Encounter with the treacherous rough earthsnake
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Wow. That’s a regular wild kingdom you have there. Fantastic. The patterning on the spider is probably my favorite.
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I’m not sure which of the three spiders you are referring to. I presume it’s either the white banded spider that’s white and pink eating them bee or the female green lynx spider on my finger. The other tiny orbweaver in the grass is pretty but pales in comparison to either of those two.
Yeah it was a rough hike. The best trails are still full of 3-4 foot grasses and saplings. In several spots you have to walk 10 feet over creeks over fallen trees. In at least six spots I had to swim across.
Coolest thing I seen but was not able to get a picture of was of an American bald eagle that was flew from a pine limb into the woods or a purple and pink dragon fly that I think may have been the roseate skimmer. It’s roughly 3,000 acres of swamp.
Those places with the water was where it cut across the trails. The hardest part was the one with the log about 4 feet from the edge at a angle. The water there is pretty deep. So you have to squat down on the end and leap across it to the edge.
But for about 40% of the time the water is above your knees. It’s the hiking trail I take people I don’t like out too. Seriously. Instead of telling someone that I don’t really like them and they irritate me on hikes I take them here and pre warn them it’s rough. They still will come and after spending a few hours out there soaking wet getting bombarded with insects and dealing with the heat they will almost never ask to go hiking with me again. I’m about two months I’ll be heading out here for a really rough hike thst will be mostly army crawling in mud under thickets.
Almost every time I go hiking I have those two books on me. A Bible and a tree ID book. I ran into no one today. But most of the time I come across people and we chat and god comes up. So I’ll do lots of random Bible studies and set up later studies after the hiking that’s more specific to them. All part of the great commission.
New England Aster (purple), Staghorn Sumac, Virgin’s Bower (Devil’s Darning Needle or Woodbine), and Pandora Sphinx moth caterpillar on a bike ride tonight. Fall flowers are coming out that I had never noticed before. Beautiful!
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Definitely the female green lynx spider, though the white one holding the big bee was a challenge to sort out and nicely shocking once I did.
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Wow the caterpillar did not look real until I blew it up. Even then far from ordinary.
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Yes, it looked like a detached finger crawling across the bike trail! That is what caught my attention…it was big…about the size of an adult finger, too. Here is the Wikipedia.
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At first glance I thought it was a spicebush swallowtail caterpillar. Orange morph.
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I can see the resemblance. The only difference I can think of is there is no eye mimic at the front on this one, but my photo doesn’t demonstrate that well.
Spicebush swallowtail caterpillar
Pandora sphinx caterpillar
(copied from Wikpedia). I am still not sure! Good eye
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I can tell that that it’s different. I just initially thought it was the spicebush. They do look similar. I’ve not seen either species in the wild yet. Though I’ve been looking for the spicebush in the wild for several years. Spent many hours looking at spicebushes and sweet bay magnolias trying to find them.
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Some images I just took of how it looks at night looking out towards the forest and wetlands on the back of my property. So many noises. You hear birds, coyotes, frogs and new er ending amounts of insects.
That white stuff is the left overs of my uncooked pumpkin. Some goes to compost piles but a good portion gets brought out at night and placed in different spots for whatever wildlife wants it.
Wanted to show two pictures from earlier today of some roach species I found. Often roaches are viewed as being extra nasty but the reality is that they are just like other insects. Also wanted to show a side shot so that it becomes easier to see how they are actually closely related to mantises. They actually look very similar. Mantises, roaches and termites are all extant members of the super order Dictyoptera.
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Never knew that! I have always been fascinated by mantises–we would find egg clutches in our back yard, with multitudinous tiny ones hatching at once. We were told to stay away from touching them too much, as they carried worms. There are some scary videos on YouTube about worms erupting from mantis bodies to enter the water, but I don’t know if they can cross infect humans or not.
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Yes indeed. It was discovering this fact and then observing it in mantises and roaches that I was keeping at the time that was a factor in my ultimate abandonment of YEC. It wasn’t exactly a smoking gun moment, but let’s just say the barrel was uncomfortably warm.
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Sweetfern (actually not a fern but an angiosperm, the only species, "peregrina,’ currently existing of the genus ‘Comptonia,’), orange moss agaric (the tiny button-like fungi), a ghostlike mushroom, sassafrass with a yellow Fall tint, and ( I think) bog leatherleaf turning red.
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The book had a nice winter buds section. I’ll probably get it or one similar to really hammer down on buds and learn them. They are often pretty diverse, just like leaf margins, but over looked.
I don’t know what the purplish mushrooms are but they was pretty.
Some species of boletus mushroom. Really pretty.
Lastly is the beautiful fall colors beginning. It’s the winged sumac.
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Yes, those purple ones are gorgeous, and delicate!
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Thought you may especially enjoy this.
This is a blog to the podcast.
But there is a good podcast over an hour long on the evolution of spiders. It’s episode 123 of The Common Descent Podcast”. Pretty interesting. They are on most podcast platforms.
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Thanks, Mi. I will check this out.
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