I’m with you there. Though every season has its charm, I do like hearing the birds and seeing their activity building nests, feeding chicks, protecting them as they fledge and eventually driving them off. So spring is tough to beat. Watching the plants swell with fresh new growth is also exciting. By late summer -our dormant season- all that rampant growth starts to look a little worn.
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Red Cup fungi of some sort…patches of green tubers coming up. It is still very early spring here and the trout lilies have not yet bloomed.
Summer here seldom is hotter than the upper 80s. Winter is pretty dead as far as growth for 5 months of the year, (November through March), so I love the other seasons
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Can’t load a video that shows it better. But maybe it’s visible in the pictures. It’s pretty cool and crazy. It’s a limb from a southern magnolia that grew out and rooted to the ground and the sprouted back up as another sapling lol.
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Wow those red cup fungi look like bowls of pure red pigment.
@SkovandOfMitaze, plants are so versatile. Puts the ability of lizards to regrow a lost tail to shame. So many plants seem to depend on falling over and rooting again where they land. All my cultivars of Aeonium arborem begin to develop roots once they get more than a couple feet tall.
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We had a good friend from Mississippi. When I first met him, I asked him from which part of Mississippi he came. I asked him if it was from the north or the South. He said there is no northern Mississippi!
That southern foliage is sure pretty
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Southeastern USA is definitely my personal favorite plant communities and climate. A lot of creation can’t be captured in images. It’s so much better when all the senses are engaged. Not everyone is the same but one of my favorite things is the humidity. I love the stickiness of it on my skin and the high moisture content of each breath. I like nature more than I like civilization but a 80/20 minute is my favorite. As mentioned before even the house I am building for myself is focused more on still being able to take advantage of and enjoying the outside while even inside.
The house is only 28x28 and is two story on pilings so the first floor will start about 12 feet above ground. One half of the bottom with be walled off on each side with louvers and screened in. The other half will be for parking. The first floor will just be two small bedrooms and bathrooms and a large kitchen and small theater style living room. Besides that room all the rooms will have lots of tall windows for natural light and keeping fresh air in. The top floor will just be a large master bedroom and bathroom taking up half the area and he other area , the roof of the first floor, will be on a low pitch and will be a private outdoor patio. The wall on that side of the top floor will be almost all windows and sliding g doors with sliding screens on the inside so that if I want I can completely open up that area like in fall and enjoy fresh cool air all night and I am using some sky windows and even sections of open glass floors so you can be in the kitchen and look down below you at a shade garden. Also wanting some large wrap around decks on the bottom. I want to be able to enjoy so much of gods creation while still being inside. Even building cat walkways inside the house so they can run around and play with little platforms like 10 feet off the ground. I’ll probably eventually have like 200 indoor plants. I want the interior to be designed with natural things like pressed flowers in frames, rough bark trim and crown molding shelves with rocks, minder also, shells, and I even have someone who can track down things like mammoth tusks and I’m hoping to find some giant sloth skulls lol and have other fossils.
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I do too! Growing up in West Africa, in the dry Sahel grasslands near the Sahara, the parching northeast wind from inland switches about April 15 to coming from the humid ocean southwest. The plants all open their leaves and your skin softens up. Everything smells better and more alive. The local Hausa people even have a special name for the humid wind…“Bazara.” I heard a song about that change that goes like this:
Allah, Ka kawo ruwa da iska,
My ji sanyi, sanyi!
Lord, bring water and wind,
We will feel cool, cool!
Rain usually starts the end of May and lasts 3 to 4 months. Then the wind switches around again, and everything turns brown again. My American family thought I was crazy to like humidity but I think that was the reason.
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It didn’t upload today, though. 
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Thanks! Sorry. I think it is fixed now
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Lovely! I guess we’re not the only ones who just had another dose of winter. “Poor man’s fertilizer,” some call it.
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Moving on from winter to spring, here’s a picture of some blossom that I took today from my bedroom window. Sussex, England:
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Hi Randy (& other Forum visitors)
I thought you might enjoy this photo my younger daughter sent me from their mini ranch on the banks of the Yakima river in Washington. Soon after they cleared the land of sagebrush, some 25 yrs ago, I paid yearly visits there, but since I’ve limited my traveling, we keep in touch via email.
I have these (+ 100s more going back prior to our courting days in 1945) on my Pikstar (sp.?) located beside the recliner chair that I use for a bed. So I can look at them as I start each day, recalling how blessed I am for the 94+ years of happy life the good Lord has granted me.
Stay well in these trying times.
Al Leo
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Mid-April mid-Nebraska mid-afternoon raccoon:
And he/she wasn’t starting to scratch – I took an iOS Live photo and looked at it frame by frame. It really lifted both fore- and hindfeet that high as it was walking. I had noticed long ago that their backs are really arched, artificially, it seems, like they are wearing jackets that are too tight, when they walk. 
Maybe high-stepping helps explain it.
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We had a run in with one of those masked bandits here last August. My younger dog who was taught young by my older female to submit in the face of force did his best to put a stop to their attack by squealing like a pup … with the predictable result. It was late at night and I had to run out there into a dark corner where all their screaming and his squealing was coming from in order to effect his rescue. This is his yellow badge of … ‘courage’. The worst of it was on his butt where the deepest bites required a stint to be put in, the reason for his extra wide sombrero.
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I gave that a very qualified “Like” because of your pet’s injuries. Yeah, raccoons are not to be messed with.
Last week when I was taking down snow fence I saw what I at first thought from its tail was the carcass of an orange tabby. A closer look quickly told me that it was red fox rowed kill (as in row crop ). It hadn’t occurred to me until you mentioned your pet’s altercation that the fox may have mixed it up with a raccoon and lost, although I didn’t examine it closely for wounds – there were no major ones that immediately caught my attention.
I didn’t spend much time with it, though. A zoologist or someone else specializing in the critters might be able to suggest something about its age from its teeth:
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It’s crazy to me it’s still cold in some places. Here it was in the 80°f today and I went hiking early this morning before work. Found some cool insects.
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Nice.
Your caterpillar photos remind me of one common around here that my family calls “dill worms” because they are always on dill plants. Actually black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, the defensive mechanism of hidden and then ‘inflating antlers’ is really remarkable (hence my remarking ), somewhat analogous to airbags, but fluid-filled. They of course deploy when picking them off your dill plants.
Not my photo:
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