It's a bird! It's a bee!! It's a... moth???

I saw this little guy hovering around my phlox last week. My first thought was "oh, a hummingbird!" It was just about the right size and shape, and it was certainly flying like one. I ran and grabbed a camera.

Then, I noticed the antennae. After that, I did a leg count. Six of them. Okay, so that isn't a hummingbird. It was brown and yellow, but WAY to big to be any sort of bee. Some internet searching revealed that what I had was a Hawk Moth, a pair of them, actually, even though I managed to photograph only one of them.




My garden project while we were in the country last week was to plant some coneflowers and coreopsis. BF managed to snap this "work in progress" photo. I've never been a huge fan of how coneflowers look, but this year I kept noticing them in other people's gardens and I realized that they're really quite pretty when paned with other flowers. Please excuse the posts on the porch-- they don't look too hot now, but they will be painted when the weather cools.



The added bonus with the coneflowers is that they will provide seeds for this little guy and his feathered friends during the colder months.