollinator Portraits: Skip and Sweat 
Due to the current heat-spells in our region, we haven't been able to spend as much time as we'd like observing who's been buzzing and fluttering around our flowers during this year's Pollinator Week. Instead, we took to the shade and comfort of our workshop to continue our Little Paintings series. We each chose a species that caught our fancy and spent some quality time interpreting their likenesses and doing some deeper research into their lives & habits.
Here's a peek at our colour-testing sheets for the portraits— read on to see the results... 🌼 🐝- – -
Pollinator Week: Got Nectar?
Looks like someone's had a busy day of pollinating while filling up on the sweet stuff!
🎵 MeadowMakers' Anthem 🌱
Hi friends, happy spring!! 🌱 🌼 🍀 🌦
Last year I took part in a really great native plant growing workshop series program called MeadowMakers, hosted by Satinflower Nurseries and Pollinator Partnership Canada.
For this year's welcome event they invited any alumni to present something about their experience in some creative way to the current participants. I had been mulling it over here and there but had so much going on last month that I didn't have much time to spend on it... However, during a power outage one day I got a jolt of inspiration and managed to scrape together a little song, kind of anthem-like, which you can hear below:
Bewick's Bird Card + Farewell-to-Spring 
Wren by Seán, environment by Kate
We're so happy and honoured to have had the opportunity to join a community of artists and naturalists from around our region once again in highlighting 36 of our avian neighbors for the latest set of Art Bird Cards. This was a great opportunity for us to continue honing our digital art skills and we learned a lot in the process of collaborating on this illustration of a Bewick's wren (Thryomanes bewickii)—a year-round resident here atop Humm Hill.