Walking through the back woods I saw an actual cicada nymph. Not the cast off shell, not the adult cicada, but a nymph who had just dug out of the ground and was looking for a place to climb up high. I’ve never witnessed this before!
Cicada nymph
Its a bit hard to see in the leaf litter, so I guess this post becomes a little bit of Where’s Waldo.
My eldest has been telling me that she has been seeing extra large June bugs in the yard. I finally was able to spot one and take a picture! According to my iNaturalist app, this is the Grapevine beetle, also known as the spotted June bug. And it is larger than your average June bug; this one is just over 1” long. This phrase on Wikipedia amused me: “The beetles fly at a fast speed, usually in a curving flight.” That is a pretty big buzzing curve ball coming at you through the dark.
Snakes? No problem. Beetles? Easy peasy. Cockroaches? I now feed them to my chickens. Worms? Na, I bait my own hook. Spiders? Um. Great big yellow and black garden spiders? Even though they are non-aggressive? Heebie Jeebies. So getting close enough to this guy to take a picture with my phone was a personal act of bravery. Taking down her web by disconnecting the anchor lines and leaving her one line (as far away from me as possible) to retreat was cold steel. But see, I had to get to the other side of her web to put the roosts back up in the chicken run. It was for my chickens. And I’ve learned this technique for dismantling spider webs the hard way; I really, really hate walking through spider webs. Gack. We have so many, many spiders this summer. I have to keep telling myself that yes, there are a ton of spiders, but there don’t seem to be many flies. So the spiders stay, even if I have to pull up my big girl pants and deal with the gentle yellow and black nightmare.
Goodness, the toads are big and friendly this year. Thanks to the nice contributors on the iNaturalist app, I believe these guys and those I’ve found in the chicken coop are Gulf Coast Toads. We have many, many, many tiny variants of toads and frogs around the yard, but these big guys like to hang out by our doors.
I’m half waiting for one to come in the house and ask for tea.
We had 13 coop residents in the morning. A rather large toad was sitting in the chicken foot bath. The chickens were all leaving it alone, which I thought was interesting, since chickens eat some reptiles and amphibians. Now I have found maybe this same toad in the coop before (or maybe a similar one, there are lots), and have relocated it (them?) out of the coop several times. I thought I had a fairly tight run with all the hardware cloth we put up, but there is a spot somewhere we he gets in. Hmm. The concerning thing is that if he can get in, so can snakes. Hmm.
Critters and Craft 