Summertime

This is summertime in New Mexico, this blue sky and this big Russian Giant sunflower that peeks over the fence every morning.



This is a cat, hidden in the trumpet vine greenery.



See? Saba!



This is a cat less adept at hiding.



See? Gray Kitty!

This is a wasp. They patrol the garden looking for insects to take back to their nest.



This is only one of the species of wasp that we've seen. The other species of wasp, the cicada killers, are harder to get a photo of even though they're much larger, like B-52 bombers compared to these streamlined little missiles.  Along with wasps, many spiders have colonized the garden and patio, including at least one hellishly fast fat black widow and several small orb weavers and grass spiders and wolf spiders and (my favorite) little jumping spiders. There are praying mantises and ladybugs and bees, lots and lots of bees. Really big bees and really little bees. There are also little predatory hover flies that look like bees.  There are ants, of course, and grasshoppers (which aren't doing nearly as much damage as I thought they would) and annoying little flea beetles. There are cabbage moths and click beetles and roly-polys. There are birds, too, two of which have fallen prey to the cats. (One was eaten, one was just killed.) There are little striped lizards running around.  Saba likes those.

Tonight there were one, two, three, four, five black-chinned hummingbirds fighting over the feeder. (We went and bought another feeder after dinner.)  I love how fearless the hummers are. They have violent little dogfights in the air and they strafe the cats and they fly under the patio umbrella to see what you're doing. This morning one came up behind me as I took pictures of the plants near the feeder. It hovered about a foot away, looking over my shoulder.  And then the other night, there was a perfectly silent white hummingbird, larger than the others, that stopped at the feeder and drank and drank and drank and then flew off like a little ghost. I haven't seen it since.