JCC [Animals] What wildlife visited my yard today

Sounds like a riveting enclosure to view.

 

The flowers outside my bedroom often attract hummingbirds, so tonight I caught one on tape. While watching the Daily Show.

 

Cool! I bought a flip camera recently, so hope to do the same and upload clips too.

 

And I did.

Here's a Fantail fluttering around the front lawn this morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVWw5hafDyQ

 

I will post the picture of the frog we saw outside our window at C5 because japes says I have to.

This was a magical climbing froggie. He or she somehow got up to our railing on the 4th floor!

[image=http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4101/4900240946_50165d9923_b.jpg]

 

It's also golden! Did any of you kiss it?

 

More turkeys:

[image=http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4139/4915981443_e3285ab1df_z.jpg]

[image=http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4073/4916589544_82f0037183_z.jpg]

 

Wow, wild turkeys that's awesome! I just have a skunk that visits my yard. He and my dog have actually become friends. The dog will come in wagging her tail and smelling a bit like skunk, but not enough to have been fully sprayed. The other day, I saw them eating out of the same bowl....very cute. Fortunately, my dog has all her vaccinations, so if they get even friendlier and begin to play together she won't catch anything from Mr Spock as I've begun calling the skunk.

 

Whoops... I think I messed up the Flickr privacy settings for my picture of the frog. Does this work now?

[image=http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4101/4900240946_e0da0cfeab_b.jpg]

Also! We've got a trio of exotic birds far from home in our neighborhood now. I think they might be some sort of parrots, but I'm not sure. I haven't been able to see them well enough to get a picture yet.

 

Not my yard, but where my horse is I found this massive spider. Idk what it is, but I am creeped out. I am hoping it will be turned around tomorrow so that I can figure out what kind it is.

[image=http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k87/s65horsey/mms_picture.jpg]

 

Other than really boring birds, Scorpions, Spiders, Crickets, Cockroaches, Toads and the occasional stray Cat, I don't get any interesting animals in my yard. However, a few miles from my house, near a friends house, I spotted a Roadrunner and an Owl in the same farm field.

 

The thing is, we don't have the same 'boring animals' in our part of the world, so any sort of bird or bug can be interesting, even if they're common to you.

Anyway, this Emperor Gum Moth landed on my car the other day. We caught it and brought it inside to identify it. It's huge, biggest moth I've ever seen outside of a tropical butterfly house. Australian species originally, either got blown here or caterpillars came in on imported wood, but they're not too harmful.

[image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/jaepee/gummoth.jpg]

 

We got this motion sensor camera trap that we set up outside my parents cabin, every time we set it up it either catches nothing or gets set off constantly (literally constantly, like, you can set up the how long before the camera will turn the motion sensor back on once its been set off, and all the photos will be that length apart) until the whole memory card is full of photos of nothing.

It sucks, I was going to have awesome photos of bears, and deer, and elk, and mountain lions, and the crazy people who live down the road and supposedly steal mushrooms off our property.

 

that moth is pretty amazing.

 

In that case, I'll post my local neighborhood fauna for you, in pretty pictures lifted from the internet.

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/StripedBarkScorpion.jpg]

Bark Scorpion

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Bufo_woodhousii.jpg]

Woodhouse's Toad

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Anaxipha_exigua.JPG]

Swordtail Cricket

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Cockroachcloseup.jpg]

American Cockroach

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Collage_of_Six_Cats-02.jpg]

Housecat (stray in this case)

Also, I'll include the two more interesting ones that I mentioned.

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Greater_Roadrunner_%28Geococcyx_californianus%29_2.jpg]

Greater Roadrunner

[image=http://bloodstar.net/owl.png]

Rocky Mountains Great Horned Owl

Also, I've read somewhere that Bald Eagles live or have lived in central Arizona, but after living there for 20 years, I haven't seen one.

 

It looks a lot like a spider I had living next to my front steps years ago. IIRC it was a harmless sort but still pretty creepy. Mostly he just sat in his web and ate.

 

That spider looks sort of like a Grass spider. According to that article, they are poisonous, but it only says it can cause rapid paralysis in insect prey. Nothing about humans. Then again, I'm probably wrong about what it is in the first place, as I was merely comparing it to various spiders in the North American spiders category on Wikipedia.

 

My son spotted this ~13cm (5") slug sliding its way down the outside of our house last week. Ugh.

[image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/jaepee/slug1.jpg] [image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/jaepee/slug2.jpg]

It's a Yellow Slug, introduced to New Zealand from Europe.

 

I don't think I have enough caterpillars...

[image=http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj75/MedievalSam/photos/DSC07118.jpg]

Last count there are about 22 spread across 8 plants. More appear every other day.

 

That is insane! Are they always like that?

 

Swan plant I think.

Not sure. It was originally my sister's project but she go fed up with it so unloaded the plants on me. There were five chrysalis(es?) originally, but then a few caterpillars appeared and it just exploded over the last couple of weeks.