Changing Weather

While there are still butterflies and flowers, veggies in the garden, the drought makes pictures of them unremarkable. Once the weather changes, I start aiming the camera at the songbirds.... They're a lot more difficult to shoot than the butterflies are....

Towhee

Some kinda wren...

Mockingbird... Kinda unusual to catch these guys on the ground...

Cardinal... peaking around the iris... I'm catching these birds at the goldfish pond....

The goldfish don't seem to mind...

As interesting as the mockingbird on a rock was, this woodpecker on the ground was really cool.

Hmm... the audubon website sez they eat fish... 

Is this guy eating seeds or catching pine sawfly caterpillars?

I took a pic of those guys a couple weeks ago....

Spotted a (ripe) tomato this morning.... This one is in a tomato cage.... all the tomatoes that I left sprawling.... are getting eaten by the cats... before they even start turning!

And.... stupid possums and raccoons are causing plenty of heartache in the garden too....

I plant carrots and turnips, rutabagurs, and when I water.... it attracts varmints that till the moist ground.... not good for seedlings. 

Had a light frost this week.... covered some stuff with bed sheets, but even the stuff I missed... probably didn't burn enough to prevent the fruit from ripening.

Finally, some autumn colour, sassafras above and osage orange below.

Very impressive drought going on here in the Southeast.... 

Map borrowed from the drought monitor site

And... The smoke from those fires is affecting us...