the little monster

Doesn't this look like some cute little shaggy dog you'd love to pet?
Don't Do It!

This is the furry puss caterpillar of Megalopyge opercularis, the Southern Flannel Moth, and it is considered to be the most venomous caterpillar in the United States.

Must be the season for me to see weird bugs

As I've learned from experience, if a caterpillar is fuzzy, spiky, or begging to be petted, you should avoid it like the plague or be prepared to face Pain. Or as WIRED put it: Never Touch Anything That Looks Like Donald Trump's Hair.


This worm had an interesting brown stripe along its back, which included the tail. Looked like a Mohawk haircut. It was crawling around the withered top of a spider lily in my back yard, perhaps looking for a place to attach itself prior to morph into THIS.

I got a short video of this creature on my phone but forgot & turned it the wrong way.  When I went back outside to redo the video the critter had vanished.  So, apologies for making you turn sideways to view it.

daffydils

From before Valentines Day. It seemed early, but now there are 8 or 10 daffodils blooming.

more yellow birds

American goldfinch - Spinus tristus - Bell County, Texas

It seems most of the winter visitors here are little yellow birds; finches and warblers. I've rarely seen goldfinches in their brightest colors in Texas; by the time they are turning bright gold they're ready to return to their homes in the north. I've seen 3 or 4 individuals foraging together this year.

Goldfinch & Cardinal - Bell County, Texas

The cardinals are here all year. A few days ago I saw four males and four females foraging together in the front yard, so there are at least eight individuals frequenting the feeders.

Winter Bird

Brown Thrasher photo by Dan Pancamo

 I spotted one of these beautiful birds in the back yard this morning. First thing I noticed was how much it resembled a mockingbird. I checked my Sibley bird book, and it was as I suspected, a Brown Thrasher, and in the same family, Mimidae, as the mockingbird. I see on Wikipedia that my house is in the wintering region of the thrasher, so perhaps winter is coming sooner than expected.

It seems the hummingbirds have already deserted us, too, another sign of impending weather changes.

I finally have spider lillies!

Two and a half years ago when I moved 160 miles south from my former home I brought with me some spider lilly bulbs from my old back yard and scattered them around my new home, hoping that they would take hold in at least one spot. Two years went by and I didn't see any spider lillies bloom. I was disappointed. I decided that the soil or climate just wasn't to their liking.

A few days ago I noticed what looked like 3 spider lillies poking up in three different spots in the back yard. Now they're blooming, and there are a few dozen more about to bloom. Sometimes nature just takes longer than we expect it to. I'm so happy to welcome all these "spiders" to my yard.

These flowers should slowly multiply, and get better with each passing year, but I doubt I'll ever have a display like This! Ooh, la la!

sunday wildlife report

I've been finding a lot of small white broken eggshells on my walks lately. I'm pretty sure they come from the nests of white-wing doves. Today I found part of a beautiful blue robin's egg. There was a time when seeing a robin in Texas seemed a rare sight. When I was little my family lived in Seattle, where robins were common, and I missed them when we moved to Texas. Now I see them in many places in North and Central Texas. I used to be sad when I saw a broken eggshell because I thought it had fallen out of the nest, then I found out it's a sign that a baby bird has hatched. The parent bird cleans the nest by throwing away the eggshell. Here's a time lapse of a baby Robin hatching and the adult bird tossing out the eggshell

Yesterday I found a good-size red-eared slider turtle in my neighbor's front yard. Its shell was about ten inches (25 cm) in diameter, so it was at least an adult. It seemed to be going somewhere, and I hope it gets there safely. I would have liked to bring it home with me, but I don't have a pond in my yard. Maybe someday.......

(c) Matthew High, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

I have a couple of Texas spiny lizards living in my back yard. I'm pretty sure one of them lives under the tool shed, but I've seen them often lately either scrambling up the wooden fence or catching bugs in the tallow tree. They will let me get fairly close, within two feet, probably because they can escape so quickly. One of these days I hope to get a good photo of one of them. They are one of my favorite little dinosaurs.

unexpected pinkness

Last fall I planted a packet of wildflower seeds. I was hoping for bluebonnets and paintbrush, but so far what has been most plentiful are the non-native flowers, including these corn poppies. On this cool rainy day they look like luscious lollipops out in the back yard.

invasion of the yellow-rumped warblers

For the second time in a week a small flock of 10-15 of these cute little critters descended on the back yard. Mostly they foraged in the grass or on the bare branches of a chinese tallow tree that has a few seeds still hanging on it. I snapped a few photos and I'm trying to figure out how to attach them to my observation checklist at ebird. I only discovered the site a few months ago; it's a great place to see what kind of birds other people may have spotted in your area.

Tallow Tree

Back in the 1970s when most of the houses in my neighborhood were built there were a lot of Chinese Tallow Trees planted here. They turned out to be a nasty invasive species, and unfortunately there are three of these trees in my yard. Their roots grow on top of the soil which is problematic when trying to use a lawn mower near them and they leave a mess year round. They seem to drop pods, seeds and twigs constantly.  I will say the seed pods do look striking against a blue sky, and now the trees that are dying attract woodpeckers. Here's a Red-bellied woodpecker on my neighbor's dead tree.

Land Slug

This blog seems to have changed into "Fifi's Garden Adventures". I'm spending a lot more time outside gardening & discovering new creatures & I'm too lazy to write about them in a journal. Plus I'd have to lug the laptop into my office, connect to the printer, and print a photo to remind me what I'm writing about. Too much work after working in the yard. (I had the chain saw out one day, the axe another day - dang! it wears me out.)

Couple days back I turned over a rock and found this slug. First one I have seen in many years. We have tons of snails here, and I saw lots of snails at various places I lived in North Texas, but never a slug. When I was a kid in Seattle we saw lots of slugs but not snails. We used to pour salt on them and watch them dissolve. Apparently it's an old tradition in some parts. I didn't salt this one though. I read that some of their deadliest enemies are the larvae of lightning bugs, and there are plenty of those around, so I'll let nature take its course.

morning glories

For a long time I had no luck trying to grow morning glories, but they seem to like the soil in my new back yard. For the second year in a row they've gone bonkers climbing up a trellis I leaned against the fence. They were so aggressive this year I had to clip them out of my neighbor's tree after they crept over to a branch that was hanging too close.  I had hoped to get several shades of blue from a "tri-mix" seed packet as well as some white moonflowers, but only this particular color showed up. I think it's the type called "Grandpa Ott." During the heat of the day the leaves wilt badly and they look pathetic, but the next morning they come out to greet the day. All they need is a bit of water to keep on going.

Sign of fall?

© Deines, Fred. Photographer: Deines, Fred. Content released to the Public Domain

The brightest yellow bird I have ever seen visited my back yard this morning. We get goldfinches, but they're almost always in their drab winter colors. I'm pretty sure the bird I saw was a Yellow Warbler  (Dendroica petechia). I've never seen one before. Information I found online & in my bird books show that yellow warblers are usually seen in Texas only when they're migrating, so I'm hopeful this pretty yellow visitor is a sign that hot temperatures may be on the wane soon. Temperatures are still in the upper nineties, with highs of 98 predicted for the coming week. (sigh)

Hummer Swarm

I'm only about a year late posting this. It was on my flip cam until today. This was shot September 9, 2013, so it's almost time for them to arrive, if they fly this way again. I think most of these were ruby-throated hummingbirds. I hope they come back.

caterpillar season

Hungry caterpillars everywhere on my sunflower! I've been trimming more and more spent flowers from the 7 ft. tall sunflower in the back yard and thinking how life is slowing down after two weeks of temperatures hovering near 100 degrees. And then I spotted the caterpillars. Not just one or two, but dozens of them, voraciously devouring the leaves on the sunflower plant. Usually when I see a lot of caterpillars they are the "bad" kind, but these particular creepycrawlies will turn into a pretty orange and black butterfly called the Border Patch Butterfly (Chlosyne lacinia). It's also called the Sunflower Patch because one of its favorite host plants is the sunflower. I've seen a few of these butterflies, but they have been too fast for me to catch with my camera.

You can see the ragged edge where this caterpillar has been chomping away at a leaf.

This one chews from the underside of the leaf. You can see from these few photos there is quite a lot of variation in the colors of these caterpillars.  Soon these little guys will attach themselves to the undersides of the sunflower leaves and form themselves into chrysalises, if they don't get eaten by the cardinal who seems to have found them. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to see butterflies emerge in a few weeks.

Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light

  -- Eugenio Montale

And life itself exhaling that central breath!

Top: The seed packet said Maximillian Sunflower (Helianthus maximilianii) but none of the pictures I found on the internet look like this. Plant is about 6 feet tall and flowers are about 5 inches wide.

Bottom: A "volunteer" sunflower, planted by birds, with Western Tiger Swallowtail. Probably a Common Sunflower (Helianthus annuus).  Flowers 4 to 4 1/2 inches wide. This plant is about 7 feet tall and has 40-50 blossoms on it, with more on the way.

Charlotte's Web

 

This small argiope spider spun her web in a red rose bush in my backyard.  Google says this is the largest spider most folks in the U.S. will ever see, obviously not written by someone living in tarantula territory. This was a small spider, only about 1.5 inches long including its legs. I learned it is also called "the writing spider" and that its baby spiders disperse on the wind with fine web "parachutes". I suddenly realized this is the spider of Charlotte's Web. Only the female argiopes have this particular pattern and color, and only the females spin such distinctive webs, so I know this is a girl spider, like Charlotte. Maybe she will write me a message one day!

ode to a toad

"That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it."  -  Henry David Thoreau

We had a new visitor on the patio this morning. At first I thought it was a regular Texas Toad, but it seemed it little too yellow in color, so I went a googling.  I found out Texas Toads don't have a stripe down their back, and this one definitely does. It is a Gulf Coast Toad, Bufo valliceps valliceps. Even though we are pretty far inland, it's been so miserably hot & humid lately Bell County might could pass for Houston or Beaumont. I hope the toad stays in our back yard. It's currently taking refuge under the loose end of a bag of potting soil, but I put a broken terra cotta pot upside down nearby in case the toad would like a mini-cave.

See the stripe down the middle of the back and two lesser stripes on the sides above the legs? The other distinguishing trait it the deep "valley" between the toad's eyes.


I'll be listening this evening for toad songs.