Hello my precious! I have spotted another ironclad beetle on our property, specifically on the house trim by the back door. This is the seventh beetle I have seen in four years.
I relocated this one out in the woods since we do use chemicals around the house to keep out the ants and scorpions.
My stock tank garden really is a frog haven, with the little pond (old dish), shade (melon vines and basil), food (bugs that eat my melons), and rest areas (branches to lead the vines to the fence). I thought these two were quite cute.
There are melons setting on the vine!
And as I was photographing the mini globes, I saw the pollinators: tiny skippers going from flower to flower.
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.
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.
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.
Critters and Craft 