In our yard this morning we saw a patch of stinkhorn mushrooms! Pretty cool phallic shaped fungi that smell bad and attract flies, which help spread their spores.
I’m in a buncha gardening-type groups on Facebook, and my feed is filled with “WTH IS THIS?!” posts, courtesy of stinkhorns and assorted other bizarre fungal growths.
I briefly saw the woodchuck last night, so I guess he’s survived the gasoline-ing of his other den. He was at the “spare” den, which is known to my cats. I seriously doubt either would do anything more than STARE at a creature that size, but I wonder if this is gonna be enough to make him move on. Poor fella is probably thinking to himself, “This neighborhood is going to hell in a handbasket! Cats, gasoline … I must ring up the H.O.A. immediately.”
Whoa, that is…something. Really something. 
Yay, the woodchuck’s okay! Chuck you, neighbor!
Happy news ! Hopefully he’s in the process of digging a new palatial den nearby.
Today, as I turned the bike onto the Zig-Zag road* on Box Hill - well, pretty much at this point here - I saw a stand of half a dozen very impressive man orchids. Riding a bike up a hill isn’t the ideal way to identify wild flowers, but the only thing you could really get them mixed up with is a twayblade; but I was pretty confident from the look of them, and I’ve seen man orchids growing on this bank most years.
It’s been a strange year for orchids, very variable - common spotted orchids were very sparse on Box Hill; but there are 120 of them on our (small!) front lawn. I haven’t seen a single bee orchid this year. (I haven’t had a chance to go looking for the more exotic species so far).
j
* - quick reminder: notable because this was the feature climb from the 2012 Olympic road races.
I saw a hummingbird moth at my carnations. This is only the third time I’ve known that I’ve seen one, they look and act so much like hummingbirds.
Went out back after work this evening to discover TWO groundhogs, chilling about 25’ or 30’ up a tree. (Posted pics and a brief video to the Book of Faces.)
I mean, the pair was just … hanging out. Waaaaayyy up high.
There’s a downy woodpecker raising an unholy ruckus in a tree about ten feet from my side door.
He was shortly joined by another downy, who is confining itself to the occasional demure “cheep.”
(“Ah,” I said to myself. “That must be Mrs. Ruckus.”)
I can’t tell if there’s a nesting-hole feud between them and the local flock of $%#! starlings, or if they’re upset about the presence of a human + two cats, or … ?
They are the coolest! Just started seeing those these last few years.
@purplehorseshoe i never knew groundhogs could climb! Never seen one in a tree before. Cute!
The other evening I looked out the window into our backyard. Under the birdfeeder, as usual, was the mallard couple. She was eating sunflower seeds and he was on high alert. Eating alongside the ducks was a black gray squirrel and a red squirrel. Then out from under a lilac bush came a teeny little baby bunny. As I was watching them, I all of a sudden noticed two mid-sized buns eating clover closer to the house, and in the grandkids’ sandbox was another mid-sized bun. He was stretched out in the sand and then all of a sudden he would jump and roll around in it. He kept rolling, kicking, and stretching in the sand for quite a while. A couple of times he sat up and washed his face with his little paws. I assume he was using the sand as a kind of dry shampoo. There was so much going on - it was like watching a circus. I went to get my phone so I could video all of the antics but of course, when I got back to the window, the sand bunny was gone.
This lovely, little Jumping spider:
And this green snail from a couple days ago:
Saw some nice bird’s nest fungi.
On Montara State Beach this morning, I came across several pretty decent-sized (still alive) dungeness crabs at the edge of the surf. Here’s one scuttling past my foot heading back into the ocean.
Pretty snail! I’m less a fan of the spider.
When my kids were young, they’d freak out about those little spiders, so I had to find a way to deal with them. Whenever a kid started hollering about one of those itty things, I’d say, “Oh, that’s just our friend Gus! How ya doin’, Gus? Isn’t he cute?” Then all would be well.
Now, if a kid was freaking out about a real spider, I’d just join in the panic.
SimWife and I were out on a country road drive - watched a mama deer doing its best to teach a fawn how to jump a fence so it could cross the road with her. Try as she might she ultimately gave up and stayed on the first side.
Sorry for the really late reply! Maybe it is a Coypu. Wife and I currently think they’re beavers.
Someday we’ll ask someone local who actually knows.
I see these quite often each summer. For some reason, they freak me out slightly if they get too close. Of course, being a grown man, I walk away slowly rather than run. Mostly.
I was just going to ask if anyone had ever seen more than one groundhog at a time. I’ve seen umpteen of them but they are always alone. Great that you got pics!
Lightning bugs, and a lot of them. I’ve had to usher two of them out of the house today.
Man, I miss those. It makes me flash back to childhood summers at my grandmother’s house in western PA. Haven’t seen one in more than 40 years.
We had a few years in the mid-2000s where they were mysteriously absent, but we have been lucky to have many of them every year since then.