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It was a warm morning. No, hot. Just the prelude to a very hot afternoon. And a flock of zebra longwing butterflies was hanging out amid the branches of the scraggly lime tree on the side of our house.

I see these butterflies often in our yard. They’re the Florida state butterfly, in fact. I’m sure our neighborhood would have more of these visitors if people would refrain from bringing in the professional insect killers to spray clouds of poison every few weeks. Sigh. I try to give these lovely butterflies a safe place to hang out.

This relaxing video shows these beautiful creatures fluttering in slow motion.

I can look at prairie dogs forever. (You can probably tell from the video, which is five minutes of pure cute.) I find it so relaxing to watch them, plus they’re adorable. I had a great experience taking photos there last year, so when Alethea Kontis and I had a break in our slow storm-chasing season, we made a trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwest Oklahoma to visit their town again.

Prairie dogs eat plants and bugs and live in burrows. According to Wikipedia, members of the same family group “kiss” and groom one another. The babies spend their first six weeks underground and are fully grown in five months. We were lucky enough to catch young ones playing in the meadow.

They made a few sounds while I was there, but it was a very windy day, creating a lot of wind noise in the microphone, and in the face of a loud mansplaining tourist, several yelling kids, and droning motorcycles, I decided to minimize natural sound in the video and use music instead.

 
Of course, there’s more than prairie dogs at the refuge. There’s great scenery, bison and other animals. It’s well worth a visit.

Roll over any image to see a caption, or click on a photo to start a slide show.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Brevard Zoo, which gets better with every visit. The expanded monkey habitats are really fantastic, and the monkeys seem to appreciate it. Lions were waiting in the wings – well, in a cage – before going on display for the first time. And work by our friends at Sandsational Sand Sculpting was on display in the multi-sculpture exhibit Life Beneath Our Sea.

Sadly, the birds were pretty much all on lockdown as the zoo tries to prevent infection by bird flu, which is in the area. The flamingos were all together in one enclosure and easier to smell than see, but I hope these measures will keep them safe. Meanwhile, vultures and ibises crashed exhibits all over the place. Maybe not the birds one expected to see, but they were interesting!

This was also a chance to exercise the camera a bit with storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis. We hope to head to the Plains soon.

In the meantime, here are some adorable critters.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, or click on any photo to start a slide show of larger images.

We have a bat box in our neighborhood, at Rockledge High School, and every evening – just about the time the first star (or planet) appears in the sky – the bats plunge from their box and take flight. We certainly have plenty of mosquitoes for them to feast on this spring, especially after all the rain we’ve had over the weekend.

Tonight I shot a little video with my iPhone of hundreds of bats dropping out of the box. This is just a fraction of the bats who come out each night. The new video is above.

What? You want more bats? Here’s a video I shot in 2018 with a better quality camera.

 
 
One thing you can say about this past year is that we’ve learned how to become travelers in our own backyard. Early in our self-imposed lockdown, I decided to get a bird feeder set up.

We have a pretty bird-friendly yard. It’s small but has a lot of cover – or what one might call a miniature Florida jungle – and we don’t use pesticides. So I thought we could create a little bird oasis and get some entertainment to boot.

After months of refinements, adding a second feeder, and endlessly manipulating the setup with arching supports and baffles to keep the rodents from helping themselves, we’ve seen some wonderful little visitors to our backyard.

 

Winter in Florida is always a good time to see birds, and as they migrate up north in the spring, we catch some beauties.

Just in the last two days, I’ve seen more variety than ever — rose-breasted grosbeaks, painted buntings, even a bird new to me — a northern parula. I had to look it up.

Hummingbirds have also been frequent visitors to the flowers around the feeder, and one of my favorite captures was of the moment when a bee flew into a resting hummingbird’s face and the bird told it to buzz off.

 
Maybe the variety of birds isn’t as vast as what one might see at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s pretty exciting for the backyard.

P.S. Because some have asked, to keep out squirrels and other rodents, we use a Squirrel Buster bird feeder, with a long, arching support hook and a wide baffle like this one. The small, round feeder requires a different, rounded baffle to keep out clever rodents.

Here’s a gallery of some of the wonderful visitors we’ve had in 2021. Roll over an image below to see its caption, and click on any photo below to start a slide show of larger images.

 

My neighbors have left some pretty wildflowers to grow for short periods in their front yard, and I hope they leave these for a while longer – because they are making tiny blue butterflies very happy.

If you’re not looking, you might miss these little beauties except for their fluttering flashes of blue. They are typically smaller than an inch across.

What I didn’t realize until I got out the macro lens and really started looking closely is that there were two varieties of tiny blue butterflies enjoying these flowers, which are a type of fleabane – perhaps eastern daisy fleabane? There are several varieties of fleabane native to Florida. The white flowers on these delicate plants are barely bigger than a typical thumb tack. I included a bee photo for scale.

Ceraunus blue butterflies are common throughout Florida, according to the University of Florida. They have a distinctive dark dot ringed by orange on the underside of their wings. The top of the wing is a pretty blue – I only got one of these to open for me for long enough to get shots of this enchanting iridescent blue, and the butterfly appeared to have a damaged wing.

The cassius blue is more cold-sensitive and can’t survive northern Florida winters. It has two beautiful iridescent dark blue “eye” spots on the underside of each wing. Apparently you can tell male from female from the coloring of the tops of the wings, but I didn’t get to see these beauties unfold their wings except in flight, when they were too quick for my camera. However, some had whiter bodies and wings than others, as you can see in the photo gallery below, and I suspect the lighter-colored ones may be the females.

In the past, I’ve seen tiny blue butterflies around my plumbago, too, which are making a comeback after a severe trimming. They can play host to the cassius blue. I’ll be looking even more closely the next time I see them to see which butterfly is paying us a visit.

Roll over an image below to see its caption, and click on any photo below to start a slide show of larger images.

I was lucky tonight to see a couple of manatees grazing along the edge of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge, Florida, and stopped to shoot a little video. They really lived up to their nickname, “the gentle sea cow.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen them elbowing their way onto the rocks at the water’s edge to get their dinner, as you’ll see in this short video.

These creatures, listed as “vulnerable” because of the extreme pressure put on their population by humans, have had a rough time this year in the lagoon, with high numbers dying. I’m disheartened when I see so many lawns in neighborhoods near the river with signs declaring they’ve been treated with fertilizers and pesticides (and for children and pets not to walk on the treated lawns because they’re toxic). I mean, they’re not hiding it – customers are paying people to dump poison on their yards. All of these chemicals flush right into the lagoon, making manatees, dolphins and turtles sick and leading to the fish kills we occasionally see here.

There are such simple steps we can take to keep our natural wonders like the lagoon beautiful and healthy for us and the wildlife.

Here’s the video.
 

I do my best each spring to try to capture the magic that is night-blooming cereus. This cactus vine produces flowers that each bloom for just one night. The plant comes in various forms; the one climbing up our deck and a palm tree looks kind of like a snake the rest of the year.

Honeybees retire in the evening, so I’m not a hundred percent sure if those were the bees so excited about the pollen in the bloom I captured on video. The flower begins to open right at sunset, so there was still some light in the sky. I’d never seen anything like it in my time-lapses from previous years, and it was really amazing! Once it got dark, the bees went home, and the flower finished opening, still covered with ants and other insects.

While I have many projects in the works – producing videos, writing a novel, helping a client publish a book – I’ve been shooting tons of photos recently. The subjects have ranged from a pinup to a sugar artist to a newspaper preview of Epcot’s International Food and Wine Festival. But as always, I’m drawn to nature, especially weather. And when the weather doesn’t cooperate – I’m still waiting for a great nighttime lightning storm here – there are sea turtles!

I recently accompanied storm chaser Peggy Willenberg and her friends, experts on turtles, as they roamed the east central Florida beaches one evening looking for nesting sea turtles. Our target was the Floridana Beach area, north of Sebastian, a popular area for turtles. We saw perhaps ten that night, under the full moon – at least when it stopped raining. We went out in a light rain just after dark. White light and flash photography should not be used when observing turtles, so all of these photos were taken in almost complete darkness with only the help of the full moon. The shoot was incredibly challenging. A red light is OK, and one of my friends had one, but it was rarely used. So focusing was almost impossible. (Next time, I’ll bring a red light to assist with focus.) We saw a couple of turtles early in our search, and then, after a lull, saw several more until we stopped about 1:30 a.m.

There was something magical and primal about these beautiful creatures emerging from the ocean to do what they’ve done for thousands of years, and I did my best to capture the experience. See more photos below.

Note: This post has been updated with the gallery that originally appeared on SkyDiary.com.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

Off and on for a few years, I’ve been trying to perfect a time-lapse of a night-blooming cereus flowering, but it’s a challenge, because each bloom flowers for only one night. Each time I’ve used a different camera and different lighting. I’ve blown out the image with too much light, so this year I used a smaller light. But I had to use a wide-angle waterproof camera because it was raining in our part of central Florida, so sacrifices were made in terms of quality and zoom. You can see the flowers buffeted by the wind as a shower whisks through.

Still, it’s always fascinating to see these beautiful flowers unfold for their one-night-a-year show. Click the gear symbol in the lower left after you hit play and choose 720HD for best quality.