Flashback to June flowers

Have you been missing my wildflower posts from Scotts Bluff National Monument? I’ve been missing my hikes up the bluff. I’ve got excuses, of course. (Out of town, too busy, schedule changed, trail was closed due to rock slides, etc.) But now I’m just getting to downright procrastination on the posting.

Here are some images I took back on June 23. Many of the flowers can probably still be found out there.

The prickly poppy – one of my favorites.

Plains sunflower

The platte thistle – this one’s a native plant, and important for pollinator species, judging by the number of insects I often see on the flowers.

Not sure what this one is, but it’s got a beetle on it.

This Little Brown Jobber landed on a dried yucca spike near me. I’m not so good at identifying LBJs. Lark sparrow, perhaps?

A late-blooming large-flowered townsendia.

Here’s an out-of-focus photo of a clustered cancer-root bloom. It’s a parasitic plant that lacks its own chlorophyll.

A folded prickly pear blossom, ready to unfurl as the day warms up.

There’s an opened bloom!

Scarlet globe mallow

There were just oodles of spiderwort. Must be a good year for them.

As opposed to the yucca. Not a particularly spectacular year for yucca blooms. But this ladybug looked handsome on a prior season’s yucca spike.

I’ll slip in one more insect photo here – a bee assassin. They don’t just eat bees. They’ll eat pretty much anything they can catch.

Here’s a view from the Monument I don’t often see. On this day, I hiked all the trails one top of the Monument, when usually I would just hike the Saddle Rock Trail up and then down again. I was in search of something that I, alas, did not find.

Here is a photo that my friend Rick Myers had shared just a couple of days before, taken at the Monument, which led to my fruitless search that day. I had no idea there were barrel cacti up there! Maybe one day I will find it!

Copyright 2015 by Katie Bradshaw, except barrel cactus image by Rick Myers