It rained almost all day and part of the night on Monday. By Tuesday morning we had about four and a quarter inches, which we desperately needed. Our newly-sprouted grass appreciated it, as did the moss and lichen on a bank along Fouche Gap Road.
I believe the vine cross the image from the bottom left is Virginia creeper.
Despite the amount of rain, the ditches along the road were not flowing heavily. I hope that’s because a lot of the rain soaked in.
We have been watching Hurricane Florence’s path for nearly a week. At one time it was going to threaten Leah’s aunt in Winston-Salem, NC. Later it looked like it would move further south and west, possibly coming close to us. We were hoping for rain, although less than the coastal areas are getting.
Finally Florence’s path was settled, and it splits the difference. It’s moving through South Carolina, and we are not likely to get any rain. However, it seems to be spreading clouds towards us. There was a bank of thick clouds to our east and south most of the day on Saturday. Later in the evening the clouds reached us.
These apparently are part of the extreme outer cloud bands. Unfortunately it seems that they are not going to bring us rain.
I met one of our close neighbors a few days ago, a nice, lovely widow.
I first noticed her a couple of weeks ago when I was changing a hose at our outside faucet. The connected hose almost always has some pressure, so water drips out when I unscrew the fitting. The drops hit her web, and she comes out to investigate. I’m not quite sure how I managed to get my phone to shoot the video upside down. I guess it couldn’t tell which was was up when I held it pointed down.
Here’s a still shot.
This spider has the characteristic red hourglass shape on the abdomen, which she graciously presented, but it also has a red dot towards the rear of the abdomen. There is no mistaking a black widow spider, with its shiny, black body, even if the red marking is not visible.
I seldom bother black widows, or any other spider, for that matter. If I can, I remove the harmless (or, based on some reading I just did, usually harmless) spiders from the house and release them outside. I have never found a black widow inside. I might or might not try to capture it with a plastic container, depending on how brave I felt and how aggressive the spider was. I have also never found a brown recluse spider, for which I am thankful. They are apparently more likely to be found in a house than a black widow.
The link above says that the wolf spider bite “may be very painful.” I see wolf spiders very frequently at night when I take the dogs out. The orb-weaving spider, which I believe lives around here, spins webs that are easy to walk into, especially at night. The web site says, “Be careful not to walk into their webs at night – the fright of this spider crawling over one’s face can be terrifying and may cause a heart attack, particularly to the susceptible over 40 year olds.”
I guess I will continue to appreciate spiders, but only from an appropriate distance.
We get a fair amount of wildlife traffic through our yard. I have posted shots of turkeys, deer and coyotes in the past. It’s time for an update.
Here are some of the deer we have seen lately. First, the does:
That’s a small fig tree between them.
Here is a buck we saw recently.
He was eating the pitifully sparse grass that sprouted after my spring and early summer labors.
This thing flew past my head one night when I took the dogs out.
It’s a cicada. This is an annual cicada. According to the wikipedia article, it has probably been living underground as a nymph for several years. The emergence of this type of cicada is not synchronized like the emergence of the 13-year or 17-year cicadas. It sounded almost like a hummingbird as if flew past my head and landed on the driveway. The dogs were fascinated, especially when it started singing. The cicada song is ubiquitous here, almost a characteristic of the Southern night.
The next passer-by came though a few days ago. Leah called me to the kitchen window to point out what she thought might have been a fawn. I looked out and spent some time trying to identify a fawn in what I saw, and suddenly realized that it wasn’t a fawn at all.
It’s a goat, one of two that escaped from someone down in Texas Valley on August 29. The photo is from the owner’s Facebook post reporting their escape. The goats have been seen several times lately. The latest sighting was Thursday. One of the people I see on Fouche Gap Road on my daily dog walk stopped to tell me about seeing one of them. They are apparently enjoying their freedom, at least for the time. I think they are lucky that coyotes seem not to hunt in packs around here.
Bow hunting season opens on September 8, a date the goats would do well to note.