New Adventures in Your Own Backyard

Have you ever walked out in your backyard, or down your street, or around your block, and discovered a new bug or plant? Did you ever wonder why certain things happen in nature? I sure have! My family and I love to explore our surroundings and usually will find some new or odd thing that we have not seen before! Luckily, in this day and age, we have the internet at our fingertips to help us figure out some of these perplexing things! (If you are EXTREMELY lucky, like we are, you also have neighbors who are something like a walking and talking Wikipedia about all things in nature and they will share their knowledge with you!)

Whenever my kids are outside, they are searching for some type of bug. We have discovered many, many bugs in our backyard. We have been fortunate enough to see a horned tomato worm (that had been stung by a parasitic wasp that laid its eggs inside the unfortunate worm), a praying mantis, cicadas, soldier beetles, caterpillars, butterflies, moths, bees, hornets, paper wasps (and their huge nest!) grasshoppers, crickets, pill bugs, box elder bugs, numerous spiders, an especially creepy, green-fanged, hairy jumping spider (who built his home in our mailbox no less!) and many, many more bugs than I can even mention!  In our house, we can't just find a bug and not learn more about it. We get pretty curious when we see these little creatures crawling and flying around, so we head over to our neighbors, or to the internet to check it out.

In this blog, I hope to be able to share some of the awesome things we have discovered over the years. Maybe it will get you searching your own backyard too! One thing that we have learned is that the backyard has many treasures just waiting to be found! The more you get to know who and what shares your environment, the more you will appreciate the beauty of the world around you. Despite those crazy green fangs (and me not being too fond of spiders), that jumping spider was pretty amazing! We ended up taking him safely out of our mailbox and putting him into one of our many bug catchers, and taking him for a walk down our street. Yes, although he was amazing, we did not want him to come back to his mailbox home. So, we took him to live in the very nice, peaceful field that is at the end of our block. We hope he was able to find a nice home that didn't entail scaring a postal carrier half-to-death!

As I go along in this new adventure of blogging, I hope you will join me in learning. Remember that nature doesn't stop in the fall and winter (although a lot of it may hibernate), so I plan on finding some pretty fun and interesting things to post for you all during these colder months! If you ever have any things that you question from your own backyard, please feel free to share them with me. I love to learn about the world around us, but especially those things I can find in my own backyard adventures!

Cheryl