Tag Archives: wildlife

WildLife Wednesday – Black Swallowtail Butterflies

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6 Black Swallowtail butterflies have emerged from their chrysalises.  They’re so quick and sneaky that I haven’t had the priviledge of watching any of them emerge.
There are 3 males and 3 females. That’s pretty neat to have an even split.

There’s 1 chrysalis to go. It’s getting super dark and clearish. At this stage you can kind of see the yellow speckles of the wings. I figure it’ll hatch(?) within the next 24 hours.

It’s been very interesting dealing with the birthing of butterflies. However, I don’t plan to bring anymore caterpillars in this year. I’ve read that at some point the black swallowtail caterpillars build chrysalises to overwinter (diapause). I don’t know when that’ll be, so I’m not going to chance it. I figure they’d be better off overwintering out in nature the way God designed them too.

The butterflies have been an enjoyable part of this 4th of July holiday. I’m happy our Grandson got to see the chrysalises and new butterflies. It was an extra bit of fun to share.

Happy Wednesday!

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Fox Eggs

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Remember my posts Mystery Egg 2-15-2017 and Turtle Egg 4-26-2017 well, I encountered another mystery egg. This one is buried in my cedar chest planter.It was the oddest thing. I was digging up some annual bulbs and replacing them with marigolds in my cedar chest planter, a few inches deep in the soil my hand touch something hard, round and smooth. There’s only store-bought soil in the upper part of cedar chest, so I knew it wasn’t a rock. I picked the object up, lo and behold it was an egg. Oh dear, why on earth was an egg buried there? Okay, this is getting bizarre. There’s no way this is a turtle egg because I can’t imagine a turtle scaling the cedar chest wall just to lay an egg.

As I reburied the egg, I wondered what mischief it could be? I even pondered on the idea of someone was tinkering around with a magic spell. Well, what would you think? :\

It was time for some internet searching to see if anyone knew what significance buried eggs have. I was amazed to see that there’s several other folks that have found eggs buried in gardens and flower pots.I learned that turtle shells are a leathery texture, so right away I knew that this one wasn’t one and I was wrong about the egg I found in my other flower bed being one. The shells of the eggs I found are hard like a regular chicken egg, so they must be hen eggs of some sort.

Apparently Foxes and weasels bury foods in various places to store for future feasting.
To our knowledge there’s not any weasels around here, but we do know that there’s a fox in our area. Remember the Red Fox I posted a photo and video of 5-11-2016. We’ve seen a fox a few more times since then, so we suspect that a fox is responsible for the buried eggs.Cool, so the now the mystery is solved. A fox must have left the egg in the woods and is also hiding eggs in my flower beds, it’s strange though, I thought it was only the Easter Bunny that did that. 😀

Wishing you fun mysteries!

Further reading- Google search link – found an egg buried in my garden

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WildLife Wednesday – Not Turtle Egg – updated

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One of the fun things about yardening is that I never know what I’m going to encounter. Like today, I was digging in one of my flower beds to plant some marigolds. I was pulling the dirt in around the edge of the marigold, when I found an egg buried under a sweet william.

Cool, I physically laughed out loud. I walked across the yard where my husband was mowing and told him, “I need to show you something.”
He followed me to the flowerbed. He laughed and said, “Isn’t that something. I bet it’s a turtle egg.”

We both shared a laugh at the interesting things we find on our property.
I agreed with him about the turtle egg. We used to see turtles in our yard making nest. So far though, we’ve never seen a baby turtle.

I covered the egg back up with soil.  I hope that it may one day hatch out a turtle. Unfortunately, we’ve had more than a few freezing temperatures this past month. This egg is really close to the top of the soil so it may not be viable now.
Or it might be, we’ll see, time will surely tell.

Have a great rest of the week.
May all your surprises be fun ones.

edited in:
There may be more eggs. I stopped digging around as soon as I saw the egg.
Also, I’m just guessing it’s a turtle egg. I honestly don’t know what kind of egg it is.

Edited in May 30, 2017- This is not a turtle egg. It’s a hen of some sort.
see my updated post: Fox Eggs

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