Good News, Bad News

Good
I finally found an unbelievably helpful blog post explaining how to use my camera's 4K features. Why the manufacturers don't hire people like Heather to write their instructions and make their instructional videos I'll never know. Nothing in my 400-odd-page manual actually explains anything clearly.
Bad
Heavy tree canopy and a cloudy sky made it impossible for me to practice what I learned.

Good
One Arrowhead Spiketail passed me four times along the now mostly dry creek/runoff bed on the Village Trail. 
Bad
Without sun or water, the Spiketail never slowed down or perched.

Good
On my way up to the elementary school, I just happened to see an amusing green caterpillar resting on the bridge handrail. My first ever Eastern Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar!

Bad
Heavy tree canopy and intermittent sun in all the wrong places make for a lot of awful photographs.

Always Good
I am easily entertained by photowalking.

It's All Good

The thing about walking every day, sometimes at the same spot over a period of days, is that I watch a folding of one event into other without interruption, the way life happens as opposed to an invented narrative. To wit:

Day One
I note several sizable piles of scat at various spots near the small Day Lake Road pond. Not dog poop, not cow patties, not horse droppings, not deer or rabbit pellets, not dog doo-doo, not dark like coyote feces. Plenty of seeds, undigested, size large and splattered in shape. Raccoon maybe? Raccoons? Whoever has left the splatter left it generously.

Day Two
Several Silver-spotted Skippers and one Red Admiral alight on the droppings, teeming with flies, though one skipper in particular seems especially greedy and lingers, spreading himself over as much of the pile as he can, exerting an authority that speaks this is mine! (On the other side of the pond, a Green Heron kaks in distress, bleeding where a leg should be, and I wonder who will eat the bird?)

Day Three
A horde -- five and then six -- of newly minted Eastern Tiger Swallowtails clump themselves on the dung, a hallelujah chorus of hungry Lepidoptera, shaking a St Vitus dance one moment, stilling in meditative prayer the next (stunned like newborns, milk drunk).

Here's the thing: nothing's wasted. The animal or animals who left the scat ate something that lived, digested what or they could,  left the rest, to use it for nourishment, leave their eggs on plants, those emerge in new forms, they feed on plants, . . . .

Anyway, the Lion King was right about that circle of life, and I like watching it.