After several months of wet and windy weather, spring is settling in. We may have lost the Camp Cougar sign and its hefty post in the 88 mph winds, but the daffodils survived. Ensconced safely underground, they waited until March to start blooming. Now they are fading away.
The weather was wet enough to bring out a little-seen creature—a banana slug. I always wonder where they live and how they survive. There must be a mating couple somewhere, but I haven't discovered their love nest. I suppose if I planted tomatoes, I'd see many more. But alas, they must forage like most other non-avian critters up here.
Miner's lettuce always signals the start of spring to me. When we first moved here, I added the lettuce to salads. The plants are so small that recently I decided to leave them alone.
I discovered that leaving miner's lettuce alone allows them to flower and go to seed. They are quite pretty. We get more and more each year.
We have a lot of coastal rosemary that we planted after we moved here. It smells wonderful but it is not edible. The purple flowers blossom at this time of year.
Turkeys typically disappear in the spring. We've had one lone male showing up from time to time. If he is lucky, he'll find a flock to hang out with. I used an oil paint filter on this image.
When we had the pond put in 12 years or so ago, we got three goldfish. It turned out that two were male and one was female. Mrs. Fish has long since died, but because of her, we have at least 18 fish now. They don't stay still long enough for me to do a proper census.
We haven't seen a skunk all winter, even though we've found scat that could have been from a skunk. Finally, this one showed up on the critter cam. They might be too small to trigger the camera. I suspect we got this image because of the deer.
I thought mushroom season might be over, but areas of our property are damp enough to foster mushrooms.
We have a dead fir tree that is about 40 feet tall. This year, I noticed it is peppered with fungus about an inch or two across.
This is a very tiny mushroom, a little smaller than my pinky finger.
I'm hoping one year to wake up to a field full of flowers that I can see from the window. We have lots of flowers, but they are very tiny. One can appreciate them only by taking a walking and looking and/or bending down. The first image appears to be wild strawberry, but I have never seen the fruit.
A little fuzzy, but you get the idea.
Over the years I've planted lots of poppy seeds. I even started buying the seeds by the quarter pound. Yet, the property doesn't look like a poppy reserve as so few flowers ever grow. The first poppies started to blossom this week. They are at our gate, in a spot that gets good sunlight. I hope the rest follow soon and that I see more of them.
A few dozen small lupines bloomed. We typically get lots of these. I'm looking forward to seeing more in the next month.
I planted a lot of these last year. So far three have popped up. However, you'll notice this poor flower is being attacked by three insects. That's probably why it looks so beat up.
The warm season is off to a good start. From what I've seen so far, this could be a very good year for flowers at Camp Cougar.
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