Some Common Alaska Wildflowers and Bugs

We walked around  Byers Lake in Denali State Park - partway on Saturday and all the way (4.8 miles according to the sign) on Sunday.  Here are some of the flowers and bugs we saw.

Most of these are pretty common Alaskan flowers, but a couple I'm not 100% sure of.  This one is a wild rose. 

Dogwood.

Unidentified moth on what I think is a Labrador tea flower

Blue bells.

This clear water showing the rocks and then the reeds is at the south end of Byers Lake from the bridge as the lake drains into a creek. 

These yellow flowers always trick me.  Is it a cinquefoil?  A butter cup?  I don't know.  And I didn't get pictures of the other parts that might help with the identification.  What am I even trying to do here?  Plant identification isn't my main goal, but rather to take pictures that cause me (and maybe others) to look more closely at things we tend to rush by without really looking.  Close ups of things we generally fail to see, so that we see them in a new light.  It all fits in with the basic theme here of how we know what we know. 

This is cow parsnip just opening.  It's probably about the size of a cauliflower head. 

And a watermelon berry flower.  Later the berry, which tastes a bit like watermelon, will also hang down like this. 

We see a lot of insects on the flowers which reminds me that they all work together - the bee getting food and then helping to pollinate the flowers.  This bee is on cow parsnip flowers. 

A wild geranium.

Another bee in a wild geranium.

And I just can't resist the iris - all painted up so outrageously.

This is a sedge ("sedges have edges") with a collection of raindrops.

Another bee - a different type I think - working on a devil's club flower.  Didn't know bees had hair.  I was using my macro setting, so you can see the bee wasn't at all disturbed by my getting real close.  (Inches away). 

Not exactly a bug or a flower, but this bear scat will fertilize the plants that have the flowers.  And it probably has some plant material in it as well.

There was no shortage of mosquitoes at Byers Lake.

OK, this was back in Anchorage but it seems to fit into this series of pictures.  This is cow parsnip again.  The bud was full of these little black bugs.  I'm assuming that this is where a lot of eggs hatched all at once.  We seem to have different stages of what looks like is going to be the fly like insect below.