I saw one of the stray cats that hangs around our office building eating a baby snake. I showed my husband and said, “Now that’s the kind of cat we could really use around the house!”, but he was unmoved.
BIG moose walking down my driveway yesterday evening. Full rack, one of the biggest I’ve seen. Drives the dogs a bit crazy.
A bear broke into my Wife’s car about 2 weeks ago. Well, opened the door. The just pull on and open doors on new cars make it easy, and this guy figured it out pretty easily. Same thing happened to a neighbor. My Wife’s center console compartment won’t latch anymore, I need to take a look at it. Other than that, It was just footprints on the seat, so not much damage.
I always look around when I step out of our house.
We had a little over seven inches of rain fall Sunday morning. These were taken about two hours after the creeks crested.
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/eT6HwUFLRIeM4t_4p7mN3w.Flj76REcg0vRacgtYYq5kX
The creek that runs though our neighborhood. The bridge is usually twelve feet high.
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/nPWpIBCfTMSAu75ehkoLfg.Aq19FbVV1zpTgd1kibfJYT
This is Mill Creek, about four miles upstream from the USGS flood guage that measured 19.5 feet. It’s normally 3 - 4 feet. Twelve feet is flood stage. Fifteen feet is moderate flood stage. Twenty feet is major flood stage.
I watched a fisher chase a squirrel up a tree. The fisher was as fast as lightning. It made me wonder if they can leap from tree to tree like the squirrels can.
I walked past the duck pond on my late afternoon walk. It’s filled with Canada geese and mallards. I noticed an odd looking “duck”. After watching it for a while I saw him spread his wings and stretch out his neck and realized it was a cormorant! I’ve only seen cormorants a few times in the last 20 years.
I have some Peegee Hydrangea bushes that are heavy with flowers that have now turned from white to pink. When I get up close to the bushes, I can see honey bees, bumble bees, bald-face hornets, yellow jackets, sweat bees, hover flies - all together on the same bush.
There was a great big Sphinx moth in my laundry room last night (okay, he wasn’t “in nature” but he got rapidly returned there). I found out the name by Googling “Art Deco Moth”, which is what I would have named it.
On the way home from work last night I saw a huge frog sitting in the middle of the road. I stopped my car and got out to put him over to the side. As I reached down he let out a loud “MAAAAAAAAA” and then loudly plopped across the road to the safety of the forest.
Sorry to be That Person (not really, this is the dope, and I am That Person, why hide it?) but I don’t think they were mating in that clip. Snail mating is a truly elaborate and weird process involving tiny darts (really, look it up if you don’t believe me) and a prolonged amount of time foot-to-foot, generally facing opposite directions, as both are hermaphrodite. There is variation between species, but that didn’t look like any I’ve ever come across… Just looked like one snail slithering over another to me.
Anyway, my cool encounter of the day was when on my way to take some honey off my bees. A sparrowhawk had just caught a partridge- it hadn’t even killed it when I got there, I think I just missed the catch. I sat down and watched it pluck and eat, from a distance of probably about 6 m, for a good half-hour, before I had to disturb it, because the light was starting to go, it was right by the apiary gate, and I really had to get the honey off today. It ate a good chunk of supper before flying off there wasn’t much but feathers and feet left.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to one for more than a quick flyby before; I guess it had enough reason to brave the weird human in a bee suit today, while normally there’s nothing to gain by hanging round near people.
You know those wasps that spoil your picnic by trying to land on and eat your tri-tip or barbecued chicken? They’re notoriously hard to track to their nests (which are underground burrows), but today on our walk we saw the entrance hole to a meat wasp nest. They were active and pouring out of the entrance, even though it was 6:30 in the morning and chilly. I read up on them, and at this time of year, they’re really jonesing for meat to feed their large end-of-summer larval family. That’s why your late August picnic draws such swarms of them.
Mr. brown wanted to chuck a rock down their burrow but I talked him out of it. Later I showed him a youtube video of someone digging out a meat wasp nest, and he’s now convinced that he should always give them a wide berth.
In the last few days I saw (we were away, and I couldn’t post on the day):
- A leveret (young hare) right next to our hotel (in Weymouth, Dorset) standing upright in the grass and looking at me in a highly suspicious manner
- An adult hare running down a gulley on the downs
- A kestrel stooping four times in rapid succession, over a period of just over a minute, I would guess (also on the downs). I was surprised by how slow each stoop was - it wasn’t just a surprise tactic, the bird was clearly adjusting its path to track the prey as it descended. After every stoop it hauled itself up to hover again, at a height of just a few meters, apparently following the same target; except for the fourth stoop, after which it flew off, presumably with a tasty snack for the kids.
j
You could be right, but most snails do not have love darts, and they were in contact for over 4 minutes in realtime. (And it would be a pretty big coincidence for the top one to completely randomly drop down on to tge bottom one.)
Treppenwitz, you visited Watership Down? 
Owls are cool. We heard an Eastern screech owl calling at dusk.
Last night it was a cow bellowing in the distance. Not sure what got her riled up, except I had just had a nice bowl of Blue Bell Moo-lennium Crunch ice cream.
In addition to the recent Sphinx moth, I also saw an Imperial moth in our horse stall, and a Luna moth hanging on the side of the office building where I work. These things are frikkin’ vast!
I saw one of those skinks earlier this summer up in Michigan. Amazingly beautiful.
Over the past weekend, we were back in Mich, and some friends stopped by to walk around hunting mushrooms. The most interesting (and tastiest) one we found was a Lion’s Mane.
(Sorry - can’t figure out how to link an image.)
Oh, how lucky for you! Luna moths are sooooo beautiful.
P.S. I thought the same thing: Watership Down came to life!
Uh - here’s a confession: I’ve never seen Watership Down. But - and I’m not joking here - that leveret had very striking eyes. I wouldn’t have chosen the word bright, but I wouldn’t argue too much with it. Does that fit in?
j
PS: distribution of hares in the UK is supposedly widespread, but this is the first time I’ve seen them in about a decade.
@Treppenwitz Don’t worry about watching Watership Down. But if you’re a reader, oh, what a book!
In keeping with the thread, I got to watch a pair of crows harass a very large hawk Top Gun style.
We’ve had a lot of cottontail rabbits here this summer. Just saw a really cute little young one today. Unfortunately the little bastids have also been eating all my flowers.
Buzzard watch update: Today we walked the South Downs from Jack and Jill to Ditchling Beacon (specimen view) and back. On the scarp (north) side, four buzzards were engaged in a 20 minute aerial dogfight, presumably over hunting rights. The fighting technique, it seems, is to get above your opponent and then drop onto them; and the preferred method of evading the attack is to fold up your wings, drop like a stone, and then unfold to veer sideways out of the way. Presumably they fight with talons, but we were way too far away to see that level of detail. But none the less, it was spectacular.
j
ETA Just noticed, so I’ll do it myself: interesting post/avatar combination
Rain from a cloudless sky. I have never seen this before - there were no clouds overhead, or nearly overhead, or even not-nearly-overhead. Just pure blue sky - there were wisps of cloud on one horizon, and that was it.
If you google “Rain from a cloudless sky” you find a wiki page for serein, and the description there
This sort of rain is said to take on the form of a fine, light drizzle
is bang on. The article continues with “typically after dusk”, but it was about 10AM when we saw it. It lasted maybe two minutes, and was gone. Very strange.
j