It kinda looks like a male cross orb weaver to me based on the shape and lack of markings (other than the stripy legs). Either was those are good friends to keep around!
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Windows!
Discovered in Fresno. At first I was a little baffled, but eventually I realized what it was, and was a little impressed.
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Give us a hint?
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That beautiful storm cloud?
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Every single afternoon storm that formed over the last couple weeks has missed my yard until this afternoon, and then this happened:
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The monsoon is late, and we’re getting desperate.
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A lovely crane and their turtle friends amongst the fully-bloomed duckweed (the stuff that the Floating Goat from above grazes on.) It gets so thick and covers so thoroughly, I’ve seen a handful of toddlers and dogs walk right out onto it thinking it was turf. luckily the pond is only about 18 inches deep around the edges.
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My folks made mistake feeding a gull their after dinner scraps. Now Sammy shows up daily at dinner time
Why do Seagulls live by the sea? Cause if they lived by the bays they would be baygulls. 
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The brown Turkey figs are in.
The deer, raccoons, opossums, foxes, birds, Texas ring-tails…
… and neighborhood kids are having weeks-long chowdown party.
Come on by if you’re in Central Texas. Be advised to bring a change of clothes, as this is a very chigger-heavy year out here, and you’ll need to shower ASAP after picking, and to wash your infested clothing immediately.
We have a heat index today calling the “what it feels like outside” temperatures around 107°F. Figs are ripening in hours. Green in the morning and almost too ripe to eat by nightfall.
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Thank you for your kind offer, but the weather report – plus the extreme chigger issue – makes it seem not so appealing after all, despite those lovely figs!
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I put maybe 10 drops of lavender or eucalyptus essential oil into a few spoonfuls of olive oil, and try to cover myself with this from the neck down.
This does interfere with sweating, but it also interferes with chiggers biting me, and sometimes I am ok with this trade-off–esp. during fig picking season.
For those of you who do not live in a place with chiggers…
… these bugs are so minute they are impossible to see with the or my naked eye. Their bites feel a little like mosquito bites, and itch like crazy.
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For us it’s parrots (here a Rainbow Lorikeet) during the day and fruit bats at night. I don’t begrudge them any though - there’s plenty of fruit to go around, and well, just look at them!
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Wow!
Seriously colorful!
And look at the size of those yellow figs on there! Aye carumba.
I’d have a difficult time saying no to an animal as handsome as that one. And yeah, fruit bats… we don’t have them up here, so we are probably lucky that way.
My mom has a bird feeder (ok, several feeders) and we do get the occasional Painted Bunting:
It can’t hold a candle to your Rainbow Lorikeet though.
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Wow - those Painted Buntings are stunning; candle well and truly held!
We are very lucky to have these as summer visitors, even if it means checking each picked fig for bird or bat droppings. The parrots eat the figs on the top (which are hard to reach) and the bats can’t navigate the lighter branches, so we get the easy-for-humans-to-pick ones from underneath the outer edge of the canopy.
The bats are the coolest thing in our garden, and decades after first seeing them I still have to stop every time I see them flying overhead at dusk. We’re very much at the southern edge of their range, so we used to see them only in the warmer months but a mixture of a warming climate and more suburban fruit trees means we see a lot more of them.
And here’s another gratuitous Lorikeet photo!
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What pretty Pollys! Do they want a cracker?
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