BINGO! It’s a classic groundhog den. There’s one under our shed, and two under my shed at work.
I momentarily considered trapping and relocating him, but my Havahart trap baited with apples would be too tempting to the horses. Looks like we’ll be coexisting.
Saw a skunk while out walking on Friday night, and today, in broad daylight, saw three deer grazing in someone’s front yard not far from here.
I forgot to post this the other day, but I was on jury duty all week last week. The courthouse in Sacramento is this 1960s brutalist building. In front of the courthouse is this mostly concrete plaza, with concrete benches arranged in two circles on either side, with a fountain (which has been turned off to conserve water) with some abstract concrete sculptures in it in the middle. Man, architects in the 1960s really loved concrete. But there are some trees planted in holes in the concrete, which I suspect were planted decades later.
So during our lunch break one day I bought food from a taco truck near the courthouse and was eating it on one of those benches. And then from behind me I heard “Tap. taptaptap. Taptap.” I turned around, and there was a female Nuttall’s woodpecker pecking away in the tree right behind me. Seeing that little bit of nature amidst all that concrete really brightened my day.
Preamble: Remember the first Men in Black movie? During the opening credits, a dragonfly is flitting up, down and all around until it flies into extreme close-up before splott-ing into the windshield. We have a small screened-in porch with a doggie door which is, of course, at ground level. Dragonflies are constantly getting in, but can’t figure out how to get back out, so – soft touch that I am – I open the screen door and hold it open until they can exit (sometimes it takes forever). Today, the little monster flew out the door and straight into my nose, so I got an extreme close-up of a dragonfly-face. He needed a shave. And a breath mint. 
That’s actually wonderful. Maybe not the breath mint part…
A tarantula hawk was crawling on one of the big hallway windows in my condo building. I managed to open the window and very patiently wait for it to successfully escape. You never want to aggressively shoo a tarantula hawk 
. We back open air against a regional park and they occur in my county, so it wasn’t quite a shock. But I have never seen one anywhere near the coast in my area, so it was a surprise.
About as delightful as seeing a praying mantis, with an added little bit of caution of avoiding that sting (they’re pretty mellow, though - arrogant like a skunk). First time you see a big one cruise by it’s such a shock that you think you’re being buzzed by a 747-sized wasp. They’re HUGE. Relatively speaking 
. I once saw one dragging a pretty massive tarantula through the grass to its lair - it was a mighty impressive sight.
Wow!
The female tarantula hawk wasp stings a tarantula between the legs, paralyzes it, then drags the prey to a specially prepared burrow, where a single egg is laid on the spider’s abdomen, and the burrow entrance is covered.[[3]]When the wasp larva hatches, it creates a small hole in the spider’s abdomen, then enters and feeds voraciously, avoiding vital organs for as long as possible to keep the spider alive.[3] After several weeks, the larva pupates. Finally, the wasp becomes an adult and emerges from the spider’s abdomen to continue the life cycle.
God may have an inordinate fondness for beetles, but apparently hates tarantulas.
Saw a murmuration of starlings, as we often do this time of year. (no, spell check, not a menstruation of starlings. That’s not even a thing)
(not my picture)
I could watch that action for quite some time and have done so. They’re fascinating.
Looks evil to me – EVIL, I tells ya!
Yeah, I like it too.
Back from Crete and…There’s an old Goon Show joke that I can only half remember. Bluebottle (I think) is searching for his keys, when he is accosted by Seagoon.
Seagoon: Where did you lose them?
Bluebottle: Inside.
Seagoon: What? Then why are you looking outside?
Bluebottle: The light’s better.
I mention this because, after seeing this guy on the (open) top deck of a bus (click for full image) -
- I compulsively stared at trees for days. Nothing, of course - all it got me was a headache.
On our last full day, we met up with friends who had just arrived. You won’t believe what we found on the roof of our hire car when we picked it up, they said…
Actually, I would. Sometimes it’s just a good idea to search where the light’s better.
j
We don’t get enough fish in this thread. OK, so pictures of fish are not so very interesting; but we spent a lot of time wandering around ancient and pretty harbors, looking at the shoals of fish, and I idly wondered if it would be possible to take a worthwhile picture.
Now, for all the time we idled away fish spotting, only once, and for no more than about a second, there was a brouhaha in the shoal, with fish thrashing around and jumping out of the water for no discernible reason. And, unbelievably and entirely by accident, that’s when I took my picture. Here it is, click for the full image:
Something we’ll never really resolve: for the first time, I watched a vector of ten or twelve herons flying offshore. Googling suggests that they might well have been purple herons, but they were to far away to be identified.
j
Oh, that turned out really pretty. 
If you would like some more squirrels, just let me know and I’ll be happy to catch a few dozen of ours, slap some stamps on their butts and send them your way
Of course in a month or two, we’ll just have a few dozen more that have moved over from elsewhere ::sigh::
I’ve been away for a bit, so my latest nature contributions are these:
A Western Jackdaw in a tree that was growing out of the sheer rock wall of the Corinth Canal in Greece:
and a cricket that I saw while visiting the ancient city of Corinth, which was sacked by the Romans.
It was cold and rainy this weekend. Took a picture of this lil dude in our yard. My gf shredded some romaine and chopped up an apple and left it by where he was sitting.
Yesterday (10/15) at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland:
Some nice water plants at the edge of a lake:
Fungi with interesting color:
No sign of a beaver, but a beaver’s lodge:
Both bald eagles and an osprey. I forgot just how close to the river my new home is, and the new workplace is even closer.
Sunday, I was about to open my balcony door wide to let some fresh air in when I spotted a yellow jacket waiting on the windowsill for an entry opportunity. Oops, door remained closed.
We’re on the road and yesterday stopped in Florence, Oregon for lunch at a fish joint right on the water. There was a dock right outside the restaurant’s windows, and two or three crab pot fishermen were there. They’d toss their crabpots, baited with chicken, far out into the water, wait five minutes and then drag them in. Every time, the crabpot was loaded with Dungeness crabs. But almost all of them were too small and were thrown back. About every fifth toss resulted in a keeper crab.
It was funny to see them haul in the pots swarming with small crabs, some of which fell to the dock and skittered wildly around before going over the edge into the water. A flock of seagulls were in close attendance, eyeing the small crabs, and obviously wishing they could dive in close enough to the fishermen to snap them up. But the little guys all got away.
I wish I had some of those keeper crabs they were catching.