The Luna Moth Caterpillar

Remember this beautiful Luna Moth? It has a wingspan of 4-5 inches, lives for only a week or so, and has no mouth -- it doesn't feed after it becomes a moth. I'd never seen one before moving out here.



Well, today my husband called me out to see a huge, fat, green caterpillar.



Of course, it turns out to be the caterpillar stage of the Luna Moth.



Here's a shot of it against someone's remarkably ugly foot, just to give you an idea of the size.



Nature is truly remarkable.

What We Saw On Our Evening Walk

My last post was about taking an evening walk with Gus the horse. It's a little difficult to concentrate when we're walking with him, because you have to watch your feet, which is -- oddly enough -- not conducive to good picture-taking.

But I got some pictures. Our native Beautyberries are flourishing. We have them everywhere, and their vibrant pink-purple berry clusters just make me happy.



Other wildflowers are spreading now. I have no idea what this is, with its little yellow flowers, but we have a lot of it.



We also have a pretty purple wildflower that is making this little fellow very happy.



And this enormous fellow is munching away for all he's worth on.....well, we never did figure out what this plant was.



I'm happy that all we have are weeds, so God's creatures can eat to their hearts' content, and we don't have to care.

Lovely...Just Lovely

We had a cool, misty morning today. When I woke up, I couldn't even see the pond for the mist. I stepped out on the deck later to enjoy the unusually cool weather.



I watched my husband feeding the animals, and savored the peace and quiet of the country.



Then I went to go back inside. I immediately walked full-face into a large spider's web. As I stumbled back, clawing at my face to be free of the web, I stepped barefoot on to a damp hairball my cat had evidently spit up during the night. I'm lucky I didn't go careening off the deck at that point.

I actually remember watching my cat groom himself last night and saying to my husband, "That's going to cause a hairball."

Yep.

Identification, Please?

Anyone know what kind of grasshopper this is?



It's the biggest grasshopped I've ever seen, and I've been looking around online but can't find anything that looks like it.

I hate that.

The False Fritillary

We have native passionflower (Maypop) vines down by the pond, and they're the only larval food for the Gulf Fritillary butterfly, so we've been eager to see them. They don't come out until the late summer, so we've just started seeing the caterpillars...



And now we're starting to see the butterflies all over the place. I couldn't get a very good picture because, oddly enough, they won't hold still for me, but the top part of the butterfly is this beautiful bright orange...



...and the bottom side is this cool paper white with silver spots. It looks completely different depending on which side you see.



What I really love about these butterflies, though, is the sense of irony in their name. What's ironic, you ask?

ENature.com: “Although it has silver spots like the true fritillaries, the Gulf Fritillary is not closely related to them.”

What?? Why would you name something a Fritillary, when it's not actually a Fritillary? Or even closely related? I imagine it this way:

Scientist 1: "I know, let's call it the Gulf Fritillary. 'Gulf' because it's been seen flying toward the Gulf of Mexico, and 'Fritillary,' because...well, I don't actually know why."

Scientist 2: "Ha ha ha - I know exactly what you mean."

That's scientists for you....

Wild Grow the Grapes

We've been watching some wild grapes develop down near the pond. I looked them up on the Internet, and they're muscadine grapes, which are said to have been mentioned in accounts by Spanish explorers in the American southeast in the 1500's.



Wikipedia says that muscadine grapes turn bronze when ripe, but that some wild varieties may stay green.



Hmmm, that's going to complicate knowing when they're ready to eat. Of course, the fact that these grapes are -- technically speaking -- in our neighbor's yard complicates it too. Oh, well.



Meanwhile, here's a passion fruit, hanging from one of the many passionflower vines we have down by the pond. So far the only ripe ones we've seen have been picked apart by birds, which is fine.

The Beauty of the Berry

For the past several months, we've been trying to identify a plant that is growing all over down by the pond. It's ironic that we couldn't figure it out, because it's something we actually purchased a few years ago to plant in our suburban yard: American Beautyberry.

We can tell what it is now because there's no mistaking the beautiful berries it produces. Look at the color.



It's a native plant, and the berries are apparently an important food for birds because they last well into the winter. We had bought it for the other house because we saw it on a trip to Jekyll Island, on the Georgia coast, and just had to have those berries. We waited and waited for the berries to develop, and when they did, they were white. We decided that they must turn white before they turn purple, but they never did. We finally read up and found that we had purchased the 'rare white Beautyberry.'

Rare, schmare -- I wanted purple! Well, now I've got lots of them.



I had to show this picture too. We have pokeweed all over. It's poisonous to animals (and humans), and a landscaper told us that people will know we're Yankees if we don't pull it. Well, I'm pretty sure they already know we're Yankees -- that's a little hard to hide around here -- and the berries are edible for birds. Our animals just ignore it, so we're leaving it.

Dancing Butterflies

I've noticed the last couple of days that we have a cloud of little yellow butterflies on a small sand plain where the dumpster used to be.

You can barely see them in the picture below.



I believe they're sulphur butterflies. We have these little clusters of them in several other spots in the yard.



I read that they're sometimes called 'mud puddle butterflies' because they cluster at small mud puddles to sip from them. They're supposed to be getting minerals that way. The ones in this picture all look similar but we have several different kinds of these butterflies, some larger and some more orange than these.



I love how they cluster, and then rise and dance in the air when we pass by. What's also interesting to me is that we have other damp areas of ground in the yard where they don't cluster. I think that if I just knew more about it, I could conclude something about the composition of soil in those areas.

At our previous house, which backed to a pond, I always wondered why we didn't see more butterflies, since there were abundant mud flats there. I suspect it was because all the houses that backed to the pond had lawns, and many of them used herbicides/pesticides.

It always amazes me how little I really know about the world around me.

More Orb Spider

My husband got some more detailed photos of the orb spider, so I thought I'd post one. It's an amazing looking spider.



I zoomed in on it.



I hope I don't dream about that picture.

The Orb Spider

My husband decided to mow a path along the pond this evening, both so we can walk around it more easily and to see if the animals will eat the exposed pasture grass, since they seem to avoid the taller stands of grass.

It was the first time we'd walked along there in a while, and we discovered large numbers of beautiful orb spiders bobbing gently in the breeze in their ornate webs.

I particularly like this picture, with the female orb spider in the middle, a passion fruit growing on the passionflower vine, and the bright orange caterpillar of the Gulf Fritillary butterfly, which feeds exclusively on the passionflower vine.



We've been hoping for some time to see those caterpillars. Here's another shot of the female spider, with the characteristic zig-zag portion of the web. They're supposed to be common spiders, but I'd never seen one before we moved out here, and I've never seen anything like this web. Isn't it amazing?



According to my Internet research, the black-and-yellow argiope, which is this version of the orb spider, eats its web at the end of each day and re-spins it at night. In climates like ours, the female can live up to a couple of years, but the male probably dies after mating. To attract a female, the male plucks gently at the edge of her web. They eat flies, mosquitos, and ants and are considered beneficial to humans.



We would have liked to get closer pictures, but to get these we had to hang precariously out over the pond, and much as I like any spider that eats flies, I don't particularly want to meet them up close and personal....

Danger Lurks

A landscaper came over yesterday evening, and we were talking about whether our front yard was graded properly to prevent moisture from seeping under the house.

He decided to prove it by going under the house. As my husband went to open the hatch door that leads underneath the house, he focused on a spider web, and suddenly realized that there were two black widows in the web. Unfortunately, I didn't get the camera out in time, but the landscaper confirmed the identification before they scampered away. I had never realized that the red spot on the black widow spider belly was so distinct and bright.

The landscaper -- OMG -- went under the house anyway, and a minute later pushed a board out with this on it.



He said it was the black widow's egg sac. Sure enough, when he poked at it, all the little baby spiders went running. All those little specks of dust you see there are baby spiders.

We almost never go under the house, but the builder's nephew had told us that he had killed a bunch of black widows under our deck, where we do go, while the house was being built.

You can probably tell from the alarmed tone of this post that black widow spiders have not featured prominently in my life to date, except in horror stories. I'd prefer that they keep to the story books, frankly, but I was interested to see how blase the landscaper was about them. He said that one year he saw so many that he was thinking of collecting them and taking them to the local hospital so they could milk them for the anti-venom serum.

You can imagine that's going right to the top of my 'to do' list. Yep, I'll be out there each morning creeping around under the house trying to capture little poisonous spiders so that I can save the lives of others. A regular Florence Nightingale, that'll be me.

********

Or maybe I'm just going to declare that entire side of the house off-limits.

Goodbye, Gus

Just a quick note to say that our sweet cat Gus was killed by a car yesterday morning.



We're devastated by his loss. We raised him from a kitten found in a garbage dump, and his zest for life, quirky nature, and attachment to us never ceased to amaze us. He was a very special animal.



I wrote about his beginnings in this post:

http://wannabeinthecountry.blogspot.com/2009/04/its-tough-lifeor-not.html

I'll probably write more about him later, because he deserves to be memorialized, but for now it's just....

Goodbye.

The Bees Were Real...

A while ago I posted about my husband looking up while fishing and seeing a huge swarm of bees..



http://wannabeinthecountry.blogspot.com/2009/05/buzzed.html



Well, today I stopped at a nearby roadside stand because they were advertising local honey. The young girl manning it told me that her family has over 200 hives. Just then, her mother drove up with some more stock. As we were chatting, it occurred to me to mention the bee incident, and ask if by any chance they had a hive near our house.

It turns out that their main beefarm is just down the street from our house, and that one of the hives had swarmed, so it was almost certainly their bees my husband saw.

This is what I love about living in a rural, less populated area. Everything is personal. When we describe where we live, we normally just say, "We bought so-and-so's house." And everyone knows where that is. (She did.) In a more heavily populated county, what would the odds have been of actually meeting the person whose bees flew over our house?

She gave me her card so that I can call her if the bees come by again. I commented that normally you call your neighbor to say, "Hey, your dog is over here again," not "Come get your bees."

I have to say that I kind of hope it happens. I'd love to see how she retrieves a swarm of bees...

Where's Waldo (the frog)?

I took some pictures around the pond this morning, and took the one below because I was interested in the plants growing into the wood.



When I put it on the computer, and saw the larger version, I found this little guy hiding there. I hadn't seen him at all when I took the picture, which of course is what he was hoping for.

Buzzed...

My husband came in from fishing a little bit ago, and told me that he had heard what sounded like a tornado coming. It's a clear day, so he was looking around to see what could be making the sound, and he finally thought to look up. At about treetop height, he saw a huge black swarm of bees.

So there he was, with all of his fishing gear and a nice cold beer...and suddenly menaced by possible killer bees. Prudently, he decided to flee the area. I would have shrieked and run off immediately, leaving all my things, but not my clear-headed husband. He looks up, sees the bees, looks down, grabs his beer, and then runs.

Gotta love a man with priorities...