There’s no real story behind this photo itself – I was sitting on my folding camp stool, watching for bluebirds near an active nest box without much luck. I was bored, and turned my telephoto lens to a nearby buttercup blossom, and grabbed a shot.
I’ve encountered buttercups my whole life; they are a staple summer flower. As a child in New England, they grew on the margins of our lawn, and in roadside ditches, and in the cleared space beneath the powerlines. They grew along the trails, and in the old fields at my grandparent’s house in NY state. I have memories of picking them and holding them under our chins, to see if they reflected yellow against our skin to determine “if we liked butter.”
But I never gave them much thought, even as I was capturing this photo. It wasn’t until I was sharing it here that I thought to identify it, so that I could add it to my online field guide. And I can’t, at least not from this photo alone.
I turns out that there are at least 9 species of buttercup – of the genus ranunculus – in Pennsylvania. Some of them are quite distinct, such as the tall buttercup, or the white water buttercup with its namesake white blossom. But many of the others appear very similar, and identification based on the blossom alone is beyond my skill.
(This is a good note to myself to start taking a second photo of unknown plans, to capture the leaves, stems, and base for later identification.)
So what started as a simple photo of a common plant has turned into a more involved project, and I am already looking forward to returning to this spot in about June to see if I can obtain a more definitive identification and learn specifically which variety of buttercup I encountered.