Mammoth BUGS

So. We're back from Mammoth Cave, KY.
Did we see lots of birds? Nope. (A pair of bluebirds was my best bird moment)
Did we see lots of bugs? Oh, yeah.

It was hot and humid in eastern Kentucky this weekend. With no AC in my car, we are fairly moldy by now. And the hotter it got, the louder the cicadas yelled. Brood XIV has emerged here at home and apparently in Kentucky, too. Everywhere we went, there were cicadas; young ones just emerging from the ground, teenager ones emerging from their old skins, randy adult ones singing their ugly butts off, almost dead ones twitching on the sidewalks, and fully dead ones no longer twitching on the sidewalks.

This morning, as we were checking out of the hotel, a luna moth greeted us.

"Good morning. We hope you enjoyed your stay. Please come again."


Is there a more fantastic moth, anywhere?
Poor guy lost an antenna somehow.

While waiting to go down into the caves for a second tour, this guy was flitting about, and I got him to light on my fingers:

I thought it was a hackberry emperor, but it's not matching any pictures I can find. Who knows what this is? Speak now!

The caves we walked today are at the "wet" end of the cave system (which is the longest cave system in the world, by the way) and thanks to all that water over millions of years, the cave is festooned with glorious stalagmites and stalactites, soda straws, cave drapery, flowstone, and Frozen Niagara, a mass of formations that cascade down from one room of the cave into another.

Mammoth Cave has a sandstone cap that protects most of the system from water wanting to flow into the Green River, but where the cap ends, the formations begin.
The girls were so very unimpressed with all of the information we were getting from the ranger. But I loved it all.

Though there was a very large,unsettling hole in the ceiling. I was afraid to ask about cave-ins.

Many different kinds of critters call the caves home:
Little brown bats
Big brown bats
Gray bats
Eastern pipistrelle bats
Eastern small-footed bats
Cave crickets
Cave salamanders
Blind salamanders
Eyeless cave fish
Cave crayfish
Cave shrimp

While most of the life in the cave was inaccessible to us, we had no shortage of cave crickets. I thought that they were only where the lights were shining (every 20 feet or so) but the ranger started shining his flashlight on the ceiling, we realized that we were surrounded by them.
Thankfully, he saved that bit of info until we were on our way out. I got the creepy-crawlies on my neck as we passed under God-knows-how-many to get back to the outside.

These were mating. How........... cute.

On the way out of the park, I wanted to stop at a pond we saw on the way in.
Boy, am I glad we did, because this was in the parking lot:

A butterfly "bachelor drinking party"!
I just read that only young males engage in puddling. And only certain kinds of butterflies (sulphurs and swallowtails, whose males will patrol territories for females) will collect in puddle parties. Huh. Interesting, eh?

And as we entered the woods around the pond, we found more:

Tiger and spicebush swallowtails, and oodles of blues....summer azures?




I sat down and invited Isabelle to do the same. I showed her how to wipe sweat from her brow (we had no shortage of sweat) and put out her finger to get one to climb on.
When one of the blues accepted her gift and walked onto her finger, she said quietly, in a voice I have never heard from her, "Mommy. This is a dream come true."

She was in transports of joy. I feel like Mommy Of The Year.

The pond was lousy with dragonflies.

Blue dasher


A smallish snapping turtle (about two feet long) swam up to investigate us.
I got some good pictures, but I didn't realize, until I uploaded them, that I got one that looks like he is sticking his tongue out:

It's a leaf. But it makes for a fun photo.

Progress

Why did I take Nellie along today when the girls and I went to the CNC?
Why, oh why?
We don't walk her very much on a leash, and I have been working with her when we do, trying to accomplish the "Dog Whisperer" thing of her walking alongside or behind me.
She doesn't seem to get it. I have never claimed that she was smart.
The highlight of a visit to the CNC (at least for the girls) is feeding the fish and turtles.

Nellie may be part Labrador, but it must be a small part. She does not like water.
Every time the fish would jump for food, she would back up until she was practically sitting on me. Sissy.
(Remember, this is the dog who is scared of tree swallows.)

We consider the visit a success if we see Arnold, one of three snapping turtles who call the lake home.
Look closely at this picture...just under the small turtle's tail. See that face? That's Arnold.

What is this? I found a few here and there around the Krippendorf lodge. I searched Wildflower Information but can't find this color. Green is not a color of flower you come across much.

I consider a visit to the CNC a success if I find any cool birds. And today, I found life bird number 141. On the driveway out of the center, I saw what I thought was a stick or leaf. I am so glad I stopped:

As soon as I got close, I knew what it was. A red-eyed vireo.
It must have been stunned by another car or something, because I was able to pick it up.


I showed the girls (Nellie isn't allowed to get that close to birds...she is also part bird-dog) and got some pictures. I mean, how often do you get this close to a live vireo?

Ow.
Ow.
Ow!
Okay, okay! I get the picture, damn it!
He or she may have been a little dazed, but was still able to bite the hell out of me.
I put it over in the underbrush to recoup.

Then, we swung by the Red Barn to check the construction progress:

I am so glad that the color choice for the siding was red, the same color the barn had been. I had originally thought a deep green would be nice, but the red makes it look perfect. And everyone around here calls it "The Red Barn", anyway.
New doors and windows, too!
Dinner at McDonald's. Yuck. But Shrek toys in the Happy Meals go a long way with tired kids.
And I remembered the robin sitting on a nest the last time we were there, so I walked over to see the progress:

Five (?) new baby robins. At least they aren't House sparrows.

Geoff actually took some time tonight to go out with a friend to see a movie. This happens very, very rarely. Thank goodness. He needs to unplug and get out of the house more.
So the girls and I went out in the back and I savagely attacked some weeds while Lorelei "helped" pile all of the weeds around the sycamore.

I am so glad my camera is surgically fused to my body these days. Lorelei put her hands on her hips and said, "Whew! We are doing a BIG job!"

And Lorelei gets her first, unassisted bird find.
She got tired of moving clumps of weeds and went off to swing on a tree branch.
She later came running to tell me that she had found "a bewd nest". Hmmm. Okaaaay.
I expected her to show me the chickadee nest or something (which is now empty...they fledged today), but instead, she lead me to the tree she had been swinging on.


A robin nest! About four feet from the ground in one of our maples. The only reason I know it's robins is that I have noticed a pair hanging out there lately.
Yay! More babies to watch!

Blog news: Word has it that Kathi (katdoc) will be starting a new blog, after receiving her new computer next week. What a cool blog THAT will be! She's smart, a veterinarian, she's hilarious, and she's a birder. That, my friends, is a winning combination.