We live in the country in Virginia.  That means lotsa critters!  I never saw this much wild animal/insect action growing up in upstate NY, I can tell you that……even when I stayed on my cousins’ farm.  Heck, I spent a lot of summers hiking around the Adirondack Park and never encountered enough to scare me into staying away from the woods.

Now that I live in a more mild (read: HOT) climate I spend most summers threatening to move to Canada.  But it’s not all bad.  Some of what I see around here is pretty darn cool.  Last August I had a flying squirrel that would come to my bird feeder every night.

Pretty cool, right???

So here is a smattering of what we’ve seen around here this spring.

As always, tons of venison deer:

(That was taken from my living room window)

There’s the territorial little finches at my feeder every day:

(I tried to get a good one of the downy woodpecker and nuthatches we also see, but no luck yet)

A few nights ago, we spotted what we think is a luna moth:

It was HUGE!!!!

This next poor little critter was long dead………we found this shell and bones down by the stream:

It was way cool, but kinda disturbing, too.  I found all of his little vertebrae and bones there.  There was a ton of little tadpoles in the stream so we’ll have some amphibian action soon!

Then yesterday when I moved the garbage can I found this guy:

What I thought was steel wool was actually a wooly bear caterpillar. After I made a call to the local wildlife and pest authority (mom) and ascertained that he was harmless, I went back out to collect him with a jar, but alas, he had gone. Freaky though, huh?

And now that we’re talking creepy / crawly, I found a redback spider in the sunroom yesterday, a lonestar tick on my living room window, and spent 3 hours picking live, crawling nasty lice out of Emily’s hair today.  No pics of those.

Canada, ho!!!!