I only grabbed a couple of sunset shots last night since my boy (cat) was with me and he wanted to play on the road. Although it was a nice sunset, I don’t think its beauty last night was enough to erase my kids presents this morning as the boy threw up in my chair and my sweet Tippy pooped in the sink again.
July Sunset
A visit to my county fair today found all kinds of critters from cows to snakes. And the little cute critters always catch my eye like this little goat, even if this wasn’t the baby one that was only eleven days old.
Goat at Fair
This purple coneflower looks like it is ready to blast off into the sky. The stem might be holding to the ground it is still reaching for the sky.
Purple Coneflower
This morning I found my old maple tree on the ground. It had weathered a lightning strike, wind storms but finally succumbed to the forces of nature and the beautiful maple is no more. It will no longer wave its bright colored leaves in the fall for the sun to see. Instead it will slowly decay back into the soil but hopefully some of last year’s seeds survived and a new maple will takes it’s place.
Autumn Maple Leaves
I had a couple of flower pictures picked out for today but they didn’t match my mood so when I went out to take the sunset, I found that the clouds moved in already so I took this cloud shot instead.
Dark Moody Clouds
I had a new visitor show up at my place, a cute baby little red squirrel. I have had gray, black and even white ones for a few years but this is the first red one. And he has such a high squeaking chatter compared to the other squirrels that I was able to find him the next day by following the different noise.
He sure is a cute little critter and about the same size as a chipmunk. I thought it was a chipmunk at first running up the side of a tree until I saw the bigger tail.
As kids, we would pick this grass and try to tickle each other with it (and that’s reason we always called it tickle grass). And while it’s pretty to look at, especially a full field waving in the wind, this foxtail barley grass is not a grass farmers and ranchers want to see in their pastures and fields. Foxtail barley grass has sharply-barbed awns that can cause sores at the nose, eyes, and mouth of livestock.
Foxtail Barley Grass
The work never ends for farmers and ranchers. It is a tough job since the livestock don’t recognize holidays and they need to be fed in blizzards and storms. There is always the gamble on the weather, whether or not the crops they planted will mature and be plentiful enough to make it to the next year.
Right now the oats are being harvested and hay is being baled. And the day continues well past sunset like this rancher moving his big round hay bales off the field so the new crop of hay can grow.
I take a lot of sunset pictures but this one was a hard shot to get since I was on the road when I spotted the tractor on the hill and for some reason it didn’t stop when I hollered whoa so the first shot had a tree through the tractor and this was the second shot and there were no more shots to take as it disappeared off the hill.
Working Tractor at Sunset
Since someone said they preferred butterflies instead of bees after I posted the Purple Bergamont with a bee, here is a butterfly picture but then it isn’t on a flower.
This is the Common Buckeye butterfly and I love the ‘eyes’ looking at me!
Common Buckeye Butterfly
It has been usually warm here this summer and this bunch of cows were hiding under the shade of an old willow tree yesterday. Normally there is a little creek next to the tree but that is bone dry right now.
There are calves in the long grass but you never know what else might be in the grass as I had a snake sunning itself on my path to the pond this morning but I didn’t get a picture since I sort of jumped so no snake picture, just cattle today.
Cattle under Willow Tree
