Summertime Critter Fun

Be sure to click on the pictures to enlarge!!

Our family loves studying critters and taking pictures to remember them by. We find all sorts of cool creatures.

A giant moth

We've found lots of turtles this year. Our little Dachshund Olivia finds them and we hear her barking her "turtle bark" and we have to rescue them.

A very strange looking bug

A butterfly sipping some apple juice. You can see it's long straw-like tongue sucking up the juice.

A flower within a flower

As fall draws closer we are seeing lots more of these guys. This was a really cool spider. It was all monochromatic with blacks and grays. He was hanging in the corner of our front door.

We went out to check out the multi-headed sunflower (a mutant from a giant gray striped one that that has reproduced to continue the multi-heads--there is like 10 or more flowers crowded all over the stem) and saw the bumble bee. The kids inspected it even closer and found this crab like spider. The bumble bee was dead and the spider was having a fancy gourmet dinner with its pincers embedded in the bee's head. Eeeewww!!

There were frogs and snakes too but couldn't find any of those pictures. I wish I would've gotten a picture of the enormous "writing" spider I found in the garden. It was the biggest I've ever seen and probably would have been as big as the palm of my hand all stretched out. Beautiful. All yellow and black--the kind that writes the "zig-zags" in their webs.

We've also been "plagued" with raccoons this summer. A family of them. They drive our dogs crazy all night (thus driving us crazy too!) and steal food from the cat and dog feeders--expensive!! They're so cute though. Unfortunately they've killed all of our chickens... so cute or no cute, they have got to go!!