I think I saw Bugs Bunny do that in a cartoon!
I think I saw Paul Newman do that in Cool Hand Luke. Shaking it here Boss, still shaking it!
“Frogger” mousie style.
Michigan got semi-spring warmth and rain, so the lilacs are doing this:
Ha ha, exactly!
oops
- back in a mo
j
First reptile of the year. As the range just appears to be Europe, I had better clarify that this is a slow worm. So: a legless lizard, not a snake.
j
On another subject…
Bluebells are more or less over now, but it’s been a great year (visually) for wild garlic. I’m specifying visually because it’s been very dry for several weeks, and for the fabulous aroma of wild garlic, you need a bit of moisture – so that’s been sadly lacking.
Because it’s been dry I’ve been riding trails, frequently with the trail lined with garlic, I haven’t been able to take a photo which captures this – the best I could do was actually this flight of steps in Borde Hill Gardens.
j
Hmm, interesting. I’ve never met one of these things (and am not likely to have the opportunity).
A lovely place you’ve got there!
That was on our allotments, on a neighbor’s plot. So I’m extremely jealous.
Interestingly, slow worms give birth to live young. (Edit: not quite, it seems (my bad); delivered in eggs which they immediately exit.)
j
You could potentially meet a distant cousin 
. We’ve got several very similar-looking legless lizards in the U.S., they just tend to be little seen since they often like to stay under leaf-litter.
I sure could! They’d love it in my yard.
Let’s simply call them ovoviviparous.
Today I accidentally dug up a baby pokeberry plant. Look how big the taproot already is. (The whole thing is maybe 8 inches long.)
My daughter took this picture today of two alligators. See them?
Cute!
Pity they grow up and then try to eat you .
In the campground at Pinnacles National Park yesterday, an acorn woodpecker. These guys are very common in the oak woodlands of California. Their “waka waka waka” call is very distinctive – supposedly it was the inspiration for Woody The Woodpecker’s “laugh”.
I haven’t seen it yet but … On my allotment one of my fellow allotmenteers has found the sloughed skin of a grass snake. So now we know that there are still grass snakes active on the allotment. This is a much bigger deal in the UK than it would be in - say - the US. Excellent news!
j
I’ve been growing my Amophophallus konjac plants in the same 26 x 36 inch container since 2014. This year I needed to relocate the container, so in early March before they woke up for the year I dug out ever corm I could find (around 70 of them), moved the soil to the new location in three wheelbarrow loads, moved the container, refilled it, and replanted the corms. In the past couple of weeks this year’s leaves have started breaking the surface and I have been transplanting some of the corms to new containers to give them more growing room. Three times while digging I unexpectedly ran into long “stems” where the leaf had already opened underground and the corm was somewhere deep towards the bottom of the container. All three times the thin “stem” broke and I found only one of the tiny corms: they were so small that I had missed them in the soil while transplanting and they ended in the bottom of the container.
Tonight I found a leaf breaking the surface around a half-inch from the wall of the container. That’s obviously too close and I definitely wouldn’t have planted it there so I knew it had to be another small corm that was missed when dug everything out.
I started slowly digging with my fingers as carefully as I could trying to reach the corm without breaking it the stem. I ended up with this. It amazes me that a corm that small can produce a “stem” that long, and I wonder how much further it could have continued reaching for the surface before running out of energy.
I replanted it a little distance away from its original spot, more shallow but still much taller than ideal. (It’ll have the container wall for some protection.) While replanting it I uncovered another small skinny leaf-tip, but it was far enough from the wall that I didn’t need to try to dig it out this year.
People actually eat something named “shapeless penis”?