7.31.2005

Sunday Morning

Big, beautiful, and brilliant green, these beetles make quite an impression. Fiery Searcher is one of the common names for this beetle. It makes its living hunting caterpillars and if you try to catch it, it will live up to the "Fiery" part of its name by letting loose with a caustic blast from its southern end. Woe to the predator that catches the blast in the eye -- it burns!
(Calosoma scrutator)



Green treefroglets (Hyla cinerea) are all over the place now. This one was about three-quarters of an inch long -- too cute.




The flower of the jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) looks like a little pixie cap to me. Another name for this plant is spotted touch-me-not.




Hey! A butterfly actually sat still long enough for me to get a picture -- Pearl crescent (Phyciodes tharos).

7 comments:

Mr. Bloggerific Himself said...

*cough cough*

We used to have some sort of touch-me-nots in the backyard right next to the sidewalk where I got a rather nice bite from a stray dog. I tried to escape on my bike, but the training wheels were set so that I could peddle, and the wheel would spin...but no traction had I.

I was fast though!

swamp4me said...

We used to straddle our training-wheel bedecked bikes over the narrow drainage ditch between my house and the next door neighbor's and peddle like crazy. It was big fun in the 'burbs!

Just imagine a neighborhood with 10 girls and 2 boys all about the same age. We had some very good times doing silly, fun stuff. Our mothers turned us out in the mornings and brought us in in the evenings -- you know, sort of like a herd of cows :) We had free rein of the neighborhood as long as we stayed on our street. It was a good time to be a kid.

R.Powers said...

Is that beautiful beetle a type of bombardier beetle?
As for the nostalgia, we grew up the same way. That is one big change I see today, you can ride through a neighborhood in the summer these days and not see kids playing outside.

Mr. Bloggerific Himself said...

We used to be out all hours too. And there were a ton of us. My boy will miss out on some of that, which is sad...until I remember some of the stuff I was up to. Maybe it's not so bad. :)

Crystal* said...

LOVE the froglet. Oh yes. *nodding vigorously* Need the frog pics. What a cutie!
Grins*

Rurality said...

I wish I had jewelweed here... haven't found it yet though.

Hey Swampy that sounds like my old neighborhood, except it was 10 girls and 3 boys. :) My sister's neighborhood is still like that.

Oh I read something cute about frogs on another blog: They are really footnotes that have escaped from boring scholarly texts. That's why you hear them saying "ibid ibid" all the time! LOL.

nina at Nature Remains. said...

Just dropping in--came across your photo of the Giant Lichen Orb Weaver--what a beauty!

Loved your shades of green tree frogs, too.