Honeysuckle and roses, emerald tigers

Out to the Woods at 1:00 today; in via the SW Gate.. a soft suffused sweet early summer smell of the Japanese honeysuckle and white multiflora rose there. Up the main SW trail, the previous standing water was completely gone and the trail underfoot dry or drying. I stepped over the big bur oak tilted across the trail. The tops of the branches of the big tree are producing small green leaves. I hope the tree survives..although it looks unlikely.
North and east is now one large sunny light gap where the oak's canopy once blocked the sun. Beyond the oak, the forest floor was littered with ten thousand young pairs of green rounded cotyledons, just beginning growth. Profligate reproduction.. all the same species..but what? Not the green ash cotyledons abundant last year with elongate green leaves. The green ash this week dropped here and there clusters of green seeds..or they were torn from the trees by winds.
A hundred meters in, I disturbed a herd of five or more deer as they made their way briskly eastward along the south border of the sedges.I followed slowly behind them and saw them again before they moved off north. Along the shaded path one red-spotted purple flew a short distance away. South and east, the green "bath tub ring" of young woody stems, and leafy shrubs still defined a sharp border between where the previous flood had stood and the higher ground with surviving green understory.
The small deepest pool by the young elm was completely dry. The aquatic life there had either returned north to permanent water or had died and likely been consumed by foraging raccoons whose tracks were along the edge.
Returning, I took the southward path past the big hollow log. Lying on the forest floor a beautiful white catalpa flower caught my eye. The white ruffled lip of the flower tube decorated with maroon and yellow dots of color. I looked up to find the good sized catalpa standing near the hollow log.
Along the south boundary trail out to the G zero post exit the Woods were filled with the roaring of bulldozers, trucks and the big earth mover; moving clay from one location to another; preparing for the new trash station.
I left the Woods and drove to the NE Gate off Jenkins. I stepped through the gate and walked along the newly cleared path in the dappled shade. All the way down to the Elm Bridge and across to Fence Corner on the E-W Fence Line trail. There, inhabiting a small patch of sunlight was a bright living emerald. A brilliant green tiger beetle Cicindela sexgutata? It moved a short few inches, not leaving the light but checking potential prey, small gray brown flies touching down for a second in light. The beetle likely could have taken one of several. What was it waiting for..just the right choice species? Did it recognize the flies it did not pursue and know they would not be tasty? For a brief interlude that sun patch was the tiger beetle's world and it did not stray beyond the border out to the shadow.
Returning eastward along the E-W trail at the big pecan blow down there was a larger active light gap with another bright green tiger and four widow skimmer Libellua lydia dragonflies.. one with the chalky white male pruinosus on the abdomen and three with the females' extra brown patches on the wings. Two last gems on my outing, two more emerald tiger beetles on the open path through the cedars where the poison ivy was cleared away in a patch of sun.
Now at 5 PM remembering with the first tornado clouds of summer moving across the campus and rain flying in driven diagonal streaks from the southwest.

Yesterday Russell and Sesough found box turtle up by the old pipe south of the big walnut. They fed it a Duchesnea indian strawberry west of the oak bridge. Most of the Woods paths are mowed. There was knee to thigh high thick green grass by the fallen pecan at the north end of the two pecan trail.