Itsy Bitsy

While going out to the car the other morning, I almost walked into this:















Yep, I shrieked. (A small one.) But then I got to studying this little guy's web. It was a masterful design. Delicate, strong, and catching lots of critters. He must have seen me too, because he scooted off to the side.















The web looks huge in the pictures, but it really wasn't all that big. I'm just glad I didn't walk into it face-first! (It was up high, attached on one side to a clematis trellis and on the other to the house gutter.)

Baby Turtles Everywhere

Look at what popped out of the ground a week ago... baby snapping turtles! I'd never seen such a thing.


















For about an hour, 8 or 9 of them slowly poked their heads out of a tiny hole in the grass, completely entangled together, and made their way one by one to the pond, in back. How did they know where to go?



























We'd seen the mama laying eggs at the beginning of summer in a rotted tree stump, far from where the babies hatched. If they were from the same eggs then she certainly faked us out!