Our yard is blessed each year to be frequented by beautiful western tiger swallowtail butterflies. Magnificent specimens who flit, dart, and dodge around and through the spring and summer air in search of nectar. The big bougainvillea beneath one of our backyard palms is a regular stop on their journeys, but they rarely light upon …
What you’re looking at above (click it for the bigger picture) is not something you see everyday, nor the kind of life/death animal action many urban humans get to find themselves so close to. It’s a still from some really bad video I captured, depicting the last moment of a rather epic backyard fig tree …
The first of three flowers finally opened up today in our as-yet-to-be-determined squash patch (I’m pretty sure they’re pumpkin, but there’s a chance they could be butternut). If you look close, positioned behind the flower’s pistil is a honeybee wasting no time getting the pollination process started. Fingers crossed as hot weather — of which …
In reviewing last week’s timelapse footage this morning, I found that my decidedly low-res/tech front steps cam captured the latest visit from our unfriendly neighborhood coyote, this one when it dropped by for about 32 seconds last Thursday morning (July 19; click them for the bigger pictures): I don’t think I’d mind it so much …
Alerted by the telltale “squeeee!” of an angry mockingbird (you can hear in the clip) in the backyard, I scanned the boughs in vicinity and found one of our neighborhood Cooper’s hawks dining rather vigorously in a nearby tree. (As usual, this video was shot with my patented shaky cam technique of holding my Canon …
Number of seeds: Five Planted: July 4 Sprouted: July 8-11 Patched (as seen below): July 12 The good news is that — as planned — I got an earlier start with my pumpkin patch than last year. The bad news is that — not as planned — juuust like last year instead of planting pumpkin …
Crossing paths with a coyote in an urban environment is a brief affair — especially if you go on the offensive rather than the defensive. The last thing a coyote’s ever wanted around me is to get into some sort of stand-off as to who’s the dominant opponent. Mainly because I don’t give it the …
Read more “Of The Coyotes I’ve Encountered This One Had To Have Been The Most Unique”