Creatures I've encountered
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I spend alot of my day working in ditches on the side of the road. I'm usually either putting out road signs or picking them up.
Our equipment can be out on a job anywhere from just a few days to a year or two. As you can imagine, the more time it spends out the more time it has to acquire some residents.
Encountering wasp and mice nests are pretty much a daily thing but there are other times we encounter other things. Here are some of the things I've meet in my travels. All pictures were taken by yours truly.
This is a bat at flew out of one of the sign posts.
A caterpillar of some sort but it looks really cool.
We come across black widows fairly often.
Velvet ant AKA cow killer.
This is a truck full of active bee hives. Notice the netting covering it. Zoom in, you can see the bees.
Garden spider
The crowd gathers.....
And finally..........a litter of kittens, which I took home, fostered and found them homes.
Other posts: Orthodontist, Rescue, Creatures
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Nice pics. Be wary of that caterpillar. I wasn't able to positively ID it, but it looks a lot like a Hemileuca species which are present here in Missouri and are actually one of the stinging species. Have you ever noticed black widows deliberately flashing their red hourglass spot at you? I don't have much experience with them, but had several show up in the greenhouses this year, and it really seemed like that's what they were doing.
Thank you for the warning about the caterpillar. As far as the black widows, I have not noticed that behavior. If they are disturbed they just run away but otherwise don't seem to be bothered by our presence.
ok so it was probably just me being an arachnophobic paranoid then rather than the spiders actually exhibiting the behavior lol I kind of wondered if that might be the case.
Cool pics. I'm pretty sure that black and yellow spider is a garden spider, not an orb weaver. The orb weavers usually only come out at night and spin these enormous webs that they take down and rebuild every night. The garden spider I've seen out during the day plenty of times. Either way, they're both pretty harmless but super menacing looking. I like to keep both around. When I see them I just leave them alone. What part of the country are you from? I never saw a black widow until I moved here to California from New York.
Your are correct about the garden spider. I have a pic of a orb weaver, I just uploaded the wrong one. The garden spider is large and really cool looking.
I love your photos. That ant is crazy looking, never seen those. I like the bat photo a lot too. Thanks for rescuing the kitties!
Thank you. I couldn't just leave the kittens there.