After a regular bombardment upon my few dear readers with all manner of sunflower posts these last couple months, things stopped rather abruptly more than a week ago in part because the prize of the patch finally fell victim to some ratzafratzin’ arboreal rodent. I closed the book a few days later on this year’s …
What can I say, I’m a sucker for cereus cactus blooms, which open nocturnally this time of year for one night and one night only, closing up the next morning never to bloom again. As such, the local bees (and occasional carpenter bee) waste little time diving in to frolic in the flower’s funstuffs we …
Last year, or perhaps the year before, a lady friend who previously blogged under the nom du net of Jo Gillis sent me a batch of sunflower seeds harvested from some she’d grown that year. This is the first one to present itself among the mostly smaller lemon queen sunflowers that surround it. It is …
It’s roughly 80 seconds this phoebe (I think) spent at our bird bath, but through the magic of Quicktime I’ve put the way brief timelapse on an endless loop. Now all it needs is the appropriate musical accompaniment… “Rockin’ Robin” perhaps?
I missed capturing the latest cereus cactus flower’s nocturnal opening Tuesday night, but yesterday morning I set up my cam before the bloom  at 6:40 a.m. and timelapsed the following two sunrise hours of it slowly — almost imperceptibly — closing up shop. There are certainly lulls in the activity, but it’s fascinating (to me, …
UPDATED (9.17): Thanks to the Natural History Museum’s Spider Pavilion webpage, I’ve learned this is not an orb weaver, but rather a jewel garden spider. The difference? Orb’s tend to sit smack in the middle of their webs, whereas jewel’s like to hide out in the foliage around them — and that’s exactly what this …
It’s that time of year and the neighbor’s fence-sitting cereus cactus is wonderfully at it again. I noticed the blooms-to-be about a week ago, but wasn’t expecting them to open up so quickly. And when they do, the early-morning bees drop any interest in sunflowers and literally go swimming in them. So of course I …