One of the very great pleasures of spending time in nature is seeing things you have never seen before. Especially weird things. Nature is full of weird things, and I love finding things that are strange, and wondering about them, wondering all kinds of things, how did it get here, what is it doing, what the heck is that thing? And very often, how did I not notice that before?
I was walking through my backyard today, heading out on my daily walk, when I spotted this. Now, I know this has to be a fungus, but I have never seen one like this before, specifically, this big. Sure, I have seen round, white fungi before, but this thing is huge. And there were three of them, with this being the medium sized one. Now, this is on a little connecting path that I don't walk on very often, but I walk right by here ever day at least once, and in the last few days must have walked right by ten times, and I can't figure out how I never saw these before. At the moment, they are extremely obvious. So one of two things happened–either both my husband and I walked within a couple of feet of these massive fungi for days without noticing them, or these were not massive until they suddenly blew up to this size today. Either possibility is mind boggling.
Backyard Bug of the Day:
Other Bugs:
I tossed some grapes out this afternoon, and about an hour later went out and saw that though I had deemed them no longer fit for consumption there were bees (wasps?) and ants that thought they were delicious.
Mostly, though, the bees were still interested in the autumn joy sedum:
There were honeybees on the autumn joy sedum today.
Also this weird, sad find of a bumblebee that has died. I don't know if it was attacked by a predator, or if something else killed it. We did not have a freeze overnight. I think this bee might have been one of the ones that was sleeping on the flowers last night; there was one on that spot.
Check out this carpenter bee's amazing eyes!
Assassin bug nymph
Pearl crescent butterfly. Butterflies have been pretty scarce this year. I am always happy to see one.
Lady beetle
That water level in the small pond is down quite a bit today, and I hope it has left a lot of mosquito larvae high and dry, but there's definitely still enough for the frogs to enjoy.
There is a trio of deer I encounter in the woods every couple of days. They all appear to be immature; one of them is definitely a fawn, but neither of the others looks full grown. I only ever see them when I startle them and they flee (did I post about this a couple of days ago?). They will often stop again a little ways off, but in the woods it is hard to get a good picture of them, especially if they stop in an area with a lot of underbrush. Well, today I got a decent view of two of them:
After taking that first picture I kept walking, and the path basically looped around to where I could see the deer again. The third one was behind some brush way off to the right of this spot. They keep a sharp eye on me, and I imagine they always do, well before I spot them. They have sharper eyes, ears, and sense of smell than I have.
Arachnid Appreciation:
I walked right through several spider webs today, mostly face first, and whenever I do that I have to brush off the webs, hoping that there aren't any spiders on me, particularly in my hair. Well, one of the webs was lower, and I ended up with these two on my arm:
White micrathenas. I don't know if it was two webs really close together, or if they were both on the same web for some reason.
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