A rainbow of flowers and a new bird

On September 17, 2025October 15, 2025 By dinajohnstonIn bird photography, flowers and plants9 Comments

During my visit to Sweetfields Farm in May I spent a lot of time in their zinnia field after walking through the sunflowers. They have rows and rows of different colored zinnias and the butterflies were having a convention in the flowers.

I only saw swallowtail butterflies but there were a lot of them, posing nicely on the zinnias.

They had every color of zinnia there. I picked one of each color to take home.

The butterflies were so busy feeding that I was able to take the above with my phone.

There were lots of grasshoppers in the field.

The bonus was seeing the above birds. I saw them on a wire at the far end of the sunflower field. When I got closer they moved into the nearby tree. They looked like finches but I have never seen them before. Both Merlin and Picturebird apps identifies them as Indian Silverbills. There was no record of this bird on Ebird being in Florida so I posed the question to a Florida bird identifier Facebook group and they all came up with the silverbill. A few thought it might be a juvenile tricolored munia which has been know to breed in central Florida. If it is the silverbill then it must be an escaped pair of pets that had been breeding now out in the wild.

“Farm living is the life for me”

On August 2, 2017August 2, 2017 By dinajohnstonIn zoo animals4 Comments

I’m having fun hanging out with the farm animals. Having not grown up around them, I find them interesting. With that said, it’s fun to watch them for a while and then go home to my house near the city in Tampa. I’m not sure if I would love them if I had to do the chores that go with keeping them. These were all from my trip to Sweetfields Farm north of Tampa one Sunday morning in late May.

Linking to Wednesday Around The World

Can I take one home with me???

On July 8, 2017June 5, 2017 By dinajohnstonIn zoo animals2 Comments

This goat was chilling early in the morning.

Cute baby goats also chilling.

While Mom was being fed by the tourist, one of the babies decides to get a meal as well.

At Sweetfields Farms, where we walked through the sunflower maze, everyone was going crazy over the baby goats. You can feed the goats so the babies were getting close to the fence. It makes you think “I want a baby goat!”. Then reality hits and you don’t want grown goats living in your tiny backyard in the city. But it was fun watching them play that morning.

Sunny day in the sunflower field

On July 6, 2017July 6, 2017 By dinajohnstonIn flowers and plants11 Comments

I found a new place! For a limited time in April and May, Sweetfields Farm has a sunflower maze. The farm also has, surprise, farm animals! And vegetables and other flowers but the big draw is the fields of sunflowers. Brett and I drove north of the Tampa airport on a Sunday morning. It took us about 35 minutes to get to the farm so we were there right before they opened. We did the sunflower maze first thing and I’m glad we did because the heat started to set in and I probably would not have wanted to walk through there near lunchtime. We had a great morning and I took tons of pictures. The above was taken with my phone as we were parking.