Snap.

Hah! Look who was on the front deck when I put the dog out first thing this morning...


Big Fat Toad (The First). I checked the spots on the deck toad photos going back to the first post of a toad in a pot; it's definitely BFT I.


By midday, she'd settled down once again into the toads' favorite pot. Uh-oh. I hadn't expected either of them back, and had watered the petunia... Seems she couldn't dig herself in. Oops. She disappeared when the dog and I started going up and down the steps a little too frequently for her peace of mind, but I'm assuming she's close by. (I prefer to believe Big Red Toad is, too.)

And then, while I was bringing in hummer feeders to rinse and refill (must remember: finish that), I heard a *plurp* from a prefab pond liner I had tossed in the front "garden" years ago that I have yet to dig in (or build a raised bed around). It collects a bit of water, and I've heard birds splashing in it, but this was a different sort of noise, and I had looked over in time to see a sort of *blurp* at the surface. Curious as to what was in the mess of plant debris and water, naturally I gave the thing a shake. Truly, the human brain must be programmed to recognize patterns, for I immediately picked out one from the mish mash.


I screamed with glee (no neighbors, remember?) and ran into the house to put down the feeders and grab the camera, raced back outside and down the walk, around the shed, and across the just-as-cluttered and debris-filled excuse for a patio (note to self: acquire power washer) to get a better view from the opposite angle (and to avoid stepping into the garden tangle where a big black wasp was flitting).


(The violets are doing fabulously, by the by, if any other fritillary caterpillar would care to visit.) I would not have thought this was much in the way of habitat, but it is apparently just enough for....


Snap! See the shape that stands out? Using a photo is cheating: always look dead center or thereabouts first. There, just above dead center. No? Let's zoom in for a close-up...


Whatta face! Whatta glare... I do believe someone isn't very happy with me. Baby snapping turtles are some of the coolest looking beasties. And this isn't a hatch year baby, either. I should know, having kept one in the house some years ago. They are about ping pong ball sized; this one is approaching tennis ball width.

So now what do I do? Get that pond put in (and make sure there is gunk on the bottom for winter hibernating), leave it alone on the assumption that Snap has been there at least a year or two already? Put netting over it so I don't suddenly have a mess of one-legged songbirds flying around?

...Oh, the drama! While waiting to reconnect to my dial-up that so ungraciously kicked me off while trying to upload turtle photos, I put out the cleaned and filled hummer feeders and checked on Snap. Ack! No turtle in sight, but wait, one--no, two frogs instead. Aaaahhhh! No, not there, you suicidal amphibians, there's a snapping turtle in there!

And earlier, when I had just returned home from shopping and had an armful of purchases (cat food and rescued plants, mostly) but no camera to hand, the biggest, reddest, most beautiful Velvet Ant (in actual fact a wingless wasp, I believe) was running around near the end of the walk. Naturally she was gone when I went back out to look for her... But I know she's out there somewhere.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love living in the sticks...?

BYE-BYE, BUFOS...

I have been abandoned. Deserted! I found Big Fat Toad (The First) last week on the far end of my brick front walk, completely opposite from the deck, a good fifteen feet or more from where it had been residing. Okay, I thought, I still have Big Red. (BFT II, the toad which was inhabiting the pots on my deck bench, if it is the same toad, had turned a rustyish reddishy brown color as they sometimes do.)


Luckily I still had Big Red, because over the years of living with multiple and various kinds of critters, I do try to look first before doing things. I looked at the last second before I stuck a staked solar light into this pot the other morning...


Hello, what have we here?


Oh, it's you. [Alas, macro and auto-focus finally failed me. Now, if I had wanted the rootlet in focus...]

Then I chanced to glance out the door early this afternoon and what do I see??? Big Red heading off down the (now partially weeded *) front walk!


Ah, well, Big Fat Toad (The First) is still hanging out down there watching the sun go down (I kid you not), so I'm hoping Big Red likewise stays nearby. I miss having them on the deck, though. And, oh great, now I'll have to worry about running them over in the drive. Aaaargh!!!


___
* Yes, of course I left the goldenrod. It's not like it's coming up in the middle of the walk... You can tell that we desperately need rain, too. What will my little toads do out there where I don't water? ::sniff::

THE BOX.

Any box will do, so long as it is empty (preferably) and cat-sized (more or less).

Heigh High-ho, cherry-oh.

They didn't taste all that wonderful to me, but I thought for sure this deer was going to go tippy-toe to reach the cherries.


Tick problem? Hah! This is nothing. I've managed an even poorer* photo wherein the afflicted deer's ear looks like a pimple ball. And then there was that poor buck in velvet that one year... Ooh-ooh-ooh. (Velvet=high blood flow tissue for growing the antlers.) Interesting how some deer have can have a terrible infestation (and on just one ear) and others are nearly tick-free.

* Sorry for the poor quality: taking deer photos is difficult enough--why do the birds see only the yard reflected in the windows but the deer can see through the glass so well they see me when I'm half way across the room???--but it would have helped at least a little if the windows had been clean.

FLOWERS ARE FINE...

But leaves are better.

Even allowing for the fact that the local ungulates, while not yet so populous as to have a grazed a browse line around my acreage, will still eat--or at least taste--any vegetation within reach (I have an ok photo of a whitetail enjoying ripe wild cherries straight off the tree that I'll post at some point), I finally realized that I may lean more towards houseplants rather than landscape plants simply because the tropical stuff has such fantastic foliage. Well, houseplants are green all year 'round, too. (Assuming I can keep them alive.) That's their real attraction. But still, how can you resist leaves like these?


The Monstera is becoming, well, truly monstrous. The new leaves (of which there are now another half dozen and more) are at or just beyond 15" and I don't think they are done yet.


Caladium. I had tried these once before, years ago; can't remember if I started the tubers myself, but I'm pretty certain that the plants never made it through the summer. This one is already twice as tall as it was when purchased, and may need to be potted up. Again.


Also a Caladium. A really tall caladium; 37" this morning, no telling how much height it gained today. As it is, it's tied up to keep it out of the way. And what's with the runners? Aren't tubers good enough? This one will soon need potting up. Also again. And I might need to scatter little pots about in which to root the plantlets popping up on the ends of all of those blasted runners... It was starting to send out a few when I purchased it, but I was more concerned with keeping the entire dratted thing alive, period, not about it taking over my front steps. (Could be worse: some caladium species, appropriately named Elephant Ears--which this one was tagged as, actually/eep--have leaves a couple of feet across.)


Cyperus. Another wetland plant posing innocently as a houseplant. This is going to be a tricky one to keep the cats out of when it comes inside...those leaves will be way too tempting. I had a decorative cage I was going to use for whatever protection it would afford, but this one took off as well: the tallest frond now rises a good 28". I don't know if the dove cage gets enough light to see the cyperus through the winter; the budgie cage does, but I fear those little blighters would shred the plant to bits even faster than the cats.


Philodendron selloum, aka (Lacy) Tree Philodendron. This is a young plant; the newer leaves are each coming in "lacier" than the ones before.


Oh, I haven't yet mentioned my lapse of a few weeks ago, have I? But I simply had to have this beauty. Hey, they don't climb or vine! They, um, just grow sideways... (This one isn't as large as it looks; it's still in its gallon growers pot sitting on the blue pot into which it should, maybe, fit when I get around to repotting it. Hmm.) But my mother had one that stayed beautifully self-contained for many years! Yeah, so I discovered before I rescued this one from a local grocery store that a high-school classmate has had one for the past 23 years and it takes up half of his rather large living room... Your point??? Surely I've mentioned before that I have no self-control or will power whatsoever.

READY, SET, GO!

Getting ready...


::munch...munch...munch::
Variegated Fritillary caterpillar, found in Wildwood in a pot of pansies, transfered to a more rural setting and supplied with native violet leaves.

Set...


Chyrsalis, Day One.
Thursday night I happened to notice that the chrysalis was faintly streaked with orange instead of being more of a pure pearly white as it had been. Friday morning it was definitely dark, and the wing pattern showed up beautifully--in the macro flash photo, at any rate. (Over forty, remember?)


Chrysalis, Day Seven.

GO!


Go, go, go...!!!
[video coming soon Google changed its video uploading... I don't want a YouTube account!]

Of course I did what any self-respecting naturalist would do even if they aren't working in a career even remotely related to wildlife: I took the little sucker to work with me so I had a passing shot at getting the above photos and video. (If you have never seen it happen, butterfly emergence happens quickly. Really, really quickly. Two minutes tops, perhaps?) Luckily, I happened to look down to check on the chrysalis just after the now-butterfly had freed its head. And the phones had stopped ringing for a spell, so I commandeered a co-worker to hold the lid it was on while I took the (lousy and poorly edited) video. We both cheered, but if I'm really, really lucky I actually figured out how to edit out the video's sound...


Ta-DA!

Too bad the only chance I had at an underwing photo was through the plastic container. It was even more gorgeously subtle and ornately patterned on the underside than it was on top. (The white is a paper towel put in the slick plastic container to give the butterfly a better surface to hang on to.)

I then contacted my neighbors, practicing naturalists both, requesting the use of their property for release of a brand new butterfly... Why their place and not my own, you ask? Well, what self-respecting butterfly wouldn't want to take its first flight and taste its first nectar in an acre devoted to, planted and maintained for wildlife, a mere (ha!) little "backyard"--with a sightings list of well over 50 butterfly species?

*sigh* My fritillary, who promptly flew up, up, up and away...

Many thanks to the Suttons, folk extraordinaire, for graciously inviting us in to their incredible backyard. If you are in the area in the next month or so, Pat will be conducting tours of their place and other amazing gardens in Cape May County; the tours are sponsored by New Jersey Audubon's Nature Center of Cape May and you may find the garden tour program info at their website.

YESTERDAY

Yesterday, I stood in the rain until I was soaked to the skin.

Purposefully went out into it and stayed out the entire length of the summer shower, actually. (It couldn't quite be called a thunderstorm, although there was some quiet rumbling off to the east.) And it felt wonderful! Hadn't done that in way too long a time, although I have been meaning to for at least three rainstorms now. I love summer rainstorms.

It would have been simply stood in the rain in my skin but I'm a bit nervous about running nekked around my yard these days. (Have I mentioned how much I love living in the sticks?) Even though the old man who lived next door and used to wander back to check on me if he hadn't seen me in awhile has passed on (that one time I had on a very long t-shirt and socks, not that the socks covered anything important) and I'm enough of a hermit that acquaintances haven't dropped by unannounced to introduce me to their sisters in many years (luckily, I had the towel upon which I had been sunbathing), and the family with adolescents who had the house built practically in my front yard a few years back packed up their stuff lock, stock and barrel a couple of weeks ago and disappeared (which reminds me, I need to find out who holds the lien on the place and for how much). But there are still the guys in the house at the far end of my drive; I didn't want to risk that they'd decide to come talk about the now-empty-but-for-the-house acreage between us on the one day I was out appreciating nature, um, naturally…

Too much info? Ah, well, whatever. This is who I am, baring (ahem) a bit of my soul. One reason I was able to get along with Huston for a time was because I don't exactly march to the same beat as most of the rest of the world, either; I'm just not so inclined to advertise it as often and as obviously as he… Indeed, he once told me that my backing up and stopping to take off my shoes in order to squish my toes in a mud puddle I had just stepped around was the clincher to him asking me out.

Yesterday, while wonderful and not regretted, would have been absolutely perfect if not for an overabundance of garments and lack of a good mud puddle.

BUTTERFLIES ARE BIZARRE

And freaky, and weird, and just plain skin-crawlingly… inexplicable and strange, the way they get to be butterflies, anyway.

As larvae, the caterpillar phase of a butterfly can be pretty cool (although there are some freaky ones of those, too—like the bird-poop mimics, or the larger-than-life view of the little lovely from a few posts back), and although there are some pretty darn drab examples, most people would not argue the sublime beauty of an adult butterfly. But the process of getting from one to the other? Eeew, eew, ick, how the hell do they do it?, and yuck! I'm not going to post the photo I took of the Variegated Fritillary caterpillar beginning its transformation to the adult butterfly the other morning, and wouldn't even if it had been in focus. Gaaack.

On rare occasions, though, instead of being hidden within a plain-as-dirt cocoon, that metamorphosis is cloaked by sheer magnificence:



Ok, perhaps the grandeur can even possibly be overdone in the attempt to make you ignore what is actually going on inside… What these shots fail to show clearly is the pearly iridescence of this chrysalis. It literally looks like the mother-of-pearl lining of a shell. Oh, and then there are those metallic coppery-gold touches.

How could any butterfly possibly compete with that?

(Even after devouring a few violet leaves, the caterpillar never grew very much after I brought it home, and indeed, one online reference has quite a broad wingspan range for the butterfly. To give you some idea of scale, the black background is a piece of craft foam less than an eigth of an inch thick, held up behind the chrysalis for contrast.)

"BASE CREATURES"

You remember my friend, Big Fat Toad (The First)? Lives in and amongst the potted plants on my front deck?


Don’t ever try to tell me that animals are merely instinctual, animated machines without capability of rational, conceptual thought or abstract thought and feelings. This isn't the first time this toad has come out to sit on the deck and watch the sun go down.

PURPLE, Part 2.

Pickerelweed. Aquatic emergent masquerading as a potted plant on my front deck.