A brief outing to the top of Black Mountain yielded many visual treats:the diminutive
cow wheat with yellow-tipped white trumpets; wintergreen with its dainty white bells; bristly sarsparilla still had a few flowers that hadn't morphed into one-inch balls of seeds (pictured);shinleaf pyrola; and one-flowered pyrola (or wintergreen, depending on which book I use). The tasty treat, of course, was a scant handful of sun-warm tiny blueberries. We left the rest to the birds whose scolding made us feel guilty about taking anything of theirs. Only two individual blooms of mountain laurel remained to be found on this last weekend of June when we have been accustomed to finding it at its peak. The day was capped by seeing a barred owl sitting on a snag just 10 feet into the woods nearly at dusk.