Two does came grazing through our backyard at the end of August. They were getting sips from the newly formed ponds. One looked really skinny.

It had been raining almost every afternoon through most of the summer. At the end of August we had a baby frog invasion. They would show up on our windows after the rain. One day I went outside with my macro lens and they were not skittish.

They were pretty tiny with most being smaller than my thumb. As cute as they were these were not good frogs. They are cuban frogs and are very invasive. They eat the native green tree frogs but will also eat a ton of mosquitoes.  Many locals would say I should have killed them all but I just couldn’t do it. I’m thinking the birds including ibis that we get in our yard will eat a lot of them. I’ve seen many ibis with tiny frogs in their beaks.

Most days we have white ibis cruising through and we had the turkeys coming through in early September.

The doves with their pretty pink toes like to sit on the bird feeder hook waiting for dropped bird seed.

We had a tiny young ring neck snake in our foyer. He must have slid in from the front door or the garage door, maybe when we were bringing in boxes or groceries. He’s harmless and we need snakes to eat the rats so I put a plastic container over him and slide a piece of paper underneath and was able to get him out the front door.

On another note, Jane Goodall was in the area with a speaking appearance and I was able to go with a friend. She is know for her long term research on chimpanzees in Tanzania. She is also known for her conservation work and brought her Roots & Shoots program to the St. Pete Tropicana Field for 2 days. Roots and Shoots is her youth program that has kids working on local conservation projects. One night she gave a speech and filled a good portion of the baseball field.

At 90 years old she gave a great speech. Two quotes I wrote down were “When nature loses, we all lose.” and “Every one of us makes an impact every day.”.

She showed a video clip of when she was releasing a chimp back into the wild and the chimp came back to give her a hug. She spoke about that day and everyone had tears in their eyes.  You can see the video here on Youtube.