Spruce Pine Cottage
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Newspapers (6)Other Gardening News (A-J) (29)Other Gardening News (K-Z) (30)If you remember around this time last year I posted about the chickadee family living in our "guest house". Well, this year another family moved into the same house and I got to see one of the fledglings hiding in one of the old "silver thorn" bushes next to the driveway... Wow! This is a rare sight around here--an indigo bunting on his way up north for the summer, stopping off to have some seed are one of our feeders. There wasn't much food so I went out and filled the feeders up hoping he'd stay a while, but he didn't... We had a straggler this year. For weeks after all the other robins had headed up north, this poor little bird remained behind. Yes, that's fear you see in his eyes. He was trying desperately to get away from me as I snapped his picture... We've recently acquired two fine flickers, only these birds live inside the house instead of in the garden. The first is a the wonder painting, "A Flicker Eating on Pears" by the folk artist Cornbread, otherwise known as John Anderson... You might think that we don't get much fall color in North Florida, but you'd be wrong. In fact, early fall is filled with color, but not from maple leaves. Late summer and early fall are probably high season in North Florida for wildflowers... What the heck is going on here? Are they mating? Could it possibly be mating season for box turtles? Nope. This is a battle royal, turtle style. It was a rainy afternoon, and there was a delicious cache of mostly rotten watermelon nearby... People sometimes talk about the "milkweed community." If you look at the picture above you can get some idea of what that means. I've blogged about milkweed before, and I've mentioned that milkweed provides homes for more than just monarch caterpillars... It's not a hummingbird, and it's not a funky-looking bumble bee. It's a nessus sphinx moth (Amphion floridensis) hovering over those verbena. There's a really great shot of one on this site here. There are a number of species of large moths that hover as they drink nectar... That brilliant orange color screams poison. This is a bug that all you birds out there should avoid because it will make you sick, sick, sick. We are looking at the larvae of the swamp milkweed leaf beetle... What are these bizarre bug eggs on this purple coneflower leaf? It almost seems like you can see the little critters developing beneath the translucent eggshell. Or are those just decorative racing stripes? I have no means of identifying strange invertebrate eggs, so I have no idea what these could be...
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