Monday, June 14, 2010

Flowers and Flitterbies

Mrrrrr Friends,

It's been kind of rainy and slow around these parts of late. When it rains, I just want to sleep. Sometimes I don't think about kibble for hours.

But we have a nice sunny day now and again. All that rain is making it pretty green. And there have been lots of flowers...here's the last of my special tulips.

Most of our flowers are wild. Oom and Boo planted these last year...it seemed to me a debatable decision at the time because the little bulb nuggets make fine toys for shooting across the floor. I'm glad though they got this one in the ground.

The blackberries have been blooming like crazy and they attracted a whole bunch of the big yellow flitterbies. Oom says they are Tiger Swallowtails. They are big and furry and they don't mess around.  Here's a female on our blackberries.

You can tell she's a female because she has those blue spots. Males only come in one color, the yellow with the black stripeys. But check it out, females can be black, and when they are yellow have those nice blue spots.

They're really more like birds...they look right at you when they are flying along and make appropriate adjustments when they see a car or another flitterby. I was walking in the yard this weekend, and I came along about 10 of them sitting in the yard...I think they were drinking water because they were in the marshy section sipping.

Now, I'm not a flitterby chasing cat. That just doesn't seem sportsmanlike to me. But I did want to sniff. Oom said no, but as I walked within about a cat's length of them, they all turned around and looked at me.

Freaked me out. I just sort of backed out of there...and they all just watched me.