Our hearts-a-bustin’, or euonymous, are showing their fall color. Right now they’re all covered with these red seed pods with the dangling red seeds. The dogwood would also be covered in red berries if the squirrels had not eaten every single berry two or three weeks ago, while they were still green.

The damp weather we’ve been having has caused a real burst of fungus activity. This big leafy looking fungus was growing under one of our anise bushes. I have no idea what it is, but it’s cool.

A lot of the old logs we have around the yard are starting to bloom with some nice looking wood fungus as well.

You’ve seen it growing in vacant lots, next to houses, poking out of sidewalks, or just about anywhere. It’s a fast growing, succulent (wet-stemmed) perennial that might get to be ten feet high under the right conditions.

What’s so great about pokeberry? Well, it’s pretty to look at, for one thing. Even better than that, it’s a fine native wildflower with excellent wildlife value. The leaves are food to all kinds of insects. The flowers give good food to pollinators. But most of all, pokeberry produces an amazing amount of berries, and the fruit is very popular with birds.

We’ve got four or so pokeberry plants growing in various spots in our yard. They seem to do about as well in deep shade as they do in the sun. And, in case you’re wondering, we did not actually plant any of them ourselves. They just popped up on their own, and they were welcome guests.

By late summer, the berries have turned a deep, dark purple, and you’ll often see mockingbirds, catbirds, or robins dangling on the weed, feasting on berries.

I’ve often mentioned my green lynx spiders in this blog. This is the time of year where they really start to get interesting, because by early fall, the spiders are getting pretty big. I caught this pretty cool shot of one of my big girls eating a wasp. That seems like pretty dangerous prey because, well, wasps are killers too. But the green lynx can handle them just fine. I’ve also seen the eating great big bumble bees.

Here’s one with a more manageable supper. It’s kind of hard to make out what’s going on in this picture, but the spider is there on the leaf, with one long leg stretched out to the right. She seems to have some kind of fly or lacewing.And here’s one more shot of a green lynx hiding under a leaf, for good measure.

The other day I saw an even cooler predator/prey sight–a great big praying mantis munching on a bee. Saddly, it was raining and I did not want to risk getting the camera wet. I had hoped I’d be able to spot the mantis again, but she’s been hiding pretty well the past few days. I’ll be keeping my eyes open, though.

Raising black swallowtail caterpillars is pretty easy. In case anyone wants to try it, I’ll boil it down into a few steps.

Step 1) Plant fennel, dill, or parsley.If you plant it, they will come. By midsummer, you should see some tiny yellow eggs. Within a few days, these will hatch and you’ll see little black and white caterpillars that look a little bit like bird poop. After a week or so, they’ll be green, yellow, and black like the guy in the picture above.

Step 2) Buy a critter cage.

Only about five bucks at Petsmart.

Step 3) Select your caterpillars.

Pick out a few nice, healthy looking individuals to bring into your cage. You can wait until they get to the black, green, and yellow stage if you want. The bird-poop camoflage keeps them pretty safe up to this point.

Step 4) Collect some food.

Feed your caterpillars using the whatever plant you collected them from. If the eggs were laid on fennel, feed them fennel. If parsley, feed them parsley, and so on. In theory, black swallowtail cats can eat all of the plants I’ve mentioned, but once they start eating a particular species, that’s the species they have to stick with.

We usually use fennel. It’s easy to grow and is easy to set up in the cage.

Step 5) Put the plant cuttings (food) into water.

We just take a small glass, fill it with water, put plastic wrap over the glass (keeps the caterpillars from drowning), poke a tiny hole in the plastic, and then insert the plant cuttings.

Step 6) Put a nice stick into your cage.

Your caterpillars will be much happier pupating on a stick than on the side of the cage.

Step 6) Put the caterpillars on the plant cuttings.

The easiest way to do this is to avoid touching the caterpillars at all. Just cut off a stem from your plant that already has one or more caterpillars on it. Be very careful touching the caterpillars. They’re very delicate and you can easily hurt them. They don’t sting, but if they get alarmed, they will spray a stinky chemical onto your hands.

Step 7) Check your caterpillars regularly.

Make sure they’re not running out of food. Make sure the plants have enough water. And clean out that cage! Caterpillars poop a lot more than you’d think. Putting a fresh paper towel down is a nice idea.

Step Let them go.

When butterflies emerge, let them out right away! They need food and warmth. You may want to move the pupae outside to make sure that your poor butterflies don’t have to spend a day cooped up if they emerge while you’re at work.

A decent action shot, but you can’t make out his color at all. I won’t be winning any awards for this one.

The visit the feeder a lot during the day. They always make a funny little honking sound as they approach, so you can usually tell when you need to look up. And these little ruby-throated hummingbirds are surprisingly brave. They don’t mind if I’m sitting out there. And they don’t even mind if they see our big cat Jammer near by. They’ve even tried to defend their feeder from us, which is a ridiculous thing to see. Leslie wanted to take the feeder in to change out the food and clean it, and the hummingbirds started dive-bombing her. Where do they get off?

In this picture the hummingbird is perched on the feeder. That’s him on the left-hand side.

Let’s start with an overview of the primary bug-viewing area: the sun garden.

As I’ve mentioned before, our sun garden is tiny. Halfrey Cottage has a very small urban yard to begin with. And most of that is heavily shaded. There is only about a 15 x 5 patch on one side of that house (under the bay window) that gets any sun to speak of. Over the past couple of years we’ve worked to fill in this whole spot with as many native wild flowers as we can fit there. And by now it’s pretty thick with various species duking it out to see who’s going to get the most space. Right now the mountain mint seems to be dominating some of the other plants. But I think the ageratem is going to rise up again by late summer.

Most of the more flamboyant bugs prefer to hang out in the hot summer sun, in my experience. The sun garden is where I’m most likely to see butterfiles, caterpillars, spiders, mantids, wasps, bees, and other assorted insects. On summer afternoons you’ll often see me peering into the weeds to see what I can see. Let’s take a look at what’s going on right now.

For the past week or so I’ve been keeping an eye on what I assume are insect eggs of some sort, stuck to the bottom of a mountain mint leaf. I have no idea what bug might have laid these. And maybe they’re not even eggs for all I know.

This mess of bubbles on a mountain mint stem looks like eggs of some sort. I thought they were spittle bug eggs, but I did a little more reading on spittle bugs and it seems that they actually create bubbles like these to hide in. So maybe there’s an adult spittle bug hiding in there.

Our coneflowers are finally starting to bloom. There are probably my favorite summer blooms. These amazing flowers will be around until September, and they attracts all kinds of butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, and other polinators.

Coneflowers also attract clever predatory bugs that hide out and wait for the butterflies, bees, and other polinators. I have no idea what the little bug in the picture above is. At first I thought it was a green lynx spider (which I’ve seen lurking on coneflowers before). But he’s pretty clearly an insect. Kind of looks like a tiny grasshopper with striped antenea. But the way he’s waiting on the flower makes me pretty sure he’s a predator.

Today I also saw this damsel fly flitting from leaf to leaf in the sun garden. I was surprised to see him becuase I generally expect damsel flies to hang out near water.

I also saw this cool looking wasp.