Butterfly Gardening Blog

We finally saw the baby birds in the robins nest I metioned a few days ago!

They are very protective parents – if we even walk over near the nest one of them fly over and start yelling at us!

Here’s one picture where you can just make out two beaks sticking out from the top:

Here’s another with one of the parents in the nest and one baby:

We bought some meal worms from a Wildbird Center and have been sitting them out near the nest – they come up right away and get the meal worms and feed them to their babies!

Here is a picture of the mealworms, in case you are curious about what they look like. It makes a nice contrast to the cute baby bird pictures too!

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In one of our half barrel ponds (the one on the left in this picture) we have lots of tadpoles. I’m not sure how well they show up in this picture, but hopefully well enough that you can tell what you are looking at:

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Every year there are snakes that rest on the rocks on top of the retaining wall behind our house, by the creek. We are pretty certain that they are either Diamondback or Northern water snakes and so are not poisonous. Still, they sometimes come up in our yard and eat the fish in the ponds and also get a bit territorial and aggressive at times, so I’m not too thrilled with seeing them. At any rate I got the following picture of one recently. It seems a little lighter in color and I’m wondering if that is just because the time of the year, getting ready to molt or something like that?

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Guess what! We found lots more eggs in the pond – the same that had the other egg in it. These ones were presumable from these two.

At any rate they must be a different species because the eggs and the way they were laid were very different. There are tons of them this time. They are in these long, string like things that are wrapping all around the plants in the pond. Any one know what species these might be?

Here is a picture from above showing all the eggs that could be seen – I only wish I could post a really high resolution picture on here so you could really see all the detail, but it would just take too long to load:

Here I took a close up picture of just the eggs in the bottom right – I really like the photograph. Again, I wish I could post a higher resolution image:

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I almost forgot to post that the hummingbirds are back again! I’m sure they’ve been back in this area for a while, but we hadn’t gotten our feeders out yet and hadn’t seen any. Well, we finally saw the first one on Friday. I wasn’t able to get any pictures of it – they are not real cooperative with photographers!

While mine is mostly a butterfly garden, hummingbirds like many of the same plants, so it is kind of a hummingbird garden too!

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These two frogs (or toads, I don’t know which) were mating in one of our little ponds (same one as on May 4 and April 7). They were, uh, ‘involved’ for like over 24 hours!

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Later on Friday I took the following picture of frog eggs on a Nelumbo lutea leaf in one of our ponds. The pond is the one pictured on April 7th.

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I have no idea how to make ‘Mantis’ plural – is it ‘Manti’, ‘Mantis’s’? Either way – some hatched!

We always have lots of preying mantis laying eggs around our gardens in the fall and I always look forward to the first day the following spring when I first see the little babies crawling and jumping around. I hate to admit it but I almost get more excited about the baby preying mantises than I do the butterflies sometimes! They are just so cute!

The little guy in the picture below I found in front of our house near the door. Later I saw at least 4 different individuals. There are likely many, many more around too!

I didn’t measure him/her and its hard to tell the scale from this picture, but I’d say it was less than 2 cm long. They don’t particularily like to sit still for photos either, so I did good to get this one picture:

Recently we found a Robin’s nest up in a trellis/arbor/whatever-you-call-it my husband built:

Here it is from a distance with a circle drawn around where the nest is: