I actually just started rewatching an older series , a horror series, about cicadas of sort. The Higurashi series.
Macro lens are cool. I need to get some for botanical and entomological based photography.
Oh my goodness … you’ve mulched the kids and the dog too!
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Not a great shot, but this bush was full on migrating Monarchs today. I was mowing and hundreds flew out when I passed. At least 4 in this pic.
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Old beaver damage to a tree, a yellow fern, spread gloriously among crackling leaves, fragrant wintergreen berries my son and I chewed on, and fall colors today when picking up my daughter from school in West Michigan
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A creek is our southern property line, and there are one or two or even three beaver dams on it every year. I used to like having beaver around until they cut down a 14" diameter tree! The one inch diameter or less saplings that they cut off with one chomp, leaving skewers about eight inches long sticking straight up out of the ground, are scary — you don’t want to trip and become impaled on one! This is not my photo, and these are in a clump and only representative, but imagine walking through an area containing a couple dozen one or two year old saplings evenly spaced, only a foot apart or less and cut off like this 
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I know beaver are important for the ecology of wilderness areas, but they are destructive to human occupancy in a couple of other ways. When they abandon a dam on a creek in a relatively flat area, the unattended dam does not wash away in a hurry. What happens fairly quickly is that the bank erodes around the ends of the dam, eventually even changing the course of the stream – I can lose real estate. 
One corner of our house is only sixty-five feet from the creek, and bank erosion is not my friend.
They cause erosion in another way, too, as well as posing another hiking danger. In a narrow area, they preferentially tunnel into the bank (even as far as twenty or forty feet, I think I have read) and below the waterline upstream of the dam, once it is built, instead of building the prototypical and picturesque lodge they are so well known for. They build their dens in the bank, then, and thatch the roof, and you can walk right over one unawares. Again the problem occurs when they abandon it. The thatch deteriorates and is now a serious hazard to someone walking, because the weak thatch is camouflage for the hole you can now step into, breaking a leg! When the den and dam are abandoned, the tunnel into the den is another place for erosion to begin as well, and eventually open up all the way, including the den. Thus there is again the potential for serious bank deterioration and the path of the creek to deviate – depending on several factors: water flow velocity and direction, soil composition, the presence of tree roots, etc.
One thing funny, though – it is only a couple of hundred feet from the creek across to the cornfield that abuts part of the other side of our ribbon of property, and guess what, the creatures will even cut off and drag cornstalks to their dam. Wouldn’t you know — we have corn fed beaver in Nebraska. 
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That would be quite a show so long as you don’t end up with an undercut foundation on your house or lying with a broken leg in an old den or impaled on a pointy stump. Fascinating creatures though.
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From over the last day or so. We have a cold front that came through and so it’s 51°f outside. Can’t stand the cold. I dislike winter though I try to make the best of it. At least in two more days it’s back in the 80°s.
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At least the cold makes the snakes and mosquitoes sluggish.
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I went for a drive with my wife to see the foliage, came around a bend and found this guy sunning him(?)self.
I put on leather gloves and gave him a short flight to the edge of the road. He was not pleased.
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That’s a big 'un! It’s been multiple decades ago, but a near a creek, a similar sized one was stopped in the middle of a county road we used to use a lot before some paving and a viaduct changed our route home for the better. It was near a curve in the road where people flying at 50 mph would have come upon it and not have had time to stop. It was also near an intersection where we turned onto that road, so I was not at speed. Thankfully, there was a big stick two and a half inches in diameter or so nearby, and it latched onto it quite snuggly and I dragged it off the road, no problem. Smaller than that it could have snapped right through it!
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Nice. We have snapping turtles and alligator snapping turtles where I live. It can be scary to move one if you’re not familiar with it. But at least when they are that small and weigh only like 20-30lbs you can pick them up from their shells. They are fairly limited in how they can attack. It’s like with a snake. They basically have one attack mode for us. Most of the time they can’t choke us to death , at least the wild ones, and so they can mostly just bite. Even the most venomous snake can’t hurt you when you’re holding it right.
I’m glad you helped move it. I do the same.
I’m exhausted. Woke up at 430am and went for a run snd then by 730 went hiking until 2pm. Then came back and have been using my pole saw to cut down trees. About to go back at it. Charging up my phone and listening to horror story podcasts.
That’s the trails I was hiking in though.
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Seagulls rising in the sun on a frosted field, horses warming up against fall colors this morning on the way to a walk with my boys and dog in a nearby wood.
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So I’m curious how far they can reach around with their heads. If you pick them up from behind with fingers about midway each side of its shell, does it have a long enough neck to reach around and snap you there? Did it make you glad you had the leather gloves on?
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I was curious about the same thing. . . He could not reach that far. They were thin leather gloves and I doubt they would have helped much. He did manage to brush my hand with a claw once.
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Here’s a closer shot. (Heavily cropped – I was more concerned about getting it out of the way while traffic was waiting than getting the closest photo.)
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Gnarly old beast! I wonder how old.
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You’re making me jealous. I don’t trust myself with a pole saw anymore because of the arthritis in my hands. But I got most of an overgrown Iochroma fuchsiodes thinned out today with loppers and a pole pruner. Still need to bring down the height. I might have to borrow a friend’s orchard ladder.
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Be careful! Ladders do not mesh well with folk of our age. ( I almost said to watch your language, I know those plants are aggravating, but you don’t have to call them names…)
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