Animals and Flowers

 With a new game camera up, the animals seem to be looking at it.

Bambi walks back and forth, browsing the tiny meadow in front of trail cam.

Night picture of canid. 

Bobcat. I saw the bobcat window shopping at the chicken fort several times last year, failed to ever get a pic then.

I saw a couple monarchs visiting the lantana last week, it was the first of them I've seen this year.

Buckeye butterfly on scratch daisy (Croptilon divaricatum).

Rabbit tobacco flowers. In 2016 I posted a series of pictures featuring the American lady visiting this plant for family planning.

Sulphur butterfly sipping nectar from a cypress vine flower  (Ipomoea quamoclit).

This fun picture shows Helianthus angustifolius, Salvia coccinea, & cypress vine (Ipomoea quamoclit).

Yellah from the meadow

Trifoliate oranges are ripening. I've been making "lemonade".

Blue curls. Sometimes I see one that's far larger than usual.

2 Giant swallowtails!

 Tried to get a pic of the camellia sasanqua this morning.

Tried yesterday too.

Useful Osage Orange

 I've been collecting the balls dropped from my trees.

Left in buckets over the winter, the fruit renders down into a slurry.

This slurry can eventually be poured into a shallow trench to get new seedlings.

I spotted the original fruit beside the road in town, stopped and grabbed a few.

I originally hoped to use them as posts.

They're kinda slow-growing here in the sand.

The small-diameter trunks are useful at my house.

Here's an axe with a new handle.

Buncha tool handles previously posted last January.

Mulberry makes a faster-growing post.

This mulberry log has been air-curing for a few months, hopefully be light enough to deal with soon.

When I install them fresh, it's a job, they're heavy as anything.

You know, a discussion about above bodark fruit (Maclura pomifera) hardly seems complete without a mention of their extinct seed dispersers.

There was an article written about the trees that remember the mammoths that I found interesting enough to search for more information.

I discovered Connie Barlow's book "Ghosts of Evolution". Which I found to be extremely compelling.

Apparently she's progressed from writing about plants that have lost their animal seed dispersers to attempting to save plants in danger of extinction due to Anthropogenic climate change.

That seems like a neat idea. Extinction is forever. Seems stupid to allow these human-caused extinction events to continue without making some effort to slow down the losses.