Ava On An Alien World

Here is a picture Ava drew for National Geographic Kids. She hopes that they will use it in one of their future issues. Dragons are her favorite thing to draw. She has created an imaginary alien world where dragons have some very usual features.

Click on the picture to enlarge

I love horses

I have drawn horses since I was two years old. Here is my latest horse drawing.

Baby Caterpillars!

Twelve days after the first moth eggs were laid, the caterpillars emerged. We started feeding them tulip popular and sweet gum, and then switched to sassafras since they didn't seem to be eating. They look like they are happy with the sassafras. Here is a picture of the caterpillars as they came out of their eggs.

Three days later, 70 more caterpillars emerged from eggs that had been laid by another moth. We have a lot of baby moth mouths to feed! Would anyone like to adopt a caterpillar or two or three......? They are sooooo cute!

Morning Walk at Gator Pond

I got up at 7:15 in the morning at Gator Pond. When I walked out on the porch, I found my Dad making a squirrel trap. We decided to take a morning walk to the pond. We went down the road where our house will be one day and a big tree had fallen across the road because of the recent prescribed burn and storm. So Daddy cut some branches and mowed a path right by something he did not even see. We walked down the new path that Daddy had made and in the bushes.................

Guess what I saw..............

Coral Honeysuckle!!!!!!

Coral honeysuckle is a native plant in our area. The honeysuckle you probably have seen is an invasive honeysuckle from Japan. The coral honeysuckle flower is a pink tube-like shape with yellow frills on the ends of it. See my drawing above of a coral honeysuckle and other plants and animals. See if you can find a cottontail rabbit, coachwhip snake, green anole, deer, hummingbird, turkey oak, coral honeysuckle, wild indigo, fringe tree and an ant bed with one ant. Also see if you can find these invasive plants in the drawing that we try not to have at Gator Pond: Japanese honeysuckle, privet, mimosa, popcorn tree, and cogon grass.

Prometheus Moth Update

Our first female moth laid a total of twelve eggs and then we released her so that she could continue egg-laying outdoors. We shared five eggs and two of our remaining cocoons with some friends that were visiting. Good luck Sean and Ben with the egg hatching and caterpillar raising!

Just four days after the first female emerged from her cocoon, two more females emerged. See the drawing I did of them to the left. The next night a male emerged. The two females attracted four Prometheus Moth males to our screened-in porch. Exciting! We caught all four males and two of them quickly found our females. We now have ninety-six eggs and are looking for host plants nearby so that we can keep the new caterpillars fed.

My First Moth Metamorphosis

My mother helped me collect some moth cocoons a couple weeks ago from a Winged Elm that was growing near our pond. We tied fishing line to them and hung them in our back porch. Yesterday, the first Prometheus moth emerged. I could hardly believe how big and beautiful she was! Then just a couple hours later a male Prometheus moth came to our screened porch. He wanted inside of it but he couldn't find a hole. As we tried to catch him with our butterfly nets, he flew up to the top of the porch. We kept on saying "If you want in, you can just get caught in our nets and finally get in!" We finally caught and released him into the screened porch. In less than 5 minutes he found the female. They remained together for several hours and then we found that the female flew to the other side of the porch. We put her in a brown paper bag and let her lay eggs. We have only gotten six eggs so far. We hope we will get more. See picture of the female that I drew.