Just when I thought I had seen all the birds I was going to see, I happened to look up from my desk and watch a female turkey wander past the front of the house. So, I snatched up my camera and went out to take her photo. She was freakishly fast, and I ended up almost chasing her down the lane. I have a lot of photos like this that may make a great little animated short. I don’t know where she came from, but I know she was hightailing it out of my yard!
This is a juvie ibis poking around in the yard. He decided to help me plant flowers by poking holes in the yard. He spent a few days at my house ridding my yard of whatever it was that he was eating. Every now and then, the rest of his family would join him, and I would have a yard full of ibis wandering around. Eventually, they got tired of my yard and left.
This guy was so much bigger than he appears. He settled in on a limb of my lemon tree and gave me the opportunity to take his photo a number of times. Check out the crazy pattern on his back. It almost looks like a face.
I am glad that he has decided to rid my yard of mosquitoes since they seem to think that I am lunch. There are some days when the yard is just filled with them flitting about, and all I can think about is that there must be a whole lot of mosquitoes that I cannot see.
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.
Julie L. Cleveland 