a place where nature, photography and writing meet
I’m still in the middle of some office work, but wanted to share a couple of nice things heard and seen while out on my morning walk with Sabrina. The first is a little .mp4 movie clip (approx. 1.1MB) of a male Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) which I heard drumming on a very dried out […]
Pandora Sphinx – Eumorpha pandorus In my last post on nature photography, Ruth commented: I seldom see unusual animals, insects or birds, but I would like to be able to recognize the signs that they were there, whether by identifying feeding habits, scat, trails, etc. I likely would see more if I knew how to […]
Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) butterfly. Click on image for larger view. Those of you who followed last summer’s posts about my project to raise Monarch caterpillars, and tag and release butterflies, might remember that on August 11, during one of my insect walks around the farm, I found the caterpillar of a Black Swallowtail (Papilio […]
Last Friday, while out doing a bit of work in the garden, I noticed a Monarch butterfly resting on a Milkweed leaf nearby. I moved in closer to take a look, and sure enough, it was one of the butterflies that I had tagged the previous day. It seems that the little fellow wasn’t quite […]
Yesterday was something of a ‘big day’ around here. I’ve been very busy this week, so haven’t had time to pay much attention to the Monarch caterpillars and chrysalises, but during one pass through the dining room, I glanced at the tabletop and found 3 butterflies in the process of eclosing. Two of them were […]
Yes,…. another caterpillar post. I hope this isn’t becoming too boring for others, but I find the cat behaviour quite interesting and thought that others might share the same sentiment. But first, I’ll begin with a Monarch progress report: We’re now down to about 8 caterpillars of various sizes. I’d actually vowed not to bring […]
If you’ve been reading along through the Monarch caterpillar rearing, and the chrysalises, and butterfly eclosings, you’ll know that we’ve been waiting for the arrival of tags from MonarchWatch.org. We’ve actually released 4 untagged butterflies so far (2 females and 2 males) as they began eclosing a couple of weeks ago. However, the tags arrived […]