A few years ago, in August, my husband got these shots (below) of a hawk perched on the utility lines that stretch along the back of our property line. We weren’t sure if it was a Cooper’s Hawk, a Red-Tailed Hawk or a Red Shouldered Hawk, three of the more common ones in our area….
One creature I haven’t seen in my backyard is the box turtle. Turtles are in decline in my mid-Atlantic region, mostly due to suburban sprawl. The box turtle’s home range is usually about 12 to 14 acres. Box turtles are slow crawlers, extremely long lived, slow to mature, and have relatively few offspring per year….
Imagine my shock when I saw a fire-engine red lizard face sticking out of my rock wall in the garden. I yelled for my husband: “There’s a giant salamander out here!” Because of course I know we don’t have lizards in Delaware. Salamanders, however, are a different matter. I see them all the time in…
These two precious kittens ignore their hundreds of dollars of cat toys and play in a shipping box.
Meet Yolanda, our backyard raccoon. She lives in a strip of woods behind our house that is owned by the county, so her actual home tree is not in our backyard, but we like to think she is ours, partly because of her many foraging trips to our yard. Her tree is a larger tree…
The northern green frog (Rana clamitans melanota) is a subspecies of the green frog, Rana clamitans. Native to the eastern United States, it is a common aquatic frog that never strays far from the water, except during hibernation. It lives freshwater marshes, swamps, lakes, ponds and the banks of rivers. “They occupy a wide variety…
This little guy has been hopping through and browsing from the garden these past few weeks.
As my friend left our house recently, I noticed this little vole running in circles on the driveway. I don’t know what was wrong with this little guy but he continued his compulsive circling until my husband scooped him up in a bin and took him back into the woods to release him. Voles aren’t…
We found this little guy wrapped up in a fold of the blue tarp that we use to cover the grill during the winter. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a tree frog, so cute! I had to find out more about them. They have round sticky toe pads that help them travel…
My husband was excited to see this bird; apparently it’s rarely seen around here. I managed to take a photo before it flew off.
