flowering bush with red and green leaves and large clusters of tiny white flowers

Wordless Wednesday: Flowering bushes

If flowers are in bloom, you know I’m going to post pictures of them.

image shows a black and white bird with yellow eyes clinging to a grey tree. The tree is barkless, and its surface is dotted with acorns embedded into it in holes that are placed in a series of slightly slanted, but mostly vertical lines.

Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?

Sometimes when you go out and into nature, nature does something so interesting that you want to stop and watch it for a while. Case in point: while on a hike last week, my husband and I came across a colony of acorn woodpeckers stashing nuts for the winter. After watching for awhile, we found ourselves wondering: “Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?”

Lahaina

Like so many, we here at Caterpickles Central are heartbroken at the news coming out of Maui.

Photo of me having lunch outside in the middle of a warm, sunny day.

Hello, summer!

Hello, friends! It’s summer and at last I’m back!

Mother duck + ten very fluffy ducklings swimming in a pool.

It’s spring break, and you know what that means…

2022, like 2021, 2020, and 2019 before it, has been a lot so far. Between the news, some difficult events in our extended circle, and everything going on at school lately, I am emotionally exhausted and in the market for a distraction. You may be too. So in that spirit, I offer this update from the mini-wildlife refuge we call a backyard.

Barrel shaped cactus plant with giant cluster of white flowers with a yellow center.

Wordless Wednesday: Flowering cacti

It’s springtime for the cacti too.

Wordless Wednesday: Spring flowers

Apparently, this is the week we get spring flowers in Northern California.

Sam the Eagle and Jean Pierre Napoleon in a still from Muppets Most Wanted. I picked this photo because they have their index fingers against their face like they are thinking hard about something puzzling.

Sam the Eagle: Bald Eagle, Harpy Eagle, or Shoebill Stork?

I grew up watching the Muppets. For years I wandered through life, filled with the happy conviction that I knew everything I needed to know about Sam the Eagle. This happy state continued until I saw a video of the African shoebill stork on Twitter. It bore a disconcerting resemblance to old Sam. To make matters worse, while researching shoebills, I discovered that some think that the harpy eagle is actually the model for Sam the Eagle. There’s only one thing to do when your world has been rocked by this sort of question: compare and contrast.