You have to look really close, but in my azalea flowers is a black swallowtail.He is busy gathering all the nectar he can from these fleeting
flowers, so it was really hard to get a shot of him. The flowers are usually there less than a day or two at the most, so anyone who wants to have some of their sweetness needs to move fast!
This little green tree frog thought it would be great fun to play hide and seek with us in the kitchen. He went from counter to stove top and then off onto the ceiling. At one point, he was hiding behind the china cabinet. His hop to the ceiling required me to grab a chair and climb up after him. I put my hand over him, he peed on me, I let him go in a hurry and he skidded under the front of the refrigerator. I jumped off the chair and chased him around the kitchen on my hands and knees. Then he made the mistake of jumping onto the wall. I got him! I slid a piece of cardboard between him and the wall and set him free! He’s on my stove top in this photo.
Apparently, I did not go out much in January, but the birds did. This is just a small group of the hundreds of blackbirds that descended upon my backyard in a feeding frenzy. I am not sure what they are eating, but I am going to guess that they were picking up berries from the nasty old pepper trees. The ground was blanketed in some areas with birds, but this was as quick as I could point and shoot at that moment. Not very spectacular. Those are lemons on the ground.
I don’t know what was going on or why they were doing this, but there was a great event going on in the sky one afternoon. As you can see, it was a clear, blue afternoon when all of these white pelicans suddenly decided to flock across the sky. There were a lot more, but I could only get so many of them into the shot. Now, I do live a block off the Sebastian River on the Sebastian Inlet where Pelican Island is located, so we do get a lot of these birds on a normal basis. Normally, they do not look like this; they usually fly in a long train formation. They must have been on their way to a dip in the river.
High up in one of the trees along side our empty pond was this beautiful Luna month in all of its glory. It had been resting in the grass, but as soon as I went in, got the camera and got back out, it was flying into the trees. It is in same place as the monarch landed last month. Must be something about that plant/tree that intrigues the butterflies and months enough to land in it.
I spent this spring working really hard to plant and cultivate a butterfly rich garden area in order to attract Monarchs and other of these wonderful fruit bearers. I even planted a single stalk of milkweed as a special treat for my Monarch friends. That one stalk now has six or seven offspring, and one of them has started to bloom already. While this beauty was not on my milkweed, he was busy flitting about in the late autumn sun. It was great to see him, and he is not alone, and that means that my garden has attracted them.
When I stopped by my Australian fern, this guy was busy sunning himself. I didn’t think he would stay still long enough for me to get any photos of him, but he stuck around for quite a while. In fact, while I was busy taking his photo, he was busy posing for me. The one thing that you are unable to see is that his little mouth was chewing and chewing. It was as if he was trying to tell me something. Such a beautiful creature, and he and all of his friends are more than welcome to come and live in my yard.
I was busy doing something in the yard, like maybe watering my hibiscus, and as I was puttering around, this little guy popped his head up and wanted to know why I was upsetting his morning by moving his leaves around. He posed for me quite a few times, and I took a lot of photos of him, but this is one of my favs.
This guy caught my attention as he crawled all over one of the garden
chairs. I had never seen anything like him, and in some ways, he reminded me of the big tomato worms with those big eyes on his back. Come to find out, he is a large click beetle. He was about two inches long and had big spotted wings. His claim to fame is if he falls on his back, he clicks his wings together in an effort to right himself. That way he makes a lot of noise. Those big, extra eyes don’t hurt him in his quest for safety from becoming some bird’s meal.
As if it wasn’t enough that we had a visiting peacock last month, this month we had a pair of armadillos that were wandering through the yard poking holes in the ground doing only what I can assume is their method of hunting. They were busy and did not seem the least bit perturbed that I stalked them all over the yard taking their picture. Here is one of them that managed to almost step on me.
Julie L. Cleveland 