My Garden of Earthly Delights

Quail in the garden

We have quail visiting from time to time.  Here's a shot of a couple that were moseying along the neighbor's driveway.

Purty pictures

Today I was roaming the property looking for purty things to take pictures of.

Here's what I found:

a graceful gourd

 

a luscious red pepper,

A sculptural sunflower bud

another sunflower that opened

I'm starting to think praying mantis's really like sunflowers to play on

It's actually hard to take a bad picture of a cone flower once you have it in focus

Hummingbird quarrel

I was out photographing green dragonflies in the yard

 

I even found them lined up on the spiderweb encrusted dragonfly sculpture:

 

When I noticed a couple of humming birds utilizing the desert willow for an afternoon snack

I then saw them having a quarrel in the stone pine.  It was quite animated and went on for the longest time.

Although looking at the pictures now, it doesn't look the same hummingbirds.

Carpenter bee disembowels a blossom

Carpenter bees are fascinating to watch, as they are huge and always very busy.  Unfortunately they tend to disembowel the blossoms they visit.

Dancing on the sunflower

A praying mantis performs acrobatic moves on a large sunflower:

Fascinating white praying mantis

I love praying mantis's. I love their almost palpable attitude. They either come in different colors or change to match the background.  Every time I find one, it's always the color of where it is.  This one was almost white, or maybe a pale yellow.

Hummingbird poses for portrait

A lovely little hummingbird sat stock still for me for quite a while in the redbud tree.  I took a large number of shots of it.

Dragonfly day

Today was hot - 108 degrees of hot.  It was that hot yesterday too. For some insane reason when it's really hot cats want to be outside crashed all over the pavement and mine are no exception.

On days like this the flies noisily hover in the shady areas.  The front porch reverberates with their amplified hum. And then suddenly the dragonflies just show up as they do from time to time.  I never know when or why, other than there seems to be nice cool areas that exude moist air when they decide to converge on us.  They dive bomb the flies and crisscross against the sky in perpetual motion.  All you can do is stand there and enjoy it and perhaps rescue the odd one that gets into trouble with spiderwebs. They come and go like schools of fish, now there are hundreds of them hovering in the air before you, then just as suddenly there is only one or two and before you can walk away they are back soaring exuberantly through the air making you smile whether you like it or not.

    I tried to capture the flying ones hoping to relay the feeling of the absolute fair going on, but it was impossible, so I contented myself with getting many superb photographs of them resting while dangling from the desert willow.  It was a good day.

 





 


 
On the bottom of this dragonfly's wings you can see the fake eye spots that fool predators. Three pictures above you can see gold dragonflies with no eye spots.
 


I love the pink glare in the eyes of this dragonfly


I was mesmerized with the bronze glints shining off this dragonfly's wings.

 
 There are apparently several kinds or colors of dragonflies. Some are gold and black striped as above

   
others are brown with dark eye spots


  There are solid blue ones like this or a beautiful mosaic patterning like on the one below.

 




A lovely rainbow tinted dragonfly totebag

Jackrabbits

Next door is a field where the neighbors horses graze.  I've noticed jackrabbits grazing there too - twice a day.  Once in the morning and once in the evening when the sun gets low.

It's cool when the sun shines through their ears.  You can see the little upright pink glows from quite a distance

They hang out rolling in the dust or hop slowly around nibbling nonstop whilst ignoring the horses and chickens walking by.

 

 

They don't often get this close - usually they stay in the middle or the far side of the field

Buh bye!

If you like jackrabbits, here's a good place to find coffee mugs and shirts with a pretty little jack on them:

A herd of snails

I'm an early riser.  Not because I'm a perky annoying sunshine kind of person, but because my daughter's Nazi dog wakes me up at 6 every morning to go out and usually I don't feel like going back to bed.  I take a morning jaunt out to the garden as soon as it's light enough, which at this time of year, is sooner rather than later.

Crunch....  I look down.  Oh yeah, snails are early risers too.  The lawn is wet and they are taking advantage - there's a veritable herd of them pounding across the grass at a heady snails pace of really slow.  Well they look like they are in a hurry - their entire bodies are stretched in the direction of somewhere important, probably the dark recesses of the flower bed to hide from the heat of the day.

This time they weren't fast enough.  Fetching a cup from the leftovers of seed containers, I pluck at least a dozen of these fat and not so happy slime mongers out of the grass and take them to their worst nightmare: said daughter's chickens.

Chickens adore snails.  We used to have one that would leap straight up into the air, waist high to snatch them out of my hands.  I scattered these at the feet of the flock and watched as they stabbed them to death and swallowed them down one by one.

A little murder is good in the morning.