Wild Terrarium in a Broken Jar

We found this in the woods the other day. I love it. Good job nature.

The Mushrooms of November 10th, 2015

Today is the first day in over a week in which it has not been rainy and cloudy all day long, so I decided to take a nice walk during my lunch break. With all the recent wetness I was not surprised to see a bunch of fruiting fungi while I was out and about. Here are some photos! Enjoy!

Honey bee take off

"I'm outta here!"

Black Walnut Harvest 2015

For the past several years now part of our autumn tradition has been to located a source of black walnuts (Juglans nigra) and harvest as many as possible. Fortunately for us, my wife has made several connections with people who have black walnut trees but little desire to keep the rock hard nuts themselves. So for us it is just a matter of driving to a location with a ton of buckets and bags on hand, and then load up. This is exactly what we did this past Monday evening.

Black walnuts in their green husks. This will fall off in a messy fashion after awhile, revealing the nut inside.

We filled both buckets and bags with the fallen nuts.

While not the hardest work, picking the abundance of fallen nuts can definitely be a bit time consuming.

In no time we had a ton of nuts.

We completely filled the trunk of my car.

And much of the back seat as well.

All told we probably managed to gather between 200 - 300 lbs of nuts on Monday (it'll be less once the husks fall off, and even further less once shelled). Now we wait for the husks to melt off, with the help of walnut husk fly maggots (Rhagoletis completa), and then dry cure the nuts. Then comes the real hard part, which is breaking the rock hard shells, which literally requires the use of a good hammer and a hard surface. But the payoff is a delicious and unique nut meat to make all sorts of goodies with. All around, a fun project.

One Big Mushroom

Driving home the other evening my wife pulled into a local swimming pool parking lot and said "I think I saw a good mushroom." This did not surprise me as the spot is one we have found interesting mushrooms at in the past. Furthermore, coming out of a week of heavy rains, it was more than reasonably that some fungi would be fruiting. Still, to have seen a good sized mushroom from the car, as dusk was settling, was pretty enticing.

The short and sweet of it was that it was indeed a "good mushroom." A big ol' Boletus bicolor, the Two-Colored Bolete. This is one of our favorite edible boletes in our region. While a little bit of care has to be taken to distinguish them from B. sensibilis (which is less brightly colored and stains a deep blue instantly upon cutting or bruising, as opposed to B. bicolor's very slow or lack of bluing) this is a pretty easy mushroom to recognize. Finding a dinner plate sized one, just on chance, is pretty exciting.

Bigger than my wife's hand. Pretty much a dinner plate of a cap.

It could almost be used as an umbrella.

Datana Caterpillars

The other day, while looking at plants throughout our friends' Justine and Sean's property, I found a whole bunch of weird caterpillars munching on the leaves of a young sourwood tree (Oxydendrum arboreum). After a bit of searching I have been able to determine that they are members of the Datana moth genus, most likely either yellownecked caterpillars (D. ministra) or contracted datanas (D. contracta). Whichever they are, they were real neat to look at.

Lunch Break Seed Savings

I went for a walking today during my lunch break and found a lovely patch of Sulfur Cosmos (Cosmos sulphureus) growing along the side of the road. A lot of them were going to seed so I took the opportunity to gather a good handful. My wife and I have been doing to active seed collecting and saving this year, and September tends to be a great month for it as many plants are finishing up their flowing. Sulfur Cosmos are a lovely and popular flower that is quite good at attracting pollinators and so definitely something that I would like to see grown in more areas. Gathering these seeds will provide a bit of a new batch somewhere next year.

Growing by the side of the road, these Sulfur Cosmos are a lovely and beneficial flower.

Seeds from the Sulfur Cosmos for replanting next year.

Fall stinkhorns

Pretty much every September these stinkhorn fungi start showing up. Stinkhorns are not only some of the strangest fungi, but they are some of the weirdest looking living things in general.

Spicebush swallowtail.

Spicebush swallowtail caterpillar with great mimicry.

Look at those false eye-spots!

Black Widow Spiders

Growing up in New England, black widow spiders were a known creature that was rarely, if ever, seen (occasionally there would be a report of one hitching a ride up north in some produce). Latrodectus mactans, the southern black widow (which is the species of the Latrodectus genus most associated with the "black widow" name), inhabits the southern part of the eastern US, and so is a rarity in the colder climes of New England.

When I moved to South Carolina I was aware that I would be living in an area in which black widows were native, but even so it would be almost a year in the region before I saw my own live specimen. That is in part due to the general reclusive nature of L. mactans. For all their notoriety, the black widow is in fact a very shy and passive spider, much preferring to run and hide as opposed to actively attacking with it venomous fangs.

Still, these are venomous animals and they should be treated with respect. The advent of good indoor plumbing has significantly reduced the number of black widow bites, but there are still unfortunate incidents of people putting their hands in the wrong place and starling one of these spiders and getting a bite, which, while unlikely to be deadly, will result in some severe discomfort for upwards of a week.

While doing a bit of garden weeding last week I found a juvenile female black widow and was able to take a couple good photos. Black widows like dark damp secluded areas to set their messy webs. This one was hiding in the mulch at the time I found her and was likely a bit sluggish from the slight chill that had set the night before.

The red marking on the back indicates that this is a juvenile black widow. As they get older and molt the back markings decrease until they are a solid black, with only the red hourglass shape on the underside of their abdomens.

The fascinating face of a black widow.

Black widows are a decent sized spider. This lady was very passive and just hung out on my glove. Their fangs are quite small and so posed no risk with a heavy work glove on.

Gulf Fritillary Time 2015

There have been a ton of Gulf Fritillary Agraulis vanillae) butterflies and caterpillars in our yard this year, no doubt attracted to the abundance of maypop vines (Passiflora incarnata) we have growing throughout the garden. They are really lovely butterflies, and the caterpillars are fascinating to watch. Here are some photos:

I love the little ant checking out the caterpillar's leg.

While they look spiky, the gulf fritillary caterpillars are not a stinging kind of caterpillar.

Psuedo-feet!

 

One of the caterpillars formed its chrysalis from one of our opuntia's pads.

A beautiful adult gulf fritillary butterfly.

Look at that eye! Also check out the proboscis, it is easy to see how it is actually two merged mouth parts in this photo.

Lovely having these  beauties around the garden.

Introduction

A tiny little spider on the petal of a cosmos flower.

I used to blog a lot, but have not been very active in the past few years. As I really enjoy nature, outdoors, gardening, etc. and take a lot of photos of these kind of things I got to thinking that it might be nice to keep kind of an online nature journal. How active it will be is uncertain, but hopefully I will add a bit of content here or there.

Additionally this is a way for me to play with the Blogger platform, as I am more familiar with WordPress at this point. Seems easy so far. I will see how it goes going forward.