Field Guide Extravaganza

It's been a while since I posted some nature pictures from the house. This scorpion was hanging out under my daughter's sand box. I was on the deck by the pool, when I went to move it I found a gazillion termites nomming away and this scorpion. I was able to go get my camera, cut out the wood and turn it over and he was still there. Got quite a few pictures, the best were with my canon point and shoot in digital macro mode.

A spider we found in the pool. He was dead I think.

There's been an awful skunk smell for the last week or so, then we finally saw a skunk carcass in the neighbors yard, it was easy to see, it's where all the flied were (yuk!). Not long after, two Turkey Vultures showed up to nom it.

Just today I was pulling up weeds when this 24" long king snake got pretty upset with me and started shaking his tail at me. It even rattled. It was super scary.

On a foggy summer morning the spider webs look pretty awesome. This one's quite the mess in our orange tree.

This is more like it and stretches from our orange tree to our lemon tree.

This one reminds me of the article about how different drugs affect the webs of spiders.


As usual I'm now adding these pictures to the Field Guide Album as I find them.

Owl House

Here's something else that's been gathering dust in the garage. I got out my huge ladder and screwed this thing to the big tree out front. We can't see the box from the house since I wanted it to be not north facing, but it's easy enough to go and peek and and it's even possible we could set up an owl cam from the studio above the garage. Now we just need some owls to come live in it.

I found the Owl Shack FAQ a useful reference (even though this isn't an own shack).

I'll let you know if anyone moves in.

Bat-tacular

We were all swimming in the pool yesterday around 5pm and suddenly we spot a bat flying around. As usual it was completely silent as it swooped around. We got a great view of the bat flying around the pool as he made a few passes and then he swooped right in very low over the water, right towards me and took a little drink out of the pool! It was awesome very cool to see him up close, a little frightening that he was heading right towards me.

Obviously we didn't get any pictures since we were in the pool without our camera. But here are some pictures we took recently.

Here's a Jerusalem Cricket that Granny found in our daughter's room, right in the middle of the floor, just hanging out. Who knows how he got in there but we've found them in weird places before (once in the laundry machine).

Here's a gopher snake we saw when going for a little walk at a county park nearby. He was pretty lethargic, even though it was pretty warm outside, I guess we just didn't bother him much.

New Pool Filter

The pool's been getting grimmer and grimmer all winter long. I knew the sand needed replacing in the filter, but then the filter was starting to rust through, so I figured I'd wait until winter was over and then change it. The pool guy kept reminding me and I finally did it. I found the filter I wanted online pretty cheap and he matched the price which was nice (except for sales tax) and he delivered it, but I had to install it.

It's powered by diatomaceous earth and I found out I needed to get 6lbs of that before I could install it. So that put me back a day. There was a need to hurry you see since we had a pool play date planned with a classmate of my daughter on Sunday. I finally got it installed on Friday night, and mixed up the DE and coated the filter and had it running all night long. Here's a picture of the new filter. The pool works at a much lower pressure than it used to with the sand filter, this will put less strain on the motor so that makes me happy.

In the morning the pool was blue! It was amazing. I did some quick vacuuming up of some green algae on the bottom and it's been spotless ever since. I'm delighted!

There's a few more pictures of the old pool pump area (with a broken skimmer pump, old crappy sand filter) and the new area and a shot of inside the old sand filter over in the Photo Gallery.

It was also a bumper weekend for wildlife too. When I went to check on the pool and the filter around bedtime it was already dark and I saw a big alligator lizard under a plant. Then I saw a huge king snake that must have been over 18 inches long. Just slinking along across our driveway. Also last week I found a huge black widow spider in the garage, just hanging out on one of the cabinet doors. The spiders have been going crazy recently with the super hot weather, and heading into the house, we've chucked out lots this week. We catch and release ALL spiders around here, even the black widows. We also finally got a pretty o.k. picture of a blue tailed skink, he was hanging out by the back door in the sun.

This afternoon I patched a few holes in the driveway and while I was doing it there was another 2ft long king snake on the hill by the driveway, he even rattled his tail at me! When I got wifey to come look at him she noticed there were TWO of them on the same hill and they weren't the same one we'd seen the other night!

Critter Sightings

It's been a while since I posted anything or updated the field guide. So here's some recent pictures of critters.

We have this critter proof bird feeder which is only supposed to feed the ickle birdies. However the squirrels just rock it and rock it and then eat what falls out, similarly for the acorn woodpeckers, so any little birdie that's trying to eat at it will have quite the roller coaster ride. It's fun to watch the circus though.

I think this birdie got too fat at the bird feeder and now he won't fit through the bars! He had an amazing bright yellow bit on his head which of course I didn't capture in the photo. I took the picture through our windows and it was hard for the camera to focus, I should learn how to manually focus I guess.

Quite a nice humming bird picture. They continue to thrive at our house and visit often.

I think this is the biggest king snake we've seen at the house. He must have been at least 2 feet long. This was just in front of the garage and then he slithered over to our front step and snuck into a pipe that leads to our downspout, I bet it was very comfy in there for him. We haven't seen him since, but we did spy a teeny little king snake around the same area so perhaps this big snake was a girl snake and about to give birth? The little snake slithered into a impossibly small crevice under the front step and vanished, makes you wonder what else is living under there. Oh well, King Snakes can eat rattle snakes and aren't venomous so we're kinda happy to have them around.

An adorable deer family have been visiting a lot, eating the ivy off the trees and generally trying o eat everything they can. I managed to catch a picture of these guys on the driveway which I'm pretty pleased with.

and elsewhere...

This is a California Giant Salamander, he was really big and a little grumpy when my wife tried to move him off the trail (we were mountain biking). He made a great hissing growly noise and we left him alone, It was early in the morning (6:30AM) so he hadn't warmed up yet I don't think.

An adorable We also saw a raft (or paddling) of ducks. Check out the last one, he's so fresh he hasn't even turned from yellow yet. Awww, how precious.

More pictures in the ever expanding field guide gallery.