A Midsummer Hike

Here are a couple of photos from our bluebird nestbox walk last week.

We've been checking the nestboxes every Sunday evening, around 6 pm and it's been getting hot! The bird activity seems to be tapering off - the end of July is the end of the bluebird nesting season. I'll summarize our first year's results in a future post.

Early in the hike, we saw a large rat snake stretched out in a shady spot in the grass. It was about 4 feet long and didn't move as we walked up. However, as I reached for my camera, it slithered away. How does something with no legs move so fast?

A rare bit of red in the landscape caught my eye! It was some agarita (Mahonia trifoliolata) leaves, beautifully backlit by the setting sun.

Almost at the end, I saw a snake skeleton scattered in the debris-filled ground under a live oak (Quercus virginiana) tree. This snake was quite small - the skeleton was around a foot long, but in several pieces.

Spotting the skeleton at the end of our hike formed a nice bookend with the sighting of the live rat snake at the start.