Tangled Branches: Cultivated

happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

CeVa Journal: Wildlife

Wild turkey and wood thrush. Whatever next? I was hoping to see new birds at the country house, but somehow wild turkeys didn't cross my mind. Two weekends ago, I saw this turkey hen amble through the woods in back. It is a hen, isn't it? Hard to tell from the crummy picture, but that's the best one I got.
Last weekend, something similar caught my eye, but this time I had the good sense to grab the binoculars instead of the camera. It was a tom turkey with red head and wattles and that strange beard thing sticking out from its chest. He scuffled through the leaves a while and moved on.

This morning, I heard a beautiful, distinctive bird song and tracked it through the woods to the singer. A wood thrush! It let me look and listen for a long while before it figured out I was following it around, and then flew away. It was back in a short time, but I didn't go chasing it again.

Yesterday, while hunting for wildflowers in the woods, I came across this tiny iridescent spider in the middle of its pollen-spangled web.
We started seeing dragonflies over the weekend. This one posed on the deck railing yesterday afternoon. I'm only just beginning to learn about dragonflies, and this one doesn't look like any of the pictures in my book. Maybe it's a damselfly instead?
Update, 4/25 5:30 pm EDT: Thanks to a comment from Annie in Austin, I think I've ID'd the dragonfly. She sent me here, and I clicked through to here, and said "Hmmm, that top picture looks quite a lot like my photo." My field guide only showed the Common Whitetail adult male, and that's what confused me. To be fair, if I had read the text in the guide instead of just looking at the pictures, I would have learned that the Common Whitetail juvenile male has a different abdomen coloration. And they're even more confusing when they go through puberty. ;-)
Saturday, there were at least five different kinds of butterflies around. We didn't pause in our work to identify them all - some kind of azure, something that looked like a fritillary, the same duskywings we've been seeing for weeks, sulphurs, cabbage whites and....ta da!...the first Tiger Swallowtail.This is a good argument for leaving your dandelions grow, if you ask me.