Nature Friday – Bountiful Butterflies

Hi everyone! It’s Walter here. Last week Millie showed you all some of the snakes we have in our yard and today I want to show you some of the beautiful butterflies we have.

I love watching all the butterflies in our perennial garden.

Our perennial garden is a butterfly paradise. We have all shapes and sizes. First lets look at one of the smallest.

Silver Spotted Skipper on Clematis

The next largest is the cabbage butterfly. On any given day we can have at least a dozen of them flitting from one flower to the next.

Cabbage Butterfly on Lythrum

The Painted Lady is slightly larger than the Cabbage butterfly and this one had some company while it worked on one of our cone flowers.

Painted Lady butterfly and Zabulon skippers on Pink Coneflower

Those skippers are actually smaller than the silver spotted skipper I showed you first. It was nice of the painted lady to share the coneflower with them.

Last but not least is our largest butterfly appropriately named the Giant Swallowtail.

Giant Swallowtail on Agastache

The Giant Swallowtail looks very different on the top than it does on the underside. You get a good look at what the top side looks like in the above picture. The back lighting lets the top kind of shine through. They are mostly black with lines of yellow on top while the underside has a yellow background with a multicolored pattern like you see in the picture below.

Giant Swallowtail on Clematis

I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the butterflies we have visiting our yard this year. Next week we might show you some different ones so stay tuned.

Join the Nature Friday Blog Hop

We are joining the LLB Gang for their Nature Friday Blog Hop. You should pop over to their blog to see all the other posts.

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Nature Friday – Some Slithering Friends

Hi everyone! It’s Millie here. Today I want to introduce you to some of our slithering friends around our yard.

My best imitation of a snake

It’s been too hot to spend much time outside lately but we enjoy watching our garter snake friends when we can. I like to try to sniff them but mom always calls me off before they can strike at my nose. Don’t worry they are basically harmless and probably wouldn’t even connect if they tried to strike me.

A couple of different colored garter snakes.

We’re lucky to live in an area where there are no poisonous snakes.

This snake has beautiful markings

Our snakes spend the night under the upper (raised) portion of our patio. In the morning they make there way out. Sometimes we can see them just sticking their heads out of a crack under the steps.

This snake always comes out near the down spout.

The same snake that you see above always comes out near the down spout and makes its way across the lower patio to some vegetation to hang out for the day. Here is a video that shows the snake making its way.

If you can’t see the video you can go here to view it.

Always watch your step going in our out of the garage.

Here is a wide view of the snake’s path.

(Click on the image to make it bigger)

Occasionally the snake will hang out under the bench in the above picture.

All curled up under the bench

Maybe I should save this picture for Selfie Sunday.

These snakes do a great job of keeping small pests away from the house. They like to eat slugs which is great for the hosta on the patio. I hope you enjoyed seeing some of our snakes today.

Join the Nature Friday Blog Hop

We are joining the LLB Gang for their Nature Friday Blog Hop. You should pop over to their blog to see all the other posts.

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Black & White Selfie Sunday

Hi everyone. It’s Millie and Walter here. It’s been super hot around here lately so we’ve been spending lots of time indoors.

It’s very relaxing to hang out on the big bed.

I like laying on mom’s pillow when she isn’t sleeping.

We’ve had fun watching the Olympics with our parents for the past couple of weeks. Mom watched lots of the equestrian events. Those big horses sure can jump high. The weather peeps are predicting a heat wave for us this coming week so we will continue to keep cool inside. We hope all of you can stay cool too.

We’re joining The Cat on My Head for their Selfie Sunday blog hop. You should check out the hop to see some of the other selfies. Thanks for stopping by.

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