happy new year

Maybe I will post more pics here this year just to remind myself of the weird toys I pick up on my daily walks. Just a thought, Not a resolution.

the sphinx

The biggest moth I think I have ever seen was resting against the side of my house yesterday. It stayed there for several hours and was back again this morning. It is a Rustic Sphinx (Manduca rustica).

What is the Sphinx trying to tell me?


 

summer fruit and polka dot pyrex

Red, white and green is one of my favorite summer color food combinations. Think tomatoes, parsley and feta. These grapes and strawberries are about to be drenched in greek yogurt: yum!

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.

persistence

The mums in the backyard got beat down from several big rainstorms during the past week. This squirrel, who has got pretty chubby lately, looks in the pots almost every day. I don't know what he's expecting to find.

I am the Lizard Queen

Spooky Halloween coincidence? Two nights ago I was perusing videos and articles about Jim Morrison and yesterday we found this female Anole Lizard INSIDE the house! I caught her and put her back outside, but she posed prettily for a few photos.

Look at all those colors! What a regal little dinosaur.

Wiki has an article about this Amercian chameleon.