The garden is doing its last hurrah, with only a few edible things still growing. Mainly peppers, squash, and herbs. It has been a very fruitful garden this year, though.
Strawberries!
Squash!
Grapes! And fuzzy wrath!
Peppers!
More peppers!
Various yummy herbs!
Lettuces and chard!
Tomatoes!
Weird mutant tomatoes!
And Abby's favourite, catnip!
This particular type of catnip is quite potent, too. . .
Even outside of the garden, there are tasty treats to be found. For example, the various nut trees are being all nutty. The back yard is full of pecans from the looming pecan tree, which makes it a good time for the kitten to play "catch the pecan". Walnuts and chestnuts are falling, too, which is a bit of a hazard.
The squirrels are living the good life, though, once they manage to chew their way through the layers of shell.
There are other signs of Autumn, too, in the animal life rather than the plant life. This town is located in one of the main gaps in the Appalachians, and so the annual Monarch butterfly migration passes through the area. All the butterfly bushes in the back yard have lately tended to be visited by lots of butterflies (what a surprise!).
The Monarch butterfly is one of those animals that suffer from cheap imitation knock-offs. In this case, the culprit is the Viceroy butterfly. Monarchs are one of the only things to eat milkweed plants, a type of very noxious weed. The butterflies store up the noxiousness inside of themselves, and thus when another critter eats one then the critter gets a mouthful of ick. Critters don't like that, and so no critter will voluntarily eat more than one Monarch during that critter's lifetime. This is a useful survival strategy for Monarchs overall.
The Viceroy, on the other hand, is relatively yummy. But it has made itself up to look very similar to a Monarch in colour and pattern. There is one relatively simple way to tell if a butterfly is a Viceroy instead of a Monarch, though, that doesn't involve tasting it: count the legs. When a Viceroy changes from a caterpillar to a butterfly it keeps all six legs. When a Monarch changes, it loses a pair and only has four legs. Here is a Monarch:
If you look closely, you can see that it only has two legs on either side of its body.
So if you see a butterfly with that pattern and six legs, then it is a Viceroy pretending to be a Monarch. If you see a butterfly with that pattern and only four legs, then it is either a real Monarch or else a Viceroy that had an accident.
The other way to tell the butterflies apart is by the Viceroys having an extra line on their wings that the Monarch don't have, but that can be hard to distinguish sometimes. Unlike insect legs, of course, which are so easy to see and count!
And in related news, the woolly-bears are a-swarmin'!
Woolly-bears, also known as woolly-worms and who knows how many other appellations, are the caterpillars of a family of moths called Arctiidae moths. This includes species with more familiar names as tiger moths and tussock moths. They are generally fat fuzzy caterpillars, often several inches long. Unlike many caterpillars, woolly-bears are safe to handle; their hairs ("setae", really) are non-poisonous and don't cause itching. This contributes to their popularity among kids, and thus to such institutions as the annual Woolly-Bear Festival.
Woolly-bears hatch from their eggs in the Autumn, and survive the Winter by producing a natural antifreeze in their bodies. This lets them remain alive and awake during the cold.
Their fur is generally shades of black and/or orange; commonly they are orange in the middle and black on one or either end, though all-black or all-orange ones can also be found. This range of colours is due to just individual variations in the caterpillars, not to different species.
A collection of various woolly-bears:
Woolly bears 1
A nearly all-orange one (the heads themselves are always black, even if the fur is all orange)
Woolly bears 2
One that is black at both ends:
Woolly bears 3
One that is black at only one end, with a little orange at the very end:
Woolly bears 4
This one is curled up in the woolly-bear's instinctive defensive posture:
Wooly bears 5
On this one, you can see the usual leg arrangement of caterpillars:
The head is on the right. Behind the head come the three pairs of true legs, which are on the black-furred section. Beyond those, on the orange-furred section, are four pairs of false legs; they aren't really legs, just growths with gripping ends that help the caterpillar to hold on to things. And at the end opposite the head, on the small black-furred section, is a final pair of false legs that help anchor the tail. So though it looks as though caterpillars have more than the standard six legs of insects, they really only have six legs. And with those legs, they can really move along!
And then there are the spiders!
For whatever reason, the big orb-weaver spiders always come out towards the start of Autumn and make themselves very obvious. Most of the fences around here have their share of big spiders hanging around on webs, as do many porches, bushes, and the like. Always fun to be walking along in the morning and get a face full of spiderweb!
In my spare time around town, I've been attending to various projects and doings and manly deeds of might. I've been working on building a little work studio for my landlady; she makes lots of stained-glass artwork, and really needs a space devoted solely to that. And so I laid out some foundations and started building away. It hasn't fallen down yet, so that's a good sign.
I also have been roaming about the countryside a bit. One day I decided to try seeing how many of the tallest peaks in the state I could get to the top of in a single day: I managed the four tallest, the sixth tallest, and the fourteenth tallest. I'd planned that event for that day because the weather forecasts were all calling for mild temperatures and mostly sunny skies. What we got, however, was this:
Apparently "mostly sunny" means "you'll see a bit of sun around sunrise, and then not again until several days later". At least it didn't rain, though when I reached the very top of the very tallest mountain the bottom of the clouds was literally only a few feet over my head. It was rather damp, therefore. But I managed to find the little survey marker marking the highest point in the state.
Naturally, standing upon the highest point of land in the region called for a suitably dramatic and noble comportment.
Anyway, that's how life in a little mountain town has been of late. In closing, only more thing remains to be illustrated:
a dragon car!
I have no idea what that car was about. It was here in town on Main Street, parked in front of a funeral home. A new high-speed hearse, for when you're really dying to get to the cemetery quickly?
