With summer just a weekend away, the earliest berries - salmonberries - are ripe and ready to eat, and the last ones to produce their fruit, Salal, Cranberries and Blackberries, are all in flower.

The Salal flowers, so near to the ground, are sticky with nectar, attracting insects from far and wide to come and pollinate their white bells. 

The Cranberry flowers are also low-growing, but their slender, delicate, blush-pink flowers seem to attract pollinators without resorting to those kind of tricks. 

In the birch trees, flocks of bushtits tsip, tsip from branch to branch, picking off insects and when they find them, berries and seeds. After the hummingbirds, these are the smallest birds in North America and they build one of the most easily recognised nests .  Made of moss, lichen and spiders' webs,  it hangs like a sack, seemingly disproportionate to the size of the bird. 

With the recent spell of hot weather, the pond and the trails are crowded with both dragon and damselflies. The damselflies look like miniature, blue, flying Q-tips, whilst the dragonflies are spectacular in the range of their colours, from the blue of the darners, to the red of the cardinal meadowhawk, and the flash of the skimmers.

Somehow we seem to have missed the one afternoon of blue, dancing fairies that heralds the emergence of the Mayflies.