Oh no. They’re not as interesting as spiders.
Downy Woodpecker
Maybe I need to tell Mary to take more photos of birds.
I told you I was running away from home this afternoon! I was walking for 2 or 3 hours, and now my quads are killing me–I’ve been sedentary for too long. I didn’t have much luck finding any interesting spiders, but the bushes are alive with spider food, swarms of gnats and midges, and if you feed them they will come.
As soon as I got home, of course, I find a spider on my garage door. It’s a very small Attulus fasciger, and it has been hunting successfully. That’s a midge of some sort, totally wrecked in the spiders jaws.
Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider
More will be coming. It is that time of year. Hooray!
I haven’t shown off my tarantula, Blue, in a while. They’re doing well, having a hearty breakfast.
Getting bigger, too.
Of course it did. Baleen whales don’t have teeth to chew him up, and their throats are too narrow to swallow him whole, so this kayaker just had a brief, fun little trip to tell his friends about.
My wife’s flower patch:
My wife has been keeping an eye on a chrysalis on the neighbor’s garage, and this morning it looked like this:
Empty! Where did the former resident go? It was stretching and warming itself up on a twig down below.
We have to celebrate every single monarch that emerges, because they’ve become too uncommon nowadays.
You know, I was stung by a yellowjacket the other day, when all I’d done was try to visit their nest and say hello. It still hurts a little bit, ow ow ow, have pity on me, etc.
Today my wife tells me she put out a water dish for them, in case they were thirsty.
Whose side is she on, anyway?
I told you I’d try to get better pictures of that nest in my yard.
I learned my lesson. I used 8 feet of PVC pipe to increase my reach. Next time, 20 feet.
My front yard is a bit of a scary place — it’s been taken over by cranky stinging insects. Here’s a wasp that has a nest in my front door.
Scarier still, though, is this small cavern that has been excavated in my lawn, and is full of buzzing frantically busy creatures that I could not photograph well, because they were moving so fast to complain about my existence. It might be a swarm of Karens.
I’ve mentioned that I have an endoscopic camera. Anyone want to double-dog-dare me to probe deeply into that mysterious tunnel full of alien life-forms? I’ll do it. I’m not a-skeered.
Today, you get a blazing star against a backdrop of milkweed.
