local wildlife

[quietann]

There are things to be said for living in the semi-rural suburbs...



It is in a cedar tree. It looks like a koosh ball and is about that size.






One of the dawn's early light turkeys from last week:






There is a gravel pile with a tarp over it near the barn. We needed some gravel today, and when we threw back the tarp we found this:


It turns out that some mother garter snake decided that this would be a good place for baby snakes, and there were at least 6 of them, maybe more. They usually burrowed into the gravel pretty quickly, but I did get to hold one:


There are a lot of bugs and other good snake food in the gravel, and it's well protected. I went back later to see if I could hold another snake, but there was only one out, and it got *very* annoyed when I picked it up.

Comments

[scliff.livejournal.com]

Googling turned up this page:

http://www.gpnc.org/eastern.htm

which has something that looks quite similar.

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

What you have there is the "cedar" part of apple-cedar rust. It won't generally hurt the cedars but it WILL hurt your apples. If you care about your apples, try to destroy all those orange squishy things ASAP. We have a big problem with it here.

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

Thanks. They will go away soon.

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

I pruned all of the galls that I could find on the cedar. Now I need to figure out the best way to dispose of the galls.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

I asked around here at work and they too said it looked like an Apple cedar fungus of some sort and yes, get rid of it ASAP.

[halleyscomet.livejournal.com]

AIEEEE The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming!