Backyard tip of the week: Look for weird bugs this time of year. There was a freaky moth seen the other night that seems to be in some sort of molting phase or is just one of the strangest bugs around. It looked like a sort of small brown moth with cool lines on its wings and, now I'm not making this up, it looked like it had fur! Like a fur coat and hat and gloves and even a furry tail sticking off the back of the moth thing, whatever it was. I looked it up in the bug book, but couldn't find it. I put a picture of it on the BackyardTV.com Cool Sightings Photo Gallery page and I'm hoping someone will tell me what it was. Either way, keep an eye open for funny looking, furry moths and other such things this fall. Maybe you'll spot the elusive wooly mammoth caterpillar, you're sure to love it!
Backyard sightings for last week: Including northern cardinals, rose-breasted grosbeaks, mourning doves and catbirds. Chipping sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, Carolina wrens, house wrens, eastern goldfinches, house finches. Red-bellied and downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, the tufted titmice, black-capped chickadees, blue-jays, American crows, a red squirrel and a few grey squirrels, a couple of different skunks, a doe, some chipmunks, and some bunnies. Also seen were salamanders, still some butterflies, plenty of bats and at least one 'not so friendly' neighborhood red-tailed hawk.
Cool sighting of the week: The red-tailed hawk flew at the finch feeder again yesterday. I caught a good look at the attack this time and it seems that the hawk simply flies up to the multi-port finch feeder and kicks it with his feet to send as many as six of the little birds flying off chaotically. I don't think he caught any this time. Also seen this week, an insect stand-off at the garage door late Saturday night between a cricket and a wolf spider! At first the two bugs seemed intent on approaching each other and I wondered how the larger cricket would fair against the possibly venomous wolf spider in battle. Then, suddenly, a small beetle motored his way along next to the cricket and the spider and they became distracted and went their separate ways without incident. Oh well, there turned out to be no insect battle, but, catching a close up glimpse of nature like that last weekend was very cool!
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