A nature photographer’s images and stories of birds, butterflies, and other creatures from her backyard near Orlando, FL
June 1, 2007 - We started the month with a new visitor to our backyard. This is a Queen butterfly. From far off he looks like a Monarch, but upon closer inspection he’s much smaller, darker, and in my opinion, prettier! Here is is shown nectaring on my hummingbird bush.
May 27, 2007 - The miniature roses at the garden center were so pretty that they just had to come home with me. I planted them in with my floribundas to add even more color to what is turning out to be a gorgeous flower bed. :)
May 24, 2007 - We celebrated Squirt’s birthday by planting flowers! He sat on the grill and supervised as we dug grass beside the patio. More pictures to come, but here’s what the car looked like as I got home from Lukas…
May 22, 2007 - Today my first two ‘Age of Elegance’ daylilies opened. How pretty!
May 21, 2007 - This monarch hung around for probably half an hour to nectar on the butterfly bush by the porch. Squirt saw him and just stared!
May 20, 2007 - Rich and I are empty nesters! :( After watching our Painted Lady caterpillars grow up and turn into butterflies, we decided to let them free today. Our backyard is so full of nectar, they weren’t quite sure which flower to fly to first! I got some cool pictures as they discovered their new world. Then […]
May 19, 2007 - I was finally home for long enough to be outside to take some pictures today! Most of my roses are blooming. Shown here is ‘Gemini’. A nice surprise was the bloom show put on by ‘Black Cherry’ this week…this was the rose that took the longest to start blooming, but now it is absolutely covered […]
May 11, 2007 - With all the smoke in the air this week, we haven’t been outside that much. I did run out to snap this picture of my first purple coneflower bloom. I haven’t seen any butterflies on it, but tons of insects have been crawling all over it. Here’s hoping for some butterbird sightings for the cats […]
May 6, 2007 - The rose bed is all done!!! It looks so good! This bloom is ‘Peace’. I can’t wait to see them all in bloom! I’m also really excited about my new mandevilla vine, which color coordinates quite nicely with my Rambo daylily. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since we started planting. Take a […]
May 5, 2007 - I was excited to see a new bird in the yard. Unfortunately it’s “just” a common female brown-headed cowbird…
May 4, 2007 - What was Rich thinking? He offered to take me to Lukas after a bad week at work!! I went looking for the red mandevilla to put by the back door, but saw the display of limited-edition ‘Pope John Paul II’ roses that I’ve been drooling over and, well, of course one had to come home […]
April 30, 2007 - They say that you learn something new every day. Today’s lesson was that cardinals chew with their mouths open!
April 28, 2007 - Squirt had an exciting day watching over the backyard from his grill today. We had two new visitors — a Sleepy Orange butterfly and a female Brown-Headed Cowbird. We also realized that our two finches are actually at least four finches. It was a good day to be a porch cat!
April 25, 2007 - More roses! I just can’t resist the temptation to take lots of pictures of my new bed. Here are all the first blooms of the roses that I planted bareroot just about six weeks ago.
April 24, 2007 - Look at ‘Honey Perfume’!! Tonight we were walking through the neighborhood and came across a beautiful rose bed in someone’s front yard. They were very well established (canes over an inch thick!!) and just bursting with blooms. Now I want to plant some more roses!
April 22, 2007 - We don’t have room to add another tree to our yard, but we did add an extra hummingbird feeder today. :) I got a picture of the two house finches together. They visit our yard several times a day to sample from our feeders. Their song is so sweet!
April 20, 2007 - We saw a hummingbird in the yard today!!!!! It was really truly a hummingbird, not one of those imitation moths. He came to nectar at the red hibiscus tree. Later I saw him again at Carla’s oleander. He was so little, and he moved so fast, but he was definitely a Ruby-throated hummingbird! It’s so […]
April 18, 2007 - The first bloom on my new roses opened today! This one is ‘Simply Marvelous!’ (Although I think Goldy is more concerned about watching a bird than watching the rose…)
April 17, 2007 - Meet Bobby the Mockingbird. His name is Bobby because of the way he perches on the oleander branches, under the suet feeders, and bobs up and down for his dinner. Here he seems to be searching the yard for twigs…hopefully he’s helping his wife Bobetta build a nest! (Now we need a name for the […]
April 15, 2007 - The wind tried to blow the garden away today, but luckily it did not succeed! I guess ‘Butterscotch Ruffles’ liked the wind and rain, because it opened this beautiful flower late in the afternoon. The rain was good for the new flower bed, though. See the Garden Craze page for a picture. The house finches […]
April 13, 2007 - Grass-aholics Anonymous: Hi, my name is Jess, and I pulled five bags of grass today… Looks like the house finches we’ve been seeing in the last week or so may be a mating pair. Today’s picture is of the male.
April 11, 2007 - For the first time today we saw a bird actually take a bath in the bird bath. Normally it’s used simply as a birdie water fountain. We enjoyed watching this brown-headed cowbird splash around!
April 8, 2007 - Happy Easter! The cold kept me indoors this morning, but luckily it warmed up enough for me to be outside to see this Northern Bobwhite scurrying through the yard. First he visited Goldy’s feeder, then my big one, then Carla’s next door. It’s fun to watch different birds pass through!
April 7, 2007 - Another sunflower bloomed! I planted these during our warm snap in January. The mourning doves got to most of the seeds, but this one managed to germinate. Note to self: plant sunflowers in pots away from birds first, then put in ground after they’re a few inches tall! I think the next seeds will go […]
April 6, 2007 - Another bird sunflower has bloomed…and this one is really pretty. :) Unfortunately I’m learning that the flowers, in order to face the sun, face away from the house, into the neighbors’ yards. Although I’m sure that’s nice for them, that’s not exactly what I was going for! Now I know where to plant my next […]
April 3, 2007 - Poor butterfly! I was so excited to see our first Common Buckeye in our backyard, and then I saw that half his wings are missing. :( I hope none of our birds are the culprit…there is plenty of seed in the bird feeders, they don’t need to go eating poor defenseless butterflies!
April 1, 2007 - I was pulling out a dead pentas plant today when suddenly I realized that it was staring back at me…upon closer examination, there was a freaky-looking caterpillar eating away at the plant. Apparently this is the caterpillar form of the Sphinx Moth, the moth that I mistook for a hummingbird last summer.
March 31, 2007 - Two female House Finches visited our tube feeder today. Their sweet little calls and tidy eating habits were a treat for people used to hosting the squawking grackles!
March 30, 2007 - My ‘Tuscan Sun’ rose has four little buds on it! I couldn’t believe it when I saw them. The rose was planted just three weeks ago. Now it’s a race between the roses and the gardenia to see who will bloom first…the silly gardenia has had little buds for almost two months now, and it […]
March 26, 2007 - Yesterday another hawk visited the yard. I heard a rustle of feathers and went outside to make sure the cats didn’t get too excited. Then I saw the hawk sitting on top of my big bird feeder, acting as if he owned the yard! I fussed at him to leave my birds alone, and he […]
March 25, 2007 - I think I pulled enough grass for the next three months of garden craze, all in this one weekend! The side yard by the patio is now all mulched in, with a small bed of zinnias to line the stepping stones to the side yard. I added a bed in the front of the house […]
March 21, 2007 - I saw this caterpillar on my heliotrope plant today. I have no idea what kind it is…I can’t find it in my field guide. :-p
March 18, 2007 - This is the reason we started putting out bird feeders…Miss Goldilocks loves to watch her birds through our windows. Here a mourning dove was so excited to pig out in my tray feeder that he hardly realized that he was on center stage in Goldy’s window!
March 16, 2007 - My roses started putting on new growth the day after they were planted! Today the first little leaves appeared (see below). I’m amazed at how fast they are growing! :) Spring has definitely sprung! The crape myrtles are starting to put on new growth, and I saw the first blooms on my groundcover ruellia that […]
March 10, 2007 - Roses! Finally! They arrived yesterday, soaked last night, and went in the ground this morning. Pictured below is ‘Tuscan Sun’. Look in the Garden Craze for a picture of the whole new rose bed. They look like stubby little things now, but in a few months they’ll be gorgeous! :-)
March 8, 2007 - It sounds like the hummingbirds are back in Florida! I’ve been reading this discussion on GardenWeb for the last year or so, and there was just a post that there was a hummingbird sighting in Clermont, just a few miles west of us. I hope the hummers find our yard! The feeders are full of […]
March 7, 2007 - For the past few nights one of our neighborhood mockingbirds has been visiting our suet feeders after the blackbirds leave for the night. He hasn’t quite gotten the hang of perching, though! Occasionally he is joined by the bright red cardinal, who also enjoys having the feeder to himself late in the evening. We haven’t […]
March 3, 2007 - Goldy had two cardinal visitors today…and I got this wonderful picture of both of them together! We asked them to please make a nest in our trees!
March 2, 2007 - This afternoon a flock of brown-headed cowbirds joined our regular red-winged blackbirds at the feeder. We didn’t even notice until the new customers started singing, and it sounded very different than our usual afternoon regulars. The male birds pigged out at the feeder, leaving the poor female birdies (like the one below) to sit in […]
February 24, 2007 - The Garden Craze continues as I finished planting my “Carla Extension Bed” this weekend. I wanted to get roses at Lukas this weekend, too, but since they didn’t have the ones I wanted, I finally ordered them online. They’ll arrive bareroot in two weeks. I can’t wait to get some more plants into the nice […]
February 23, 2007 - I guess spring really is here! :) To celebrate this sunflower bloomed in my backyard. I should reconsider pulling the little sunflower sprouts from under my bird feeders – the flowers are really pretty!
February 20, 2007 - OK, enough freezing weather, it’s time for spring! Luckily the flowers don’t seem bothered by our 30-degree temperatures from over the weekend. I went ahead and pruned back the crape myrtles and my roses, so the warmer weather had better be here to stay!
February 17, 2007 - I saw the first Monarch caterpillar on one of my milkweed plants today!
February 16, 2007 - Today is the start of the Great Backyard Bird Count. We counted over 100 birds this afternoon, including this close-up that I finally got of our neighborhood Loggerhead Shrike.
February 10, 2007 - The oak trees in front of the house have been full of cedar waxwings for the last couple of mornings. There’s been a flock of robins hanging around, too. Some of both stopped in at my fountain for a drink… Most of the waxwings stayed in the trees. There were so many!!
February 3, 2007 - I was pleased to get a picture of the female cardinal I saw this afternoon (see below). I know cardinals are fairly common, but in our yard anything that isn’t a blackbird or dove is a welcome change! We also saw two Loggerhead Shrikes. I’ve seen them before but never gotten close enough to identify […]
February 2, 2007 - It’s Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow…I think our early spring has already started, but I’m hoping the groundhog is right and this cold snap we’ve been having will go away soon!