With my granddaughter in camp all day, I've been able to do at least a bit of trekking, and my venue, for the past few mornings, has been a power line cut near Ashaway. I've written about this area before—I often stop here to check out the nesting Ospreys—but I haven't really explored it in any detail. As is often the case, this open area is a kind of oasis, and it's alive with songbirds, especially Prairie Warblers, which  greeted me with their ascending trills. There's also Butterfly Weed, abundant odonates, and numerous intriguing shrubbery and wildflowers. My favorite critter, however, was this Carpenter Bee—by its dark face, I'd call it a female—that I noticed starting to excavate a nest hole in an old log. These non-social bumblebee-like hymenopterans give themselves away as non-Bombus by their lack of abdominal "hair"; it's probably our common species, Xylocopa virginica.