I think dusk walks may be a feature of this vacation.
j
The weird thing was Simi wasn’t bothering birds/fish at all. He was just standing on the dock watching nature.
I’ve noticed more fawns this year than ever before. When I mentioned this to other people they agree.
In my neck of the woods, we had a very, very mild winter followed by a summer lush with growth and food. I’ve seen a plethora of turkeys. If this winter is a normal one with lots of snow, there will be starvation or so I think.
This stinky fungus appeared within a few hours:
Anyone know what it is? I thought it might be a puffball, but it’s kind of the reverse - it grew from a spherical brown shell. It has a black exudate that smells somewhat putrid.
I searched for “stinky mushroom” and found it:
In America and Europe there is the beautifully named Phallus impudicus:
and the Phallus adriani:
Both similiar to each other, and quite interesting. Charles Darwin’s daughter was known to harvest and burn them to “protect the morals of the maids,” which she enjoyed a bit too much, the maids thought. By doing so, btw, she spread the spores of the Phallus in a most efficient manner. Yes, that is one reason why you harvest mushrooms with a basket: you release the spores as you walk.
Three years ago I had stinkhorns in my yard. Haven’t seen them since, which is odd. Many mushrooms I find (amanitas, puffballs, chanterelles) occur in the same area year after year.
Odd, the picture shows as a link for some reason.
Amanitas (most of them, anyway) and chanterelles are ectomycorrhizal and generally associated symbiotically with trees of some sort - you’ll generally see them coming up in the same area year after year to some degree if the conditions are right (though they are certainly capable of dying back). By contrast puffballs and stinkhorns are saprophytic/saprotrophic and are looking for suitable rotting material with the right conditions.
Saprophytic mushrooms just in general can be a little more hit or miss. You might for example see oyster mushrooms popping up on the same dead tree stump for many years in a row as the mycelial mass slowly eats the dead wood until one year the material becomes depleted of one nutrient or another or some environmental shock happens and it dies. But if you’re a mushroom that lives on leaf litter or a pile of mulch they might be there one year, gone the next.
This morning in nature I saw three of my sunflower plants broken on the porch and all the flowers eaten off them. The deer are getting way too bold around here.
Just got back from Alsace. Started big, nature-wise, with my first ever murmuration (Sept 9); then nothing until our final day in Alsace when, on the ramparts of Neuf-Brisach, I saw a praying mantis for only the third time in my life.
j
Scrub jays have been screaming a lot near our house for the past few days, for reasons unknown. Then today I looked out my upstairs bedroom window and saw a squirrel on the roof, rummaging in a rain gutter. He emerged (wearing a big clump of cobweb on his head) and had a whole unshelled peanut in his mouth. He bounded off with it and into our redwood trees.
So now I think I know what’s going on. Someone in the neighborhood has a bird feeder and is putting out unshelled peanuts. The jays fetch them and cache them around, and the squirrels are on the watch and go and steal their peanuts. The jays are understandably annoyed and scream fruitlessly from the trees. It’s funny, but it also makes it really hard to nap.
Lousy picture, but this Great Blue Heron followed our pontoon boat as we explored the river. He’d fly off when we got too close, then land and wait for us to catch up.
A week ago today, the Mrs. and I spotted this red fox along the road, deep in the woods at a park at the tip of Door County, Wisconsin. We used to have red, blue, and grey foxes living in our woods further south in the state, but the coyotes drove them off.
These garden spiders show up like clockwork at this time of year:
Chloé and I went for a hike this morning. We found this guy sunning himself.
The way I see it, those are two guys, or perhaps a guy and a gal. But cool nonetheless!
The camera on my phone isn’t the best. That’s a knob on the log next to the turtle.
I can only recognize a few types of aquatic turtles, but I get a kick out of the fact that there are cooters. Sounds like a totally made-up name.
Aren’t they all 
? One popular etymology is that it entered American English from Gullah as cootuh, derived from the Bambara/Malinke word for turtle, kuta.
I’m familiar with red fox (like in your pic) and grey fox, but … they come in BLUE now?!?