We’ve collected some wildlife photos over the season that I’ll share today because the farm news is that we continue to spend an absurd amount of time watering and I’ve already been over that subject!
Monarch butterfly enjoying some buckwheat captured by Lindsey Deaton Viceroy on the shishito peppers. This butterfly is similar to the monarch and the 2 species are both distasteful to predators so they mimic each other to their mutual benefit. Viceroys are smaller and the thin relatively straight line across the lower third of the wings is the give away that it’s not a monarch.Black Swallowtail on flowering dill. Something I learned this year is that our crops in the dill, parsley, fennel and carrot family are host to just the Black Swallowtail not all swallowtails like I had previously thought. I always wondered why all the caterpillars looked the same. Duh! Every year we have at least one leopard frog spotting, which blows my mind because there is no standing water on the farm. Can you find the leopard frog in this old salad bed? Tomato hornworm (bad!) with predatory wasp eggs on its back (good!) A fledgling Cardinal on our greenhouse shade cloth. So cute and goofy looking!I think I already shared our baby opossum encounter but it’s worth sharing again! Audrey captured these baby song sparrows last week. This week they have flown the coop!And here we have the Felis silvestris catus, just looking for some mid morning company.
