Flying Things

Just a quick post today with some photos.  My large sage bush in the yard is in full bloom and it's really popular:





This is a snowberry clearwing moth.  It moves like a hummingbird and is colored much like the wood bees.  These are about 1 3/4 to 2 inches long.  They never stop moving so it was difficult to get any kind of good shot of them. This year is the first I have seen this moth.  It's also known as a hummingbird moth or a bee moth.  The official name is Hemaris diffinis.





This big bee on the right is a wood, or carpenter, bee.  I'm not sure what the little red one is, but it looks like some kind of bee.






I don't know what kind of caterpillar this is.  He sure didn't know what he was getting into when he crawled up the stem in the middle of the sage.  






This small unknown type bee is about the size of a honey bee.  It's black with some green iridescence on the abdomen. 





I'm not sure what this is.  It looks like a wood bee, but is much smaller, just a little bigger than a honeybee.  





This monarch butterfly visited the bush several times.





This moth visited the sage, then rested on the redbud.





Jazz was a little interested in the moths.

The Dangerous Dark

I walk around outside my house all the time in the dark.  If the neighbors could see me I know they'd think I'm insane because most of the time I have one hand up in front of my face as I'm walking.  This is why:



I don't know the name of these spiders, but they are fat brown squatty looking things that build a new web every night. They have nice webs and it's kind of impressive that they do all that work every day. They like to hang their webs out in the middle of an open space where you never expect a spider could put a web. They're sneaky that way. Sometimes the anchor lines are ten feet long.  They almost always hang them with the center about 5 feet above the ground which is face level for me.

Many times I have wrapped one of the webs around my head.  I'm pretty sure people in the next county hear me screaming when this happens, even though I scream with my teeth clenched just in case something wants to run in. I'm not fond of spiders and I'm less fond of the webs actually touching me.  One good thing I can say about these spiders is that they run up one of the support lines when something big walks through the web.  I appreciate them not running around on my face, although it doesn't stop the screaming.

This spider hung her web right above my car hood.  I had a nice shot lined up with my cell phone when Scrappy jumped up on the hood and started walking into the web.  You can see the spider is headed for a support line.  Half a second earlier it was smack in the middle of the web.

This time of year I also have a flashlight.  That's because I don't want to step on one of these:



Click on the photo to go to my flickr page and see it full size.  This is a copperhead snake. I was on the way out to my small gold fish pond one night a few years ago and saw him next to the sidewalk. I was checking the pond for snakes. There wasn't a snake in the pond but there was a huge spider eating one of the fish.

Copperheads are really hard to see in the leaves like this.  When they are coiled up in the leaves their skin makes a rosette pattern. A few nights ago I caught Scrappy and Pawlie playing with one. I heard a crack and Scrappy jumped up about two feet and back about three.  The crack was the snake striking.  Fortunately, Scrappy wasn't bitten.  I called the cats over to me and looked for what they'd been after.  It took several minutes for me to find the snake.  I didn't see it until it started to move slowly away.  

So if you see me walking around the yard at night with one hand up in front of my face, looking at the ground with a flashlight you'll know...I can explain that. 

Summer Goodness

Here are a few photos from around the house and family this spring and summer.

Black swallowtails aren't nearly as shy as their tiger swallowtail cousins.



I did get some shots of a tiger swallowtail.

There were three family weddings this spring:

My niece Angela and Suhail married in New York.

My niece Sarah and Chris married in Cancun, Mexico.

And their mother Mary married Bobby in Texas after parachuting to the venue.



My nephew Daniel graduated from high school. Here my father helps him tie his tie.

I think Dad's wondering if someone who can't tie a tie is ready to graduate.




We had the nosebleed seats.



Here he is afterwards with my parents.



The grand finale to the graduation:



Back home the garden is doing better than ever.



The Virginia Creeper leaves have already turned.




That's all for today!

Dragonflies and Cats

There's a huge dragonfly that has been hanging around my small backyard goldfish pond. I went out with my camera and got some pics.




I had to wait a long time for him (her?) to land on this flower right in front of me.

Meanwhile....



Scrappy made this difficult.




Ouch!




I did get some good shots though, IMHO.




Here's one of the water lily. It's getting ready to put on several more blooms, hopefully all at once, so I'll be shooting more of it.




I have a lot of news so stay tuned for more frequent posts.

As always, more pics and better detail at my flickr account. Just click on the pics.

Spring into Summer

One of my favorite things is taking nature pictures, particularly flowers and insects.





This is a cactus flower that I shot in the Lake Belton area of central Texas. I love the semi-translucence of the petals.



These twisted cedars are from the same area.



A robin sat these eggs at my friend Billye's house, but they never hatched.



Black-eyed Susan flowers on my parent's farm.



I had some good roses this year.



Some visitors to the garden.



Lots of colorful flowers in the garden with insects. This little orange fly below is about 1/4 inch long. Click the photo to go to Flickr and view a detail shot.



More visitors.









And finally a favorite flower:

Raccoons, Snakes, and Adventures in the Garden

Every year I (mostly successfully) grow some tomatoes and a few other things in our garden. The garden consists of some raised beds at the edge of our yard along the road. Our yard is mostly trees, so only the edges near the road get enough sun.

One bed is a permanent bee, hummingbird, butterfly garden. This year I also have two beds of tomatoes with a few hot banana pepper plants, and a bed of zucchini. I used to plant snow peas but the grasshoppers cured me of that. One year they ate the pea plants down to nothing in about two hours. There were so many grasshoppers on each plant that they flattened them down to the ground while they munched away.



I took these photos a while back so everything is lots bigger now.




You can't even see the zucchini bed now.




Last night some raccoons raided the tomato beds and generally made a mess while ruining several large tomatoes. These are likely the culprits. Mom raccoon brought them up in the middle of the day to munch on the cat food.



Scrappy isn't nearly as afraid of them as he should be.



I got some repellent spray and treated the wood on the beds with it. Hopefully that will work.

Stefan and I found this fellow in the yard and relocated him to the woods before Scrappy found him. He's a ringneck snake and was about ten inches long. He's in a yellow trash can which was the handiest thing to capture him in.



Our turtle is back. I can tell he's the same one that's been around in previous years because of the scar on his shell. Here's he's escaping with some cat food in his mouth.



Here's Scrappy and the turtle in 2006. Note the turtle had cat food in his mouth that time, too.



I've also had two very large snakes in the gold fish pond. I knew something was up because the fish weren't their usual happy, come-feed-me, selves. And then some of them disappeared.


The first snake was a 4.5 foot cottonmouth water moccasin. Unlike many water moccasins he wasn't territorial and wasn't aggressive toward me. He cleverly hid in a fold in the pond liner. My plan was to chase him around the pond so he would leave on his own. Mr. Snake foiled this plan by swimming into my net when I poked at him. I wasn't really expecting to catch him and wasn't prepared. The snake couldn't figure out how to get out of the net. I couldn't figure out how to get hold of anything to kill him with without him escaping.

I yelled for Stefan to bring a hoe. Obviously Stefan's practical education has been lacking because he couldn't figure out which tool was a hoe. Finally he brought me a four tined hard rake. I supposed if you could manage to hit a snake with one of the tines you could kill it, but hitting it would be a problem.

I carried the snake up the road to the big pond and let him go. Probably there are three dozen more just like him there. A few days later another big one got in the pond. Hubby was home this time and he shot it. I couldn't tell if it was a water moccasin or one of the look-alikes, but it was a shorter snake.

Click on any of the photos to go to my flickr page to see the photos in more detail.

Photo Journal

Winter is ending.



The ice has melted.



The bulbs in the backyard are blooming....



as well as the rosemary by the drive.



Ralph and Pawlie are napping. Almost asleep:



Until the flash:



I love their identical expressions.

Guess who Pawlie Newman is named for?



Sugar Baby is sleeping in her favorite spot.



In the morning I spot the neighbor's geese and guineas venturing out into the yards.




Scrappy, Sugar Baby and Pawlie see them too.



It's difficult to sneak up on the geese with the cats tagging along but I manage a shot of these two goosestepping geese.



Altogether it's a good day.