It has been awhile since I’ve posted trail cam photos. Mostly they have been blurry pictures of raccoons, opossums, armadillos, cats, and the occasional bird. After some adjustment of the camera position, I am now getting less blurry snaps. Mostly.
We started up a fire in the fire pit, and when I was removing the grass spider webs I found a snake. Not something I expect to find hiding under a sheet of web! He was not caught, but when I uncovered him, he slithered off, under the pot (we use an old cast iron cooking pot as a fire pit). I was afraid he was going to cook himself under there, but my eldest spotted him later hiding just outside the hottest part of the rock.
As the fire died down, we watched the grass spiders and Texas brown snake. Both are beneficial and pose no risk to humans, so they stay!
On a walk at a local park, I stopped to take a picture of thistles. I love the look of these thistles! The leaves are silvery, and I like the tassel; yes they are prickly, but at a distance that has its own kind of charm. I ran the photo through the iNaturalist app to figure out what kind of creature was sipping nectar, and it suggested thistle, and two very different insects. Huh? Then I looked closer and there are two insects in the picture! The bee fly on the bloom to the right, and the back end of a flower scarab in the bloom on the left. I have not documented either creature, so it is quite the exciting picture!
I have finally added an “About Me” page, accessible from the menu on my page ofchickensandcraft.home.blog. It rather highlights my fractured nature, but if you have been reading my posts for any length of time, you have probably picked up that I am easily distracted and try many things!
Well, attempted egg thievery. I went out to check the chickens around noon and found a 4 foot long Western Rat Snake in a nest trying to eat an egg. I ran back to the house to get my phone, turned on the video, with light, and she (?) still didn’t care I was there. The egg was too big, though. I called for my eldest to bring the snake grabber (yes, I went into the house for my phone and not the grabber), and we gently removed the snake from the nest and relocated it outside the coop.
I think the snake slithered in the coop door during the day. I was afraid of squishing bits with the grabber and dropped it a couple times and it didn’t seem to have a bolt hole. But that may be another factor in our decreased egg collection. Although, honestly, a few eggs is a good salary for something that keeps rats and mice away. This guy will need to grow a bit before it can eat the eggs. Maybe it was stealing the 44g eggs and couldn’t take the 46g.
Ok, so now that you’ve shuddered after imagining all those babies on her back making a run for it, you probably don’t want to read further about the Wolf Spider. So I’ll let you look it up. I will share that my husband found her, we all paraded out to see her, because, wow, and my youngest, upon seeing it, said “We need to move.” Yes, the spider was on our house, hanging out in the shade of the honeysuckle (the bricks are 2 3/4″ tall high). I took the image with the longest lens I have, and although I wanted the image to be sharper, no way was I going to piss her off by getting closer. Sleep tight! (And as a final note, wolf spiders are a beneficial species, so we just left her alone.)
