wordsfromanneli

Thoughts, ideas, photos, and stories.


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Hurry up and Hide

On this rural road, I came upon a doe and two fawns. Yes, there is a second fawn in front of the one that is obvious. I had to count legs. Either there were two fawns, or one fawn had more than four legs.

Over her shoulder, the doe lowed to the fawns, “Hurry! This way!”

“Get into the thicket here while I distract them.”

And as I drove past very slowly I saw that there was already a well-worn deer crossing and path down into a property  thick with shrubs and trees.

Not much concerned when cars come by,

Their courage doesn’t fail,

The fawns melt through the thicket high,

And fade into the trail.


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Insects Side by Side

The closest I.D. I can come up with is the western tiger swallowtail (Papilio rutulus).

He was snacking on the leaves of a very large Mexican orange bush (Choisya ternata).  I wonder if he was aware of the danger that lurked less than a foot away.

Can you spot the gray paperish wasp nest in the bottom right quadrant of the photo below?

I think this (below) is the kind of wasp that was working on the nest. It looks like a sand wasp but Wikipedia says they live in burrows in the soil (sand). Would they live in a paper nest like this? Probably not, but I don’t know…. I haven’t been able to identify this insect, but it seemed to belong to this gray paper nest. Any ideas? Not a yellow jacket.

 


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Double Trouble

If you’ve never left North America, you may never have experienced a ride on a double decker bus like this one in London.

There is a mystery about them that no one has ever solved.

This bobby at the Charing Cross station is still trying to figure it out. He scratches his head and says, “I just can’t figure out who’s driving the top bus.”

By the way, did you know that the term “bobby” for a policeman originated from Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel,  the man who founded the British Metropolitan Police (also known as Scotland Yard) in 1829? Sometimes the bobbies were also called peelers (for his last name), but that can’t be a good thing, as some may associate that term with strippers.