Sometimes its not that good of a defense. I was driving up the road to my house at night---there was a possum at the side of the road and then I lost sight of it. I stopped, honked and sat there a while, worried it was on road and I was trying to get it to run off. Couldn't see it, so I VERY slowly went forward and my tires went THUMP, THUMP. Traumatized my girl.....
Well, a good defense if you aren't trying to play possum with a car. We see a lot of dead possums on the road around here. They are nocturnal and move around more at night which is not good especially on a highway..
Same here. My dad loved bees and they reciprocated. I can barely keep them alive so I’ve given up. Wild colonies are rare around here. Too much disease and pests and pesticides.
I call them jumping spiders. I don’t know if that’s technically correct. Just those dark grey or black hairy spiders that are common here. Maybe someone who knows spiders can help us out if I’m wrong. I’m ignorant when it comes to spiders.
Beautiful. She comes in colors everywhere She combs her hair She's like a rainbow Coming colors in the air Oh, everywhere She comes in colors
We found a swarm in an oak tree in our yard. We contacted a beekeeper that came and collected them. Poor guy got bit several times. I love to see any pollinators visiting the plants and gardens. They are busy now on the wild flowers we planted. Butterflies, and bees are always welcome. Strange thing this season we usually have a lot of carpenter bees around and they haven't been around at all this season or rather not that I have noticed. They do a service of pollinating as well as driving holes in untreated wood...lol. Maybe they have been a victim of pesticides or disease. Sad the wrong insects are getting killed or diseased.
The painted buntings are beautiful and really shy. They are also territorial. Just this year they chased away a strange bird that came to the feeders. Before I could get the camera the buntings were chasing him away. He would have been a good bird to photograph.
We have had a shortage of pollinators since I gave up keeping bees. The neighbor has some honeybees a mile away but there is usually too much other foraging available closer to their hive so they seldom make it to our garden. I used to watch carpenter bees work for hours as a kid in Colorado. I never see any here in Nebraska. I hope yours aren’t dead. A fun useless bit of knowledge I picked up from my dad. Honeybees are not good pollinators for alfalfa. Carpenter bees are better. When a pollinator attempts to get nectar from an Alfalfa bloom, the alfalfa bloom has a trigger that is activated that makes a structure come down and smack the pollinator in the head to make sure the pollinator gets pollen on it to transfer to the next blossoms. The honeybee dislikes being knocked in the head, so quickly learns how to get the nectar without triggering the head knocker. So it steals nectar without acting as an effective pollinator. The leaf cutter or carpenter bee is either dumber or less agile or something and never learns to avoid the head smack. Maybe they like it. LOL
Being territorial reminds me of the mockingbirds. Atticus Finch said mockingbirds don't do one thing bad. All they do is sing their hearts out. The mockingbirds around here are quite aggressive, territorial, and mean towards the smaller birds.
The mocking birds we have are like the police. They watch out for other birds, I have seen them attack cats if the cat is near another birds nest. They will also chase other predator birds if they come near a nest. Although I saw a hawk swoop down and take some babies out of a mockingbirds nest. It was a bit upsetting to see.. The hawk must have known the Mama bird was looking for food and not near the nest. Hawks always have an advantage they can see at a great distance. He was probably watching the nest for awhile.
We have some hawks around here also, but they don't hang around long. There are lots of feral cats here too. I saw they were hiding under some shrubs until a bird got close to them. Put some netting down around the base of the shrubs. Both the hawks and mockingbirds seem to favor more open areas. I see the mockingbirds all the time in the hay fields, but they mostly only come by here in the early spring. Hawks are not terribly common. They just seem to drop out of bigger trees and grab something to munch on, leaving only a few feathers behind. I tried attracting butterflies, but that's all new to me. Need to do some homework. Loved those photos.
So far no carpenter bees or not like they have been in the past. They were always plentiful but not this year. I don't know if it has been a change in the type of crops that are planted or pesticides. Where there were peanuts planted it is now hay. I still have cosmos planted so there is hope. I took this photo last year.
Your photos are so awesome. I just keep staring at them. The colors are intense. Thanks for sharing. A couple of years ago, I got a bag of wild flower seeds. Big mix for big areas. I put about half of it down and gave the rest to a neighbor. Not much happened except that I got a few sunflowers and some ox-eye daisies. The only things that came back the next year were the daisies. Got a bunch this year, but they are tall and falling over. I don't see many butterflies in the area, but we do have tons of carpenter bees.
I can't take credit for my picture they are a product of the camera I use. My husband bought me a great camera and it takes beautiful pictures. He kept watching me go by and look at the camera so he bought it for me. On the wildflowers you have to keep working at them. I worked for about three years to get a decent plot going. I have quite a few repeats and I didn't sow any new seeds. The plants this year are from past sowings.
Your husband is a good man. Tell him I said thanks for making it possible for me to see those images. I'm not sure I can keep up with the wild flowers. I recently noticed that I had some weediness in that general area, so I started to clean it up. What a fiasco. There was bermuda grass growing under some of the creeping juniper ground cover that had been there for years. I've occasionally pulled a few handfuls of the grass out of there, but this year it went crazy. Long story short, the bermuda grass had those nasty rhizomes growing well beneath the surface. I tried pulling, but they kept breaking off. That means they're coming back. Now I have a big bald spot and I'm digging it all up to get those roots. So, maybe I can post a beautiful picture of some sun-baked dirt...
The end results are always worth the effort. When you get your garden started it will be worth all the aggravation.
We're in a really dry spell again. Hard to keep the plants looking good. I've never really paid much attention to the art of taking pictures, but I've managed to capture what I could with an iPhone. It's all a grand learning experience. I do like to play with light and how the light lays down on the landscape. There is so much more to that than I ever used to see. This isn't about the light, but some of the wild flowers that have been reseeding in my yard. They came out pretty heavy, but with this dry weather, they just keep falling over. But I think you're right that it is worth the effort. Never cared for this stuff when I was younger, so now there is a big learning curve.
This is from a trip to Arizona a few years ago. The sky went from blue to orange so fast. I imagine anyone who's been out there has a bunch of those orange sky photos.