Three monarch butterflies have been hanging around our gardens this past couple of weeks (two seem to be a couple, flitting around everywhere together), and one of them laid some eggs on the underside of one of the leaves of this plant above. Those eggs quickly developed into ravenous caterpillars that proceeded to defoliate the plant, before moving on elsewhere. Some ended up on another type of milkweed three feet away, but so far none yet on still another type some ten feet away, where I half expected them to be, given multiple plants. Elsewhere near our home, there is no sign yet of any monarchs or eggs on a profusion of milkweed plants at the boat landing; they were inundated with them last year.
Addendum on 8/12: they finally found the milkweed ten feet away.
Addendum on 8/17: the eggs/caterpillars were actually those of milkweed tussock moths, otherwise known as milkweed tiger moths. See next post.
Shortly after we moved here, a neighbor predicted we’d be seeing fish in the strangest places: on lawns, in driveways, on roads. Lo and behold, a month later there was one in our driveway.
The ospreys in the area tend to drop the heavier ones flying back to their nests; such was probably the case with this catfish, which may have weighed as much as the bird itself. This was taken in the late afternoon; the next morning it was gone, scavenged by animals, or maybe just discarded by neighbors.
Last year the marsh behind our neighbor’s house was overflowing with great egrets, most of them juveniles. They stayed for a couple of weeks in early April, probably decimated the fish and and amphibian population in the place, and then were gone.
This year, just a few showed up, and I only photographed a couple of times: this adult, who proved a patient model, and later, a juvenile who would not even stick around for a single shot.
Their majestic beauty and placid manner belie skillful and ruthless abilities as predators; this one caught and swallowed a fish just one minute earlier.
A group of wild turkeys forage on cow manure recently spread over the field (those brown lines in the foreground), probably for the undigested corn from the cattle’s feed.
There’s a whole science to minimizing the cost of feeding cows, including harvesting the corn when kernels are at their peak maturity, decreasing the particle size of the corn kernels when ground, or using a bacterial inoculant in the silage to maximize fermentation (from an article here, thanks Google). My guess is that the small farmers in the area don’t really concern themselves much with those economics, probably for the same reasons we put up bird feeders in our back yard.
There’s a nice article here on the conservation effort over the past century that brought the turkey population in the US back from thirty thousand to seven million.
Lest we forget all the manual labor that goes into farming: a pile of sawdust (bedding for the cows), four shovels and three wheelbarrows, two of them double tired. And then there’s the color of this barn – gotta love it!!!
