Summer Sensations- Plants Thriving in the Heat

 

While I regularly wilt in the recent weeks of high heat and humidity, plants and flowers outside our house have never looked better. They are stimulated by what many humans find oppressive. Lots of rain in recent days has helped them too.  

Our many sago palms are in full glory. July and August seem to be their time to shine, though look consistently good year-round. 

These two sago palms are new to our yard, as is the bigger one below. Neighbors did some landscaping work and decided to dig them up and not keep them. They posted on our neighborhood Facebook site that they were free to whoever wanted the trio, and I snatched them up. I replanted the two small ones in a pine straw bed in front of our house and put the large one in the back. Hopefully they will flourish in these new digs. Pun intended. 

Dog Days of Summer Best Spent at the Beach!

 

When it’s the dog days of summer, the beach is the place to be!  This pair of pooches would probably agree. 

Heat indexes have been in the triple digits for several weeks now. Relief and relaxation can be found at the beach.  

Sullivan’s Island at around noon on Sunday, Aug. 9, had lots of open sand for visitors. It was low tide and just perfect conditions, not too crowded, warm, or windy. 

We kept our eye on these dark clouds to the southeast. Fortunately, the rain stayed away. Partly cloudy skies were fine during the three hours we spent near the old Sand Dunes Beach Club. 

Traffic on the water was on the quiet side until the end of our stay when this long red ship steamed out of Charleston Harbor.

Birds of New England- Atlantic Puffins, Common Eiders, Black Guillemots, Great Black-backed Gulls, Bald Eagles and More!

 

(Note: This post is a follow-up to my July 29 post "New England Vacation- Fireworks, Witches, Lighthouses, Puffins and More!")

During our July weeklong tour of coastal New England, we saw many references to Puffins. Puffins are described as “charismatic small seabirds” found in the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. They spend most of their lives at sea and come ashore to breed in large colonies on cliffs or islands. Their unique color combination earned nicknames such as “clowns of the sea” and “sea parrots.”

In this post, I’ll share my photographs of Atlantic Puffins and 16 other bird species I saw along the New England coast. I scored seven “lifer” birds, ones I had never seen before. 

An Atlantic Puffin model is in front of a gift shop next to the West Street Hotel in Bar Harbor, Maine, where we stayed two nights. Puffins actually have orange feet. Maybe the color faded on this figure. 

Puffins, of course, are much smaller than this. They are about the size of crows. 

Boothbay, Maine, where we visited a few days before Bar Harbor, offers boat tours to an Atlantic Puffin colony. The birds nest on Eastern Egg Rock, a small island about five miles offshore in Muscongus Bay. 

Puffin souvenirs are available at shops along the northeast coastline. This is one that I bought in Bar Harbor. 

I also came home with a shirt featuring an Atlantic Puffin. I bought this at a Boothbay Harbor shop.