Bats, Snakes, Storms, and Flowers

It feels like it's been weeks since I was here, writing to you.  I have been traveling for work, spending night hours watching movies on tiny screens and swatting at mosquitoes while waiting for bats to fly into my nets.  I got to meet the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) above, but also several southeastern bats (Myotis austroriparius), like the one below.

Southeastern bats don't live throughout all of the areas that I work, so getting to catch some and get more familiar with this species was a nerdy treat for me.

While scouting for a good net site, I walked up to this tiny rough green snake (Opheodrys aestivus) on the ground on top of deep layer of golden pine needles.  At first glance it looked like a long, thin blade of grass.  The snake was calm and never tried to bite me when I picked it up for a photo shoot.

I returned home from a week in Tennessee to a weekend of impressive thunderstorms.  Someone was complaining that on our weekend off, it was going to be cool and raining, but I was not disappointed to stay close to home with the breeze and beautiful clouds.  I have a list of garden and farm chores that I was glad to ignore.  

The cucumbers and green beans are still making food, but the tomato plants have barely given me enough for salads.  There are green tomatoes on the vines, but they are not getting ripe and the plants look a bit wimpy.  The brussel sprout plants are riddled with holes and I haven't kept up my end of the battle against the caterpillars.  The greenhouse is an impenetrable jungle of tall weeds.  But the sunflower plants in the herb spiral are blooming!

One of the plants is so tall it reaches the second story of the house and has fourteen blooms!  

Bees visit the sunflowers and I counted three monarch butterfly caterpillars on the milkweed plants that grow there.  They are munching holes in the leaves but I'm glad to see them. 

Our fields are full of the frilly white blooms of queen Ann's lace.  It's time to cut the hay again but we are wary of the weather.  Of the three big big racks of hay that Brandon put up earlier this summer, at least one and half have gone moldy because the hay wasn't dry enough when it was stacked.  The moldy hay will make good mulch, but it still feels like wasted effort since the animals can't eat it.  This time we need several days of dry weather so we don't rush the drying time. 

A predator got my mamma chicken and her two remaining chicks.  She was so canny and hid her nest so well that I never found it.  She was the wildest chicken I've ever had, and taught her chicks to fear me and they wouldn't come close even for food.  I started to hope that she might actually raise them in the wild, but then they all disappeared.  Once again I learn the importance of being locked safely in the coop at night.