Wanted: Spring

My love for the natural world is not universal. Right now I am terribly displeased with whatever creature ate all of my crocuses. Those were my one tenuous grasp of spring. Now all I have blooming is this:

 Maple trees. Thanks to my recent allergy tests, I know I am mildly allergic to this, but I didn't really need a test to tell me I am allergic to pollen.

All right, it is not true that that is all that is blooming. There is one bloom on the forsythia bush, and quite a lot of creeping myrtle flowers in the rock garden (which are distressingly lacking in bees).

Today the ants were busy in the rock garden:

 Ant carrying rove beetle

Ant carrying sow bug

There weren't many bugs around today (except a LOT of flies).

 Stonefly

I have seen this blob on a tree many times as I walked by, and it always just looked like a dark, solid blob, and I thought it was something the tree exuded, but today it looked all sparkly and glittery in the sun so I looked closer... I now think it might be some kind of egg mass.

It has a hole in it that looks more like something dug into it than something hatched out.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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I am not sure, but I think this spider was in the process of gathering in the threads of its web.

Either that or it had some silk-wrapped prey. But it looked more like it was gathering up the thread. I have read somewhere that spiders will eat that in order to regain that protein, but I don't know how they do that when spiders eat by injecting prey with a venom that liquifies their innards and then suck in that liquid. I don't know how that would work with a ball of used spider web.

Spider on daffodil bud

Reptile of the Day:
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The small snake was back, lounging among the leaves. When I got too close it slithered beneath the leaf litter, which I find a great deal more unnerving than when they disappear down a hole.