Backyard safaris

Sometimes, when I am left alone at Dad's house, or The Girl's parent's house, or any other place that affords me some chance to wander outside, I get a chance to aimlessly poke around in the yard, and I'm often impressed at how much I find.  There are the usual--and almost expected--fun surprises, like brightly colored beetles or birds nests, or the much rarer stick insect or tree frog, but I still like the idea that if you let yourself look around, you can find a lot of interesting stuff in very common places.  Several years ago, I had an apartment in a miserable building in Cleveland between a graveyard and a train line.  (I didn't mind the graveyard, and didn't mind the train line, either, but the building was miserable independent of its location.)  One morning, I looked down at the street (separated from the train tracks by a brick wall and a fiteen foot drop) and saw a rabbit nibbling on a six-inch-wide grassy shoulder between the street and the train line's brick wall.  I don't know how it got there (though looking back now, it seems likely that it usually hung out in the graveyard, or came a block or more from the houses with the larger yards on the other side of the tracks), but I was impressed that it had found the only edible expanse in fifty yards.  I was also concerned that he wouldn't find his way back to safety, but I never saw a dead rabbit on our street, so I guess he made it.

During my recent visit home, I met this fellow.

To be honest, I narrowly missed stepping on him, which is hard to believe, because he was about four feet long.

That's a big dose of black rat snake.

Black rat snakes are pretty easily identified once you've seen a few of them (we lost one measuring six feet in the house once, but we found him a couple days later), though I admit that I usually start with where I am; I know they live in Dad's area, because that's where I've seen most of the specimens I've met.  They are constrictors, and harmless to humans, but given the opportunity, they may bite.  A four-footer bit me once--I think he was trying to convince me to put him down and leave him alone, but I took him back to where I had found him first (then I washed the bite mark and marveled at the double row of teeth).  Their most distinguishing feature is nearly impossible to see without picking them up: while most snake bodies are round, rat snakes have flat bellies, like a loaf of bread.  Their coloring can be widely varied, but this is a close-up of the pattern on Dad's new tenant:

Note the darker, separated ovals going down the spine.

Why "tenant," you ask?  Because I kept checking on him over an hour or so, and eventually found him crawling into an invisible burrow in Dad's mulch pile.  Once he had gone all the way inside, I could only find the burrow entrance because I already knew exactly where it was.  Proof that snakes are ninjas.  Very cool!

It's very warm inside mulch piles.  If they're old enough, you can usually find ash inside.

When I found the snake, I went back inside to get my camera (surreptitiously, so as not to arouse suspicions in the dog, who probably would have taken a more disruptive interest in the snake), and ended up walking around some more dark corners of Dad's yard.  The recent week of rain meant that he had lots of neat looking mushrooms all over the yard.  I have no idea what any of them are, and I forgot to steal his fungus book, so if you know any of these species, please let me know.

That's not a bite mark.  I know better than to take bites out of red mushrooms.

These are ridiculously small.  Think pencil-eraser.  They seemed to have little seeds inside, but the number varied from none to three.  I think one of them had four.  They were growing in a spot where an ash tree died several years ago, and we haven't quite finished removing the stump.

These are also very tiny, and grew in a large clump right beside the aforementioned stump.

Growing on the log that used to be the ash tree.  They had a weird, rubbery texture, like uninflated balloons, but thicker.

Base of a tree near the snake's mulch pile.  Two distinct species.

He also has a lot of volunteer flowers (and raspberry bushes).  I think the hostas were planted, but they've spread an awful lot.

These hosta blooms were stacked on tall stalks.

The day lilies have been in the yard as long as I can remember.  When I was a kid, I was fascinated by how they closed up every night, and Mom explained that's how they got their name.

Admittedly, Dad's backyard is not a mountain or remote island, but I've said from the start that this is also about the joy of small adventures, and I'm glad that Dad's yard can still provide those, even if it's just a matter of looking a little closer at common things.