We have one delivery person who puts our packages on the ground inside our fence rather than on our front porch. My youngest picked up the package and we saw that it had a passenger; a very irate passenger that did not at all like having its picture taken. Since no one was willing to open the package with its tiny defender, I took it and offered escape. The preying mantis was very willing and eager to leave the package and walk back to the fence. Much different than the beetles and geckos we release only to find they don’t want to leave the stick or hand.

I put our trail cam back down in the woods in a dry stream bed… awhile ago. Life’s been busy and I hadn’t checked it in nearly a month. Hm. There were over 300 pictures. Yes, mostly of cats, raccoons, armadillo, and opossum, but there were also fox and coyote! The coyote picture was pretty blurry except for the long legs, but I had the best fox picture so far.

There was also a sequence of shots of one of the neighborhood cats trying to get a rodent (I’m assuming it was a rat). We didn’t get the outcome of the standoff, but the rat holds its own for several minutes.

Last spring I put out netting over my sky chair to keep the flies and mosquitoes off as I sat. This fall I noticed it was all in a tangle, then I saw the squirrel bunching the fabric up and trying to haul it off. It might feel nice and soft, but I don’t think nylon netting is a good nesting material!

I gathered up all the artificial netting and put out tuffs of alpaca fleece as a natural substitute. This seems to meet the inspector’s approval, because I saw a squirrel pulling apart the fibers and gathering bits. That critter is going to have a soft cozy winter bed!

Talking ebbs and flows again. We saw two praying mantises in one day about 17 miles apart. One on the outside of the doctor’s office, and one on the wall on our front porch. We don’t see many of these a year, and two in one day is remarkable.

The mantis on the house was missing the lower half of both middle legs, which didn’t stop it from easily scaling the wall.

I am working on the weaving, really. Bits here and bits there, but apparently this little spider thought I needed more assistance, or maybe a model of an efficient productive weaver, as she set up shop right behind my loom. Saucy.