Oh, Katy, what have you done?

I confess that I do love katydids - there is something about their big, green bodies, cleverly disguised as leaves that I find enchanting.  Never mind that most gardeners consider them pests since they consume a fair amount of vegetation.  This one was just hanging out on one of my monarch enclosures this morning, taking me totally by surprise as I thought it was a leaf and went to brush it off.  Oops.  It moved itself to one of our deck chairs, which seemed a bad plan, so I relocated it to a sunflower in the garden.  

And it wasn't until she (yes, it's a girl) crept along the leaf that I noticed a big fuzzy Virginia Tiger Moth caterpillar on the bottom of the leaf.  A double!  And one more for my sunflower biodiversity series.  Every year I end up with several of these big fuzzy cats on my sunflowers, happily munching away on the leaves.  Last fall, I took two into an enclosure and was delighted when they both emerged this past May as gorgeous white moths.  

It was hot again today, but less humid, thankfully.  Still not all that pleasant outside, so I did some indoors chores and then took a nap (woke up so tired this morning for some reason).  But not before I found my first ever Goldenrod Crab Spider in the garden!  The only reason I spotted it was that it was traversing a bit of spider-line from one leaf to another and I caught the flash of white.  They are very pretty little spiders and have the ability to change from the white as seen HERE to a deep yellow when they are on goldenrod.  Very close second choice for today's blip, with apologies to the arachnaphobes out there.

My second-to-last (I hope) batch of monarch cats are getting big and eating up a storm.  I had to make two trips for milkweed today.  I expect the largest ones in the enclosure to start doing their walkabouts in the next day or so.  Meanwhile, I released #115, a beautiful male today for the friend of a fellow blipper.  Still taking names for releases...

Tomorrow is expected to be cooler with some rain.  Sounds like a good day for hummingbirds to me...

xo
Debbi