Welcome, sit down, lend us your mind for a bit

“You started off last weekend telling us about the game convention, Al,” you say, “and then you go back to bug and snake pics. What happened with the convention, Nimrod?” Which is a little rude, I must admit, yet deserved nonetheless. So here’s what happened:


As I said, Dan Palmer (the driving force behind the Gnomon Deck) and I had two tables read more

Not waiting another week

I could have shelved this one for another Estate Find, but that’s a week away and I think I should keep you in the loop.

I had a feeling this was looming, yet did my check a little too late in the day to catch anything in progress – still, we have this.


That’s the egg case/ootheca of a Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) that we saw in an earlier, read more

It’s time

When did we last feature wood ducks? A couple of weeks ago? That’s enough of a gap.

Yesterday I looked out the office window and found a pair of the wood ducks (Aix sponsa) hanging out on the little log that serves as a turtle basking spot for the smaller species. They had a good view directly into my office window themselves, and so I shut off the lights therein to hopefully not disturb read more

Estate Find XIV

This one was a semi-targeted find – I figured some representative of the order would be visible around here soon, but this one showed up when I wasn’t specifically looking for it.


Instead of being anyplace along the water’s edge or among roots of trees nearby, this one was found in the middle of the driveway when we took the trash out last night. This is a very read more

Multitasking

Nearly all of the images herein were obtained while I was out last night after the month-end abstract – it was a nice night after an even nicer day and so the critters were making the most of it.

This one, however, is not from yesterday, but we have kind of a theme going so we’re running with it.


I’ve dealt with this too much before, but amphibians can be a real read more

What’s happening? Not March!

Do you think that, if I had readers, they’d be writing in to request that I hire someone else to write my titles? Let me know…

But March is on its way out the door, and you know what that means? No, not that you can finally let out that fart you’ve been holding in for hours – it’s the end of the month abstract! And we’re definitely pushing the deadline read more

Move forward, even just a little

Another holiday rears its ugly head today, serving as a reminder for those things that you’ve been putting off: Make Noticeable Progress on a Project Day. That’s right, pull that thing out of the box and try to make it work again, go out to the garage/yard and bang on the car some more, actually stir up the paint before the masking tape become a permanent part of the read more

Estate Find XIII (XIIV?)

I was talking to The Girlfriend while looking out the back windows over the pond, and realized that the bird I’d seen wheeling in the thermals fairly high up didn’t quite look right I’d been seeing plenty of turkey vultures the past few weeks, but this struck me as wrong. Luckily, the camera and long lens were right there (because of the ducks, and geese, and read more

Nobody dresses up these days

Knowing that I’d be tied up for the latter part of the week, I went out today to find a subject for the Estate Find, and/or see if any other snakes had emerged. I wasn’t successful on either count, finding only the typical subjects of the property so far, but a little later on I almost casually got the Find for this week, so no issues there. This guy had to be featured, though.


Naturally, read more

Estate Find XII

As I said almost a week ago, there was no question that this one was going to make the Estate Find this week – unless something really kickass popped up later on. But as I was taking care of a few yard details on Sunday, ol’ Eagle Eyes here spotted something stretched across the grass:


I’m being facetious of course, because this was really hard to miss. I consider read more

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