A Few Creatures in My Back Yard

Mr. Frog hanging out in the pond, trying to stay cool.


I was watering my herbs last night when I found this beautiful little guy on my dill. On some of the photos you can see the drops of water on him. I hope he is the type of caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. He is beautiful!



Friendly grasshopper. I never realized their eyes were so interesting close up.

Wordless Wednesday

A Mother's Day Lesson from Birds

Every year I get two large ferns to hang from our front porch. After about a week my husband noticed a bird flying out of one of the ferns whenever he opened the front door. Upon further inspection when watering the ferns, we found a bird's nest already built. Within a day or two there were eggs. And imagine my surprise to see two different sizes and types of eggs in this nest!


I wondered how this could happen so I did a google search and learned about "brood parasites" What this means is that a mother bird (frequently a cowbird) will find a nest that another mother bird has built (the host bird), then lay her eggs there and she may or may not ever return. In some species of birds, they aren't capable of building a nest so they just find one already built for them. In most cases, the host bird will come back and lay her eggs with the others. She may abandon her eggs when she notices there are other eggs in her nest. Or the brood parasite bird may come back and remove the eggs that are not hers from the host nest.

As you can see from the photo that I took, the speckled eggs are much larger and they tend to be the ones to hatch first. I really had to wonder how 7 babies could even fit in this tiny nest. It is probably about 3" wide.

Unfortunately, I read that when all the babies have hatched, the host mother will feed the babies that are the biggest and have their mouths open first. She may not even realize that the babies are a different species. This endangers the life of her own babies, and she is feeding birds that aren't even hers. Her smaller babies may end up starving because of the competition for food. Or they may get thrown out of the nest by the larger babies. I have read that this practice has possibly reduced the number of songbirds, while increasing the number of (brood parasite) cowbirds.

For days I struggled with getting involved in this circle of life. It didn't seem fair that a "squatter" bird's eggs should jeopardize the 5 blue eggs that were laid by the mom that built the nest in the first place. I considered removing the cowbird eggs myself. But I decided not to interfere with nature and see how this plays out. I hope that all these babies will have a chance at life.

Last night we checked and the 7 eggs were still there. Today I checked and the two speckled eggs have hatched! I hope this new mama can take care of all 7 of her babies. I only see 4 blue eggs now, but hope that the 5th one is under the new hatchlings.



More pics to come in the days ahead, if mama allows it.

Happy Mother's Day!

Wordless Wednesday Floral Style

Wordless Wednesday - Insect Style

Retreat Gardens in Nassau

Two weekends ago my job took me on a Royal Caribbean cruise to the Bahamas. When I told people it was for work and reminded them I would be working, I didn't get much sympathy. We did manage to have some fun too and ate and drank quite a bit in the process! I brought home 7 of those mini rum cakes from Tortuga rum. (they are gifts mostly!) I made the horrendous mistake of stepping on the scale when I returned home. Talk about sticker shock. I will be adding sweatpants to my Christmas list I am afraid. And so close to the best food holiday of the year - Thanksgiving. ay yi yi!

While in Nassau, we went to a place called the Retreat Gardens which is a national park. They have a great collection of palms and lots of other tropical plants that we don't see here in Kentucky. I wish I knew the names of these to identify them, but thought I'd share a few of them with you. I just love nature photography.




The conch shells were for sale for $5.00 right at the water's edge in Nassau.


You can see the rest of my photos at my flickr page. Click here.

Bernheim Forest ColorFest and Geocaching

This weekend was the ColorFest fall festival at Bernheim Forest in Clermont, Ky. We had planned to go hiking at Bernheim and packed a lunch. We managed to get there before the big crowds and do a little hiking. We stopped at the gift shop/visitor center and there were booths set up with food vendors and Ky crafts. Inside the center I found the coolest "fairy" scarecrow by artist Wren Smith. Isn't this cool? I love the 2nd picture as all the light from the windows illuminates this wonderful art. Next year they are asking individuals and organizations to create their own artistic scarecrow to be on display at Bernheim. (click pictures for a larger view)






A woodturner from Kentucky demonstrates his work as a crowd gathers to watch. Everyone loves to see an artist in action. It really seems to draw them into your booth.



A nice view from the trail. And a pretty birch tree.


We also went geocaching that day. If you unfamiliar with geocaching, it's great fun. Basically you get the coordinates for a hidden item (the cache) and enter it into your gps. You also get clues, sometimes they are in code and you have to decipher them. Most of the time you have to go off the trail to find what you are looking for. The coordinates give you the general area and are not exact. We tried for four yesterday. Three of them were microcaches which means they could be as small as an altoids tin or a film canister. We never found those, and I was pretty discouraged. We gave it one last try for hunt #4. This one was described as a tall rubbermaid container wrapped in camo tape. The clue also told us it was in a hollow tree. It was quite a steep climb to make it to this one and you had to turn around as you were climbing to see the hollowed out part. My husband spotted the tree, as I had passed it up. This picture shows the location after removing the ground cover.

Inside these containers (which are often metal ammo boxes) you will find a log where everyone that has found the cache signs in and lists the date. Some people leave calling cards, like a business card that has their geocache name. There are usually trinkets inside the container, and if you take something you leave something and list it in the log. There is usually a pen inside unless it's a micro cache. You then go online when you get home and post to the person that created the cache that you found it. This info is listed for all to see. We normally print these out as they give clues about how to find them and if other people had trouble with the coordinates.

It's great fun if you've never tried it. All you need is a gps for trails(not a car gps). You can then type in the zip code of where you are traveling to and it will give you a list of the caches in the area! We try to do this whenever we travel.