YELLOWSTONE'S WILD WORLD

I was hoping to have a Yellowstone movie for you today but I haven’t finished it yet so I’m going to show you a little of what we have been seeing on our land.

Texas is known for cowboys and arid areas but with an average of 45″ of rain/year East Texas is NOT arid. It is a wonderful combination of huge pine trees, oaks, sweet gums, magnolias, wild blueberries, wild orchids, carnivorous plants, and some really obnoxious mosquitoes. But the mosquitoes haven’t gotten vicious yet and the oak pollen is almost gone so now we can enjoy the hummingbirds fighting around the feeder (If those guys weighed 5 pounds I would be scared to death of them), the coral honeysuckle and dogwoods.

We have also found some other critters including the animals, and one plant, below.

Yesterday I looked out the window and saw a really pretty rat snake crawling around the Turk’s cap bush. It was looking for Anole lizards but the birds didn’t know that and they were going nuts.

Later we heard our neighbor’s 2 dogs barking at a big water puddle left after the last rain. I’ve watched them go after everything from rabbits to copperheads so I went out to protect whatever they were barking at. I would never hurt the dogs but to be safe I grabbed a shovel to try to protect their victim. It turned out to be a pretty large and very aggressive snapping turtle. I was afraid to grab the turtle so I tried grabbing the dogs. Both of them are sweet dogs but once they get going they are difficult to stop. One of the dogs got loose from me and I heard a sharp doggie yelp. The snapping turtle got her on the nose but she got loose relatively unharmed. After that the turtle snapped repeatedly but that didn’t slow the dogs down. I finally scooped the heavy turtle up in the shovel and put it the bed of our truck. We decided to wait until the dogs left and then we would let the turtle loose. The dogs set up residence on our porch. They ended out spending the night. The next morning they were still on the porch so my husband took the turtle to our local wildlife refuge and let it loose.

After he released the turtle he noticed a coachwhip nearby. It was just finishing shedding it’s skin and looked bright and shiny.

When he got home he decided to photograph something a little calmer. Our silver bells bush had it’s first flowers of the year.