We found this beauty during a walk at Goose Creek State Park, yesterday. He was hanging out on a screened in picnic shelter. We had a fantastic walk. The birds are here for the winter, so there was a beautiful soundtrack of bird calls all afternoon.

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Ollie found another gem of a spider this afternoon. This lovely guy was our back fencepost. He’s as furry and heebie-jeebie inducing as he looks.

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Well, Ollie found another batch of baby spiders this morning. Just getting close enough to take their picture made me itch all over. I have no idea what kind of spider it is, but I got the camera as close as I could without blurring. All the little spots are the babies and if you shake the cooler they’ve nested on, they’ll scatter all around the web. Ew.

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So we put the grubs in their little pile of wood chips back in the area where we found them. Ollie watched them all squirm and wriggle back underground and we went off for our afternoon walk. When we got home, I went over to check to see if they had all gone back into hiding only to find a nasty surprise. Within a couple of hours a colony of fire ants had moved in, killed the grubs, and begun to eat them. Most of the grubs are black and shriveled up, now and there’s a path of ants all the way across our yard leading off somewhere into the neighbors. What a lesson in the food chain for Ollie. I don’t think he quite gets it, yet. He just appreciated the ants and didn’t notice the grub carcasses.

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While raking up and dumping all the wood chips from the playground yesterday, I found a whole little colony of grubs. Ollie was enthralled with them. He said he loved them, so we put them in a bucket with some of the wood chips and he’s been watching them crawl around ever since. Who knew that bug larva would make my little biologist so happy? I see a long future of aquariums filled with all kinds of wildlife in my future. Its a damn good thing I don’t mind reptiles and amphibians.

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