Happy Valentine's...from my back...while watching birds

I'm lying here on the couch watching the birds for the Great Backyard Bird Count. Actually, the reason I'm lying here on the couch is because I've pinched a nerve... or something. Wednesday night I had some pain in my back & neck and thought it was a stiff neck. I took some Aleve Thursday morning and was fine. I even went ice skating. It was quite a bit worse Friday. And, yesterday it was pretty much unbearable. I had to sit and walk around with my arm straight up in the air.

Well, today I realized that if I lie down - either on my back or side - I'm pretty good. But, almost immediately upon standing...ouch!!! So, I'm lying down. And, I've been watching and counting birds for GBBC. 

I can't really upload my photos right now, but here is a photo of a mockingbird I took a couple of years ago. And, here is our list of birds we've seen over the past 3 days. It isn't too late for you to count birds, too! GBBC goes through tomorrow!

• 2 cardinals (male & female)
• 10 white wing doves
• 1 black vulture
• 2 red-bellied woodpeckers (male & female)
• 2 blue jays
• 1 goldfinch
• 1 mockingbird
• 1 crow
• 1 house finch
• 2 black-capped chickadees
• sparrows - lots, but I'm not good at identifying which kind they are, so I'm not including them

Great Backyard Bird Count

I have had good intentions of participating in The Great Backyard Bird Count the past few years, but we've never done it. Today, I printed out a checklist from On Just A Couple Acres, and we are ready to count! I wish I'd picked up some suet, but I do have food in one or two feeders (I'll have to check). And, I hope to get out today or tomorrow and buy some for the rest of our feeders.

If you are not familiar with the count, it is really easy to do. Just run over to GBBC's website, or even view the video at On Just A Couple Acres. Robin and her son at martinzoo have participated for several years and I always enjoy reading about their peaceful morning oberving the birds!

Last Year's Container Gardening... Can't Wait for Spring!!!

I can't believe I didn't post about our contaner gardens last spring! In the Houston area, the county extension office in association with Texas A&M University offers cylinder gardening 'kits' that containers, lesson plans, organic fertilizer, and seeds to schools for FREE! They include everything but the soil and welcome homeschoolers.

A lady delivered our supplies. The containers are big pails which have been cut in half so they have no bottom. We put newspaper at the bottom of the containers so weeds wouldn't grow up into them.

We added the soil and planted the seeds as the lesson plans stated. We had 4 containers. Two were vegetables (beans and radishes) and two were herbs (I believe dill and parsley).

After planting the seeds, we watered them. Here you can see our four containers. They're around some lantana which already attracks some butterflies.

                                             

Our first little plants... just 3 days later!

And, here are our bean plants 6 weeks after planting!

And, one of our first radishes. I've never grown any food before and we both thought this was so exciting. I was amazed how God could take a little seed and 'program' it so that it could turn DIRT into something edible!!! Amazing!

Little purple flowers on our bean plant.

A TINY snail we found on one of our plants.

Some of our dill.

And, one of our beans. We got LOTS of beans off of these plants.

Anyway, the deadline for signing up for this program is at the end of the month. I'm debating whether we'll sign up or just plant some of our own seeds. When you sign up, you get whatever seeds they happen to send. We still have our containers set up, so I'm thinking about just buying our own seeds to plant. I'm excited that planting season isn't too far away for us. Last year, we planted during the first week of March.

Bird's Nest & Other Mushrooms in Our Backyard

I've seen these bird's nest mushrooms before, but not in our backyard! They are so tiny...less than a quarter of an inch wide. I love how it looks like they have tiny eggs in the nests.

I was once again surprised when I downloaded my photos. I realized that these little mushrooms were bird's nests, too... but most of them are still "covered!" The "eggs" are actually puffball-like packets of spores called peridioles. The nests are "splash cups" and, are scattered when raindrops hit them. I found some information about these mushrooms at American Mushrooms.

I'm not good at identifying most mushrooms, but I thought I'd share these photos of mushrooms that were in our backyard this week.

Green Fruit Beetle or Figeater

We had a GORGEOUS day today. We spent some of our school day reading in the backyard. Alex even swam, though I thought it was way too cool! And, I ended up taking a nap underneath the cloudy skies. Just such a wonderful day!

In the evening, we went outside again to eat dessert... and I saw this big beetle floating on one of the toys in the pool. He was a beautiful green and we'd never seen this insect before. Alex ran in and got my camera. (Do you see his gold trim around the edge?)

He was evidentally a little water-logged. He flew a short distance and I then I took some more photos... with his wings still hanging out. (I don't know why this photo won't load the right direction... I took it horizontally...)

Alex also grabbed one of our insect guides and found that he is a type of scarab beetle called a fig beetle. On the internet, I've found him more often called a Green Fruit Beetle or a Figeater. I love how his antennae break into 3 parts. Isn't he beautiful? (And, I thought I'd try another photo, but it came out sideways, too!)

In the Sky on the 4th of July

Last night, we decided to watch the 4th of July fireworks from our pool. We turned the light on in the pool and hopped in for some fun. What a shock when we saw... BATS!!!

We have lived in our house 12 1/2 years and this is the first time we've ever seen the bats! I didn't get any photos last night, so I went back out tonight to see if I could catch them on video. I saw at least 3 bats at one time and some of them swooped over the pool. The videos were poor, but below is the best one. It is short and at the end you'll see 2 bats flying across the sky. Alex and I are so thrilled with our BATS!!!

Backyard Photowalk

While Alex has been lying around sick today, I've went in the backyard for 2 nature photowalks. I usually crop the photos, but then you can't enlarge them. So, today I left them "as is" and hopefully, you can click on them to enlarge - some of them are REALLY neat looking! (UPDATE: I thought if I didn't crop them, you could enlarge them. But, only the photo with the inchworm works. Any ideas why? And ideas of how to fix it? Thanks!)

snail

another inchworm on the black-eyed susan (actually, there is a lite green one on the stem, too)


very cool green spider on the black-eyed susan cone (this looks great enlarged!)

neat looking small moth I identified as a grape leaf skeletonizer on Whats That Bug - if you enlarge it, you can see his fuzzy abdomen and antennae

our first cicada exoskeleton of the year - we just started hearing them in the evenings about a week ago

Wildflower Surprises

Several years ago, we planted a lot of wildflower seeds but not much grew. (It could have been that our yard guys were pulling everything up!) So, we were surprised a few weeks ago when we went to this part of the yard (which is usually hidden) and we found a lot of yellow wildflowers! I took some photos and am only just getting around to blogging about them. (Because Alex has some friends over and I've already cleaned the house so I have some 'spare' time!)

There are 2 different kinds of yellow flowers in our new "wildflower garden." One type, above, I've identified as Plains Coreopsis. I think the easiest way to identify these wildflowers is by the edge (margin?) of each petal.

I believe this other type of flower is a Black-eyed Susan. The center is kind of purple and the "eye" is raised quite a bit. Even though I took these photos a few weeks ago, I just looked at them today and was surprised to see...

three inchworms!!! (One is in the center.) I'm going to have to go check tonight and see if I can find more of these. I love inchworms! I've posted about them before, but thought I'd go ahead and repost what I learned about them last April.

Inchworms are a specific type of caterpillar. Like most caterpillars, inchworms have 3 pairs of true legs in the front of their body, but usually only 2 pairs of false legs in back where most caterpillars have 5 pair. They move by drawing their back legs towards their front and then stretching out their body.

Inchworms are also called measuring worms, spanworms, cankerworms, and loopers. They are usually about 1 inch long. They belong to a family called Geometridae or the Geometer moths - "earth measuring." You're probably familiar with the Inchworm song that teaches arithmetic. (See video at the bottom of the page.) We actually sing this song pretty often - sometimes during math.

Update: I went outside and found at least a DOZEN inchworms! We might have to try to raise some. :-)

Praying Mantises

Alex had received a praying mantis kit for Christmas 2007. I finally got around to ordering the mantis egg case and it arrived about 3 weeks ago. The egg case is supposed to hatch about 2-4 weeks after you receive it. Well, the hatched Saturday and we had 100-200 baby praying mantises!

We wended up releasing them all as they become cannibalistic if they do not get enough food. That would not be a pretty site! I thought it was neat that they were very spread out and seemed to need a ring of "personal space."

Here's Alex holding one. You can see how tiny they were.

And, here's a video. We released them in groups all over our yard, so hopefully we'll be seeing them around sometimes!

Mud dauber nests

Last week, we had a couple of mud dauber nests. My father-in-law was in town and he took them down for us.

This one was made right over our sliding glass door into the backyard. This photo was taken on Wednesday.

Two days later, the mud dauber had sealed this nest shut. When my father-in-law scraped it down, we found 4 spiders in the nest. These spiders would have provided nourishment for the baby mud daubers.

Here's the other nest that was built over one of our windows. I really think they're pretty! I love the different colors of mud in this nest!This one appears to have been abandoned as we didn't find anything in it and it hadn't changed in several days.

I found a neat YouTube video of a mud dauber making its nest, but I'm having trouble embedding it. They sure do work hard on these nests! And, it is neat seeing them make the balls of mud.

Documenting Ladybugs

Over the past several weeks, Alexandra and I have been documenting our ladybugs almost daily. We've never seen anything like this!

It started in early May with quite a few larva on our spa. They were eating some kind of bug, which I've since determined were wooly aphids that are probably on my neighbor's jasmine. Anyway, about a week or so later, we discovered more larva and pupa on our chimnea. And, last week we discovered even more on the grill and pool equipment. One day last week, we counted over 50 ladybugs between the larva, pupa, and adults!

So, we've been documenting the life cycles of of our ladybugs and I have taken HUNDREDS of photos. I still haven't waded through all of the photos, but I'd like to share some of our photos with you all. Enjoy!

LARVAL STAGE - A ladybug larva molts 3 times thus it goes through 4 instars. I would like to learn to identify each stage (there is a definite size difference, but they also just appear different.) And, I would LOVE to be able to identify what type of ladybug (or ladybird beetle) each larva will be as an adult. If anyone has a resource, I'd love to know!

Here's a fairly late instar.

And, you can see this larva looks quite different.

Above this larva, you can see 2 wooly aphids. It was actually pretty amazing to watch these little guys eat -they are good hunters and eat a lot!

Here's a great shot of a larva starting to pupate. I love how you can see the legs folded under.

Here's a pupa.
And another one. Do you see how different they look? I like that this one looks like it is cracking, but it stayed like that for days.

And, even another one. Can you see the little spiky "things" that it is attached to the wall with? They're pretty strong.

And another one. I would also like to figure out what type of ladybug would emerge from each pupa. If I get another chance with ladybugs, I'll mark each pupa (put a sticker next to it) and wait to see what emerges - they usually come out in the morning, so I don't think it'd be too hard.

Here's a newly emerged ladybug!

And another one. This one was really tiny! I still haven't quite figured out if ladybugs just get their spots later on. Does anyone know? Most of the ones we find early in the morning are spotless or have very faint spots.

And another. I need to identify all of these. :-)

Like I said, I actually have hundreds of photos, but I will only share a few more sometime soon. I did find my first GRAY ladybug and that was a real treat!

Our Backyard This Weekend

While Alexandra and my husband swam Sunday evening, I walked around the yard taking some photos. (It is stilll too cold for me!)

This is the center of one of our sago palms - I believe these are baby leaves forming.

Our bush beans have gotten huge! I can't believe we're actually successfully growing veggies!

I've photographed these tiny spiders several times. They come in several colors and I love the "happy face." They're called spiny-backed orb weavers.

And, our sunflowers! I was really afraid they weren't going to sprout, but they did! So, we'll see how we do with these. They are our first sunflowers ever, too!