First, the Wildflowers: Honeysuckle, Arnica and More

When I hit the road, a lot of the time I'll take little detours just because...this morning I went partway down the 5 mile side road to Silver City, stopping at a wayside park in a gulch to look around. I discovered one Tatarian honeysuckle shrub, my first sighting. It's an escaped cultivated flower.

I found more blue columbine today, in the same area off the road through Vanocker Canyon as I found my birds (below).

The meadow sage is another escaped cultivated flower, and another on my to-find list! It's from the mint family, the only of several mints in the Black Hills that I had not found yet. There was a whole bunch of it growing along someone's dirt road in N Vanocker Canyon.

I'd given up on finding the heartleaf arnica where I saw just two or three last year...they're only occasional, not abundant by any means. I found a handful in a spot on a county road out of Vanocker Canyon when I stopped to look at something else.

Aww look, the ox-eye daisy is blooming! So far this year, Vanocker Canyon is the only place I've seen the daisy, at the north end.