Pollinators

There are melons setting on the vine!

Developing Aspire melon

And as I was photographing the mini globes, I saw the pollinators: tiny skippers going from flower to flower.

Skipper visiting a melon vine flower

Whitetail Dragonfly

Whitetail Dragonfly female

She landed on the sidewalk right by my feet. That is an open invitation to take a picture! (That is practically begging for a photo shoot, for me.) The iNaturalist app community identified this as a Whitetail dragonfly. I had to go do some additional research because I’ve seen Whitetail dragonflies, and the abdomen is quite bright. Turns out it is the males with the flashy derrière; females have a brown abdomen with white markings on the side. Learn something new every day.

Trail cam update

Hm. The trail cam went unchecked for several weeks again. There were over 6,000 pictures on the SD card. Six-thousand. I usually import the whole reel then delete 95%, but in this case it was better to draw upon the skills of my eagle eyed eldest and sift through the thumb nails to just import photos of interest. I really don’t need 5,900 pics of shadows, grass, and cat tails (not the plant type). I do need a crisp, amazing photo of a gray fox. Nice.

Gray fox trail cam pic

This photo was taken a while ago, as we haven’t seen 71 degrees in weeks. This is about 20 feet from the coop, by the way. I definitely recommend installing hardware cloth around the chicken runs and coop, and buried a foot or more down into the dirt.

Find them all

Frogs in the melon vines

How many frogs can you find in the melon vine leaves? I play this game each time I pass my container garden, so I thought I’d let y’all have a go too. Below is the same image with the frogs shaded pink, if you’re having trouble.

Three tree frogs, highlighted in pink

Tiny guardians

I spotted tiny tree frogs hanging out on my melon vine leaves. They are very welcome little guardians since they eat the bugs that eat my plants! And they’re cute.

Two tree frogs on melon leaves
Froggy close-up