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In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.


Daisies are one of the flowers growing in our yard that came with the house. They’ve been eagerly growing in numbers over the last four years around the yard, but I don’t much mind as the syrphid flies seem to really like the flowers. Today I spent some time watching all the insects visiting the flat, yellow composite flowers. There were a number of different syrphid, or hover flies, of many sizes. Shiny green flies also regularly visited as did a few carpet beetles, honey bees and one Blood-red Lady Beetle. One insect patrolled the top layer of flowers, chasing off anything it came across, but whether it was a Honey Bee or syrphid fly, I couldn’t say.

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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

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