June walk by the pond, sunday morning before it gets too hot

I don't do well in heat, so I took a walk this morning before the sun got too hot, along Plainsboro Pond.  Happy people, dogs, birdsong everywhere, lovely time walking.

Before the entrance to the one-time island, a couple of bluebird boxes, currently occupied by noisy families of house sparrows.  I used to tend bluebird boxes in another park, and learned they're put in twos like this so that interlopers, usually barnswallows, in fact, take one and tend to leave one for the bluebirds.  Sparrows have no such sharing ideas, evidently.  

I could hear their young shouting away inside the box, not old enough even to look out yet.  The cold spring must have delayed a lot of breeding, since I have young birds all over at home, still being fed, pretty late for them, and not the second brood either.

This is how you cross into the park, which used to be an island, until they built this footbridge to connect to the mainland (!)

waterlilies on the pond.  a second before this, I saw a large snapping turtle submerge

Wild roses everywhere

Mosses underfoot and shadows of the foliage falling on them

Kittenbird in tree studying me, too young to be worried

More wild roses and grapevines here and there

The wild grapevines were a happy discovery today, which I explain about here

If anyone's interested in knowing how to use them for drawing, let me know, and I'll tell you more than you wanted to know...