CassieBash's Critters Fall 2019

Old thread is here. It's mostly animal pictures; I've dropped the Critter of the Week until further notice.

Since our weather has been cool in the evenings--the only time I seem to be home anymore--I haven't seen many frogs to take pictures of. So here's the closest thing--a toad I saw last night as I was feeding the cats:







Now that winter is looming on the horizon, people start wondering what the season will bring. But only one weather person, a meteorologist named Brad Panovich in Charlotte, North Carolina, has an "honest" winter forcast:



Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, and the best thing is that you probably don't need to update this map very often, so it's good from fall to fall. Thanks, Brad!

>1 CassieBash: love the map. We do get snow south of I-85, but not frequently, and rarely more than a couple of inches.

Love the toad. I never see them, though I know they are around.

I've been seeing lots of them recently. I think maybe they're beginning to look for places to hibernate. This poor fellow was probably a bit more wet than he liked, since it rained practically non-stop from Friday to Sunday afternoon, with only a few small dry moments here and there.



But I did get pictures of Sir Charles Gobblesworth III, by his lonesome, on Saturday:

Nice turkey pics! I especially like the first one.

>1 CassieBash: I'm pretty sure that map isn't accurate b/c "Winter is when it gets below 60" should be straight across Texas to El Paso. Everything below that should be "Watching winter on TV". I should know. It's 91° right now. It was 100° in my hometown just last Friday...while I was visiting my parents. Autumn and Winter are mythical events for any Texas resident south of San Antonio and east of DFW. lol

>5 lesmel: OK, how about this one? XD



Or if you want something a bit more general:



I can't really say anything about Texas winters, but this pretty much sums up Indiana winters:



Pity that I live in the red zone....

>6 CassieBash: HAHAHAHAHA! The second one really made me laugh, out loud. Good thing no one else has showed up here at work yet...

I'm so excited; I saw a bald eagle yesterday on the way home--my first!







Also a chipmunk trying to hide from the cat:



We're heading towards the end of insect season, which means the praying mantises are getting big and the females are going to be laying eggs in their egg cases soon:







Also spiders--this marbled orb weaver was waiting for it to get just a little darker before starting to re-spin its web. Orb weavers tend to be nocturnal.

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Ooh, a Bald eagle! I've seen a couple on the wing.

>9 fuzzi: Majestic, aren't they? Though if Ben Franklin had had his druthers, we'd be celebrating the wild turkey as our national bird.

Oh my, but did my drive in to work this morning ever remind me that it's now fall. The clouds have lost their summer puffiness and have become more reminiscent of snow clouds in winter:





Pretty all the same, but still....

Had a buckeye butterfly emerge yesterday. I have one more and that should be the last of the Leps to emerge this season, unless I find another buckeye chrysalis or caterpillar. They run fairly late into the season sometimes.

I like your wintery clouds.

Today on a downtown walk I saw a Northern Pearly-eye. :)

>11 fuzzi: Cool! Those are pretty, too!

I can add a pure white morning glory to my collection now:



The pond fish:





Saw a robber fly feeding on our porch handrail:



My cat being incredibly cute:



Had to relocate a snake that had made it into our building at work today; it was taken out to the nearby wooded area and released unharmed:

>12 CassieBash: nice pictures, though I love the first pond picture especially.

SO glad you released the snake! So many people kill snakes indiscriminately, just because "it's a snake!" :(

I think you had a rat snake, but I'm no expert.

>13 fuzzi: I think that first pond picture had just about everyone in it. They thought they were getting fed!

I don't kill snakes (though if I think it's a poisonous one, I probably would call our security team to handle it). This is the fourth I've released from our building over the years. One of our math instructors texted me to tell me where it was, because I now have a reputation for being able to capture and release any number of small creatures from the building!

It was still very small, so a rat snake is possible, but several species came up as suggestions when I did iNaturalist, including milk and fox snakes, but a couple of them say it's a northern water snake. Since the math teacher had originally spotted it outside of a drain, that's not an unfair assumption. It had round pupils, so it definitely wasn't a poisonous snake--we can rule out the massasauga rattlesnake--the only poisonous snake in our part of the state.

>14 CassieBash: the juveniles are tough to ID.

Picture time....

The last butterfly emergence for me was late last week, a buckeye:







A very faded painted lady I saw on Sunday, despite the cool temperature:



Turkeys aren't bothered by cool temps. They come to eat under the bird feeders almost every evening:









The morning glories refuse to give up the ghost, too.

Took a trip yesterday to the zoo in Fort Wayne, and you know what that means! Picture time!!! In fact, I'll be sharing pics from the zoo for several days, considering how many pictures I took. Let's start with the rays, both sting rays:









The koi in their pond are considerably larger than the ones in our pond--but then their pond was a heck of a lot deeper and wider:



And like any zoo pond, there were ducks and geese:



Tomorrow's pictures will feature some of the birds; unfortunately, since most of their birds are not tolerant of cold weather, they had already housed them (and a few other animals) for the winter.

Did you get to pet the rays? I've been to aquariums where you can put your hands in the pool and touch the rays as they swim by. They feel like a wet sponge to me.

>18 fuzzi: If they'd been more obliging, but they seemed to have had their fill of pets. They kept dodging people's hands in that graceful, underwater glide way. XD

Now for the birds. As with most zoos, they had free range peacocks running around everywhere, including a few white ones. One of the peahens had recently had a chick, as you can see in the pictures below. There were also white and black storks, wattled cranes, and a few birds in the Conservatory area that weren't labeled. Because the Conservatory is climate controlled and you can walk the path right through it, the birds were all running around (or swimming, in the case of the ducks), so there was no set place to see any one species. There might have been a guide at the entrance, but I didn't notice one if there had been. Next time, perhaps I'll use my phone and see if iNaturalist would help out.

Wattled Cranes:









A handsome rooster:



A coy black stork:



They had the white storks separate from the black ones, I presume to prevent cross-breeding. I don't know the nature of their status (endangered, vulnerable, etc.) but they may breed them and therefore want to keep the species separate.





One of the Conservatory birds, I think with his head tucked down. The Conservatory birds were constantly on the move, so it was hard to get a good picture without a lot of blur. Even so, just seeing a bird with plumage of that color is a treat!





Thanks to Flickr's editor, I was able to really lighten and brighten this photo of a Conservatory duck.



This Conservatory bird was taking a dust bath:





Curious bird in the Conservatory:



No, I didn't forget the peacocks:















If anyone knows the species of any of the Conservatory birds, please reference the picture and send me the name. I'd like to know but don't have a lot of time right now to research this.

Also, let me know what you'd like to see pictures of next. The reptiles and amphibians? The lynx family? Hyenas? Monkeys and apes? Maybe the insects and creepy crawlies in Dr. Diversity's exhibit? This has been fall break at work so it's been quiet and easy to squeeze in a little time to post, but tomorrow students return and I anticipate a big crowd, so I might not get a chance to post much until next week.

Cats! Show the big cats!! 😁

>20 fuzzi: My personal favorites, too. :)

The clouded leopard was just chillin':









The tigers were enjoying the only real patch of sun in their shady home:





This was the sleepy serval:







The lion was also sleepy; what a yawn!





But the lynx family was active enough for everyone!





I don't have the video of the lynx family processed and ready for upload, but I'll share my zoo videos once I get them ready to go on YouTube.

Before I get back to the zoo pics, I do want to share pictures of Halloween, and of the salamander I found yesterday. I hope everyone had an enjoyable Halloween and/or Dia de los Muertos, if you celebrate one or both. I was challenged to dress in a new outfit each day; I neglected to get a picture of myself on Wednesday, but here are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, in that order. The dragon costume from last year had a few new accessories, you might note. :)













Yesterday I found a little salamander under a bunch of leaves along the north fence row, where we have a line of sassafras, oak, and hickory trees growing. This is, to the best of my ID abilities, an eastern red backed salamander. Apparently, at least according to the pictures on iNaturalist, this species is highly versatile in its coloration. It was chilly yesterday, though sunny, but after a few moments in my hand, he warmed up and got quite squirmy--typical amphibian behavior. I took some pictures of him on the cement in front of our garage so that the pics I took through iNaturalist would show him clearly, then took him back home to be released. We normally see the tiger salamanders or the spotted salamanders, which are much larger in general and hang around the ponds. This guy was quite a distance from the big pond, especially considering his size, so he might be a more terrestrial species than the tigers or spotted.









One last picture, this one is a neat spider pic I took early one morning with a flash. The sun hadn't come up and everything was wet with dew, so I got a good creepy feel to this spider picture. As always, I'll put filler before and after the pic for those who are spider squeamish.

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>22 CassieBash: love the pics, even the spider.

>23 fuzzi: Well, I know you're not scared of spiders, lol.

>24 CassieBash: only when they jump on me!

>25 fuzzi: I had an orb weaver drop on my pants once. My first thought was, "I don't want to squish it; where can I put it where it will be safe?" Guess there's no arachnophobia here, huh? :))

>26 CassieBash: not much. As a child I used to put Daddy-long-legs on my arms and watch them walk around.

Back to zoo pics!

The canines were under-represented mainly because there just aren't as many canine species at this zoo (there are 2) and also because half of them--the dingo--was in for the winter. The bat eared fox was the only canine visible at the zoo.







The next animal most people associate with dogs, but it's actually classified as being more closely related to cats. It's the spotted hyena. But cats had enough pictures to fill their own post, so I'm sticking the hyena pics here.









In the same suborder of "cat-like" animals, there's another animal that we saw, the banded mongoose.

Looks like everyone was basking in the sunshine!

>29 fuzzi: Unfortunately, it was a cool sunshine probably for those African animals. I was surprised that so many of them were still out and about, while Australia suffered a lot of winterization prep in their display. We're planning another trip during early summer so that we can see everyone--including the aquatic stuff we accidentally realized that we missed--the sharks and jellyfish.

The next round of zoo pictures; let's all be thankful for critters!

Monkeys and apes--let's start with the endangered orangutans:





Colobus monkey--they're like skunk monkeys:



They were stinkers, all right; I couldn't get a good picture of them from the front. But the de Brazza's monkeys were more cooperative:









Then there were the swamp monkeys. I'm not kidding; that's really what they're called.

The Brazza's monkeys have fascinating faces.

Turkeys have banded into a cohesive group, with both the ladies and gents together. This means that our flock looks really impressive:

"Psst. Y'all can come out now, Thanksgiving's over!"

>35 fuzzi: Actually, I took those pics the day before Thanksgiving, ironically. But we've always had a neighborly relationship with the turkey flock, so we're the local wildlife "safe house". Maybe they were all hanging out with us until after the big day. :)

>36 CassieBash: in which case YOU would be the one to tell the turkeys that the coast is clear! 😂

Can't believe I'm STILL sharing zoo pics--and my older sister just got back from the UK with a ton of pics, including the Chester Zoo, so I sense still more animal pics coming up to share.

And here I was worried I would run out of them before winter had even started! lol!

For the sake of brevity and sanity, I'm not going to list all the species of insects displayed in their Dr. Diversity exhibit. Most of the insects were actually dead specimen collections, with multiple species in each glass-topped case. Spectacular even though it makes me a little sad to see them dead.























The living insects, mostly stick and leaf imitators:















More dead ones. *sigh*





OK, sooo...maybe I went a llliiiitttllle nuts on the insects in the diversity hut. I have a weakness for the invertebrates...the insects...the small animals...the large animals....OK, so I have a thing for all critters. But be honest-if you didn't like seeing the pictures of animals, you wouldn't be viewing this page, now would you? :D

Nifty exhibits. Have you ever been to the Field Museum in Chicago? I loved their huge displays of insects, some that were from a hundred years ago.

Jump to the Winter edition here, complete with obligatory frog picture. A frog in winter?!? "Hop" over and see!