Last Saturday, the nineteenth, my wife had the garden tour here, the advertisement for said tour appears down the line somewhere: on the dog poster. While I was sitting on our backyard deck talking to our northern Ohio relative, Kelley, and her husband Chris, I saw high up in our evergreen tree a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers. Wow! A pair! When I used to be able to walk on the subdivision street, I would frequently hear one hammering the dickens out of a tree on the ridge above the subdivision. The sound is unmistakable. “Wham wham wham!” Or, “Wham, rat-a-tat tat! Wham!” This pair moved from the evergreen tree to the Sweetgum tree, then disappeared. Alas. The birds are absolutely magnificent, as the Wikipedia photos below will show, and they live in our subdivision, somewhere. A real grace!
Yesterday, Mary found a dead robin on our sidewalk next to the house. The astonishing thing about the dead bird was that it was being eaten by American carrion scavenger beetles. She tried to take a picture of them with her iPhone, but only managed to snap her feet. So, she had me hobble outside to see the creatures. She thought they looked like vultures. Hmm! I thought about trying to catch one, but figured I would just fall on the dead bird and the consuming beetles. Instead I came in the house and fired up my iPad. After looking at about a thousand different beetles, I found the matching pictures, again a Wikipedia find. The beetles are very distinctive, with their yellow-gold back design. As I watched them outside, they would even attack one another on the sidewalk once they were away from the corpse. Odd, for their was certainly enough dead bird for the whole carnivorous nation to consume. Finally, however, Mary got a shovel and tossed bird and bugs into the deep weeds and jungle grass growing between our house and the Payne’s house. She said she had tried that the day before, but something out there dragged it back to the sidewalk. Creature features.
The carnivorous American carrion beetle, right outside our house, eating a dead robin. Who told them about the corpse? Where were they before they showed up here? Spooky.
A Pileated Woodpecker. A neighborhood dweller.