We’ve seen plenty of tarantulas on our dog walks, and I’ve taken plenty of photos and video, but I’ve never noticed one walking across sand – and leaving no track! At least none that I would have found convincing.
No-track spider
Category: Nature
General observations, generally during dog walks
Never seen before…
We often see fascinating tracks in the sand – lizards, beetles, birds – but this track was unlike any we’d seen before. And, luckily, we didn’t have to guess what made it (note how it almost gets blown off track by the wind at 0:23).
The early bird?
OK, not my best videography (ya think?). That’s a bird finishing eating a worm, bit by bit, in the middle of an intersection, oblivious to our two dogs nearby. I have never watched a bird eating a worm in the open. I always imagined they just swallowed them whole, rather than pulling them to pieces. And why in the middle of the road? I just stared, until it occurred to me to record it, which is why you don’t see the juicy bits earlier.
Next time 😉
Decent sized lizard, that
Seriously large claw marks. That’s a size 13 shoe for comparison. We haven’t seen a live lizard longer than two inches long in a very long time. There was that one once, though….
Love birds
We’ve had a couple pigeons hanging around for several years now. The pair I saw the most in the past were gray and white. This year they’re both white. They nested on an air conditioning unit upstairs. I saw one eggshell and once the two of them with another, full grown, black and white. Much more interesting than just gray.
As you’ll no doubt agree. Here’s what two two gray pigeons look like.
Carpenters
In addition to leaf-cutter ants, the woods have carpenter ants. We’ve seen some in weakened trees, but I had never seen how much sawdust they produced. If ants are higher in the tree, sawdust will likely blow away before it reached the ground. So I found this pile impressive, and was reminded why I’m glad not to live in a wooden house.
Ants and acacia
Ants are, of course, amazing. What’s unusual about this trail is that we could actually find the end of it; usually the trails disappear in the undergrowth, often after a far greater distance than this.
Regardless, the question remains: why weren’t they harvesting the closer acacia bush?
Acacias in bloom
As with the previous cold dwelling, it may look warm but anything but—temperature never got out of the 40s°F (<10°C), and a biting wind. But sun!
Double-faced fruit trees
Sometime after planting fruit trees, someone with much more experience pointed out that the nasty spiked branches would never produce fruit, because they weren’t part of the fruit-bearing portion of the plant.
Instead, they were suckers growing from the root stock. You can sort of see where the two join, and there’s the sucker below.
The junction is much clearer on our lemon tree.
Lesson is: they are nasty things, obviously well worth removing!
Just some tree
