Nature In My Yard

Wood Frog, Lithobates sylvaticus

I was outside the other night looking for any interesting bugs that might be out when I ran accross someone else doing the same thing. This was quite exciting because this is the first frog I have seen in my yard.

Wood Frogs are the only frog found north of the Arctic Circle. In the winter they actually freeze. Come spring, they thaw out.

Striped Skunk Mephitis mephitis

I’ll start this off with a post from the old site:

I came down one afternoon to get a drink of water and my wife said: “There is a skunk in the middle of our yard.”

So of course I grabbed my camera and went after it. After shooting some random “look there’s a skunk” shots, I got ahead of where it was going and waited for it.

Well, it obligingly walked into the sun, started digging, and came up with a shrew!

And then paused for a picture!

I have never seen a skunk out in broad daylight before, and I certainly never saw one hunt down and catch a shrew.

Most Striped Skunks have two white stripes running the length of their back. In his skunk the white stripes are so wide, they have almost merged. From the side it looks like a solid white back.

It was an amazing experience.

Its scientific name Mephitis mephitis is taken from the Roman goddess Mefitis – the goddess of poisonous gasses. This, which is obvious to anyone who has had the pleasure of smelling it, refers to the odorous spray of the skunk.

Quite a while ago, I created a web site called Nature In My Yard. It was technically a blog, but I had written it myself. The problem was I spent a lot of time adding features, and not much time on content. I didn’t want to add more content until the features were finished. I didn’t add more features because nobody read it (due to the lack of content).

Well, now there is no excuse for not writing content, because I have installed WordPress blogging software – and although it is not exactly what I had before, I can focus on the original purpose of Nature In My Yard: discovering the nature found in my own yard.

So enough about this boring drivel about the software behind it – let’s discover something!