mistressofmuses | Entries tagged with snake

I do not feel ready for it to be December.

Here, have some pictures (mostly) of pets:

Bella, in front of a historical chimney in one of the city parks.

Six more, of Bella and of Jaspurr

Bella blep in front of the chimney.

Will be crazy for pupcups.

A bonus shark costume picture of Bella, from later on Halloween. I appreciate the tail too blurry from wagging.

Snuggly little Bella.

Jaspurr toe beans!

His default setting is nap, but he's so damn cute.

What toad? I don't see a toad.

Seven more, of Berry Mad, of Guava Splash, and one of Ripley

Sometimes Berry Mad has taken to just digging a pit to sit in, rather than burrowing entirely.

Tall, noble toad.

She is pudgy!

Guava Splash! Also extremely pudgy... look how round this tiny frog is.

(I did manage to give them crickets for a while - there were some XS crickets that were fresh enough to not be mostly dead at one of the petstores, and Guava is much more enthusiastic for the crickets than for the fruit flies, haha. Almost equal to the enthusiasm for caterpillars. Borderline vicious going after them!)

The face of a killer.

One more!

Ripley!

(This picture is from Alex) It's Clickbait! He's still clicking away!

One of the spider:

The poor, kidnapped spider. At least he seems pretty content to feast on fruit flies, ha.

Not a pet. But my beloved library plant (a peperomia scandens) is blooming again! (I'm still unreasonably salty about the time I tried to look it up, and found an article saying that your peperomia scandens will basically never ever bloom inside, and if it ever does, the flowers are unremarkable and uninteresting. >:( Don't call her spiky flowers uninteresting!)

And not a pet per se, but here's a tracing of Cy's pawprint. Alex wants to get it tattooed, but all we have is a plaster print, so had to figure out a way to transfer it to paper.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Part two of the monthlyish pet pics! This time devoted to the coldblooded vertebrates.

This time we have:

Berry Mad!

In her most fashionable hat!

(You can see right in front of her that she has started to dig the water out of her pond to make mud for herself. Previously, she would push her dirt into the pond to make mud, but apparently this year, she has decided she likes this way better.)

Four more pictures of Berry Mad:

Sittin' in her plant.

Not the clearest, but 'tis the time of year where she starts to burrow.

Toad? What toad? I don't see a toad.

Buried in her self-made mud. But then I dumped crickets in, and she immediately sat up, haha.

Guava Splash!

So small it makes me want to cry.

Three more pictures of Guava Splash:

(This picture is from Alex. Showing off the other side of the tiniest frog.)

So small.

This picture is from just yesterday. Tiny frog is looking a little chubby!
(Which is actually a relief... I was worried about getting something so small to eat enough to stay healthy.)

And mom and Taylor's garter snake, who has been named Ripley!

(Ripley, because she looks "ripple-y" when she moves, but also because Alien is great.)

She's so cute. She likes her little plant.

Just one more of Ripley:

I love her and her cute little face.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

I took last Saturday and Sunday off to attend a model horse show with Alex. There haven't been many shows this year; he attended BreyerMidwest in the spring, but I wasn't able to take that weekend off, and the host who usually holds the majority of the semi-local shows has been taking a year off from it to do other things.

This one was held by a regular shower in the local community, and it was nice to have a show to attend!

It definitely made for a long day: we got up around 5:00 to get the car loaded, and then take Bella over to my mom's house for the day. We managed to get on the road by 6:30 or so (just slightly later than hoped, but did include getting coffee). After a couple hours' drive through mostly rural areas, we made it, just a bit after the 8:00 setup start.

The show itself was fun, but long, and a liiiiittle frustratingly disorganized. (The host kept changing things in the weeks leading up to the show, and continued changing things day-of.) Still, running a show includes SO many moving parts, and so much to keep track of, it's just a whole lot to do, so I appreciate anyone willing to do it!

Alex did pretty well - 21 NAN cards (the cards awarded to the top two places in each class of a NAN-qualifying show; serves as a "ticket" for that model to be entered into a relatively prestigious annual show) and 28 "Western Conference" cards (which appear to be an attempted regional "competitor" to NAN, which I have never heard of, despite it apparently having been a thing for 10 years... these "tickets" are awarded up to third place.)

Alex's biggest win was:

This is a custom that he did a few years ago. :) It was first in the custom Morgan class, and then went on to win the sectional champion for custom light breeds! (Got a ribbon and the 3-D printed dog. The show holder is very into German Shepherds, ha.)

This custom does extremely well for him, and deservedly so! The finishwork (done in pastels rather than paint) is extremely well done. (It's that much more exciting that it does so well, since he was the artist.) He never seems to believe that it does deserve it, though!

By the end, we were just extremely tired. The biggest divisions took a long time to get through, and we didn't end up finishing the last of it until 9:00... and then had to deal with the drive back.

I felt really bad making my mom stay up that late to wait for us to come get Bella. We made decent time on the way back (via a different route), and managed to get there just after 10:30 to pick her up, so not really much later than mom and Taylor would have been staying up anyway.

Mom said that Bella was very good. (She still hasn't really met Jaspurr; he came downstairs once, and as soon as Bella hopped off the loveseat to approach him, he bolted back upstairs and didn't come back down.)

Their excitement for the day was mom taking Bella on a neighborhood walk and finding...

A huge snake shed! Broom for scale, lol.

There is a huge bull snake somewhere in the neighborhood! :D

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: my apartment

Been a while since a ~pet picture roundup,~ so why not.

Bella wants boba. Bella wants the boba that I have so bad.

Just one more of Bella, because I'm always posting pictures of Bella

Curled up as small as she can.

Berry Mad, mighty hunter!

One more of Berry Mad:

Alex sent me this picture, lol. Toad Butt!

One more of Guava Splash climbing their plant!

(Most of the Guava Splash pictures were in the last post, ha.)

A picture of Greenbean 2, eating her green beans! (Took this one to try and do a good size comparison.)

I had initially said that maybe Greenbean 2 was maybe a male, because the back end didn't look as prominent as the previous female katydid we had last year. However, in the last couple weeks, the ovipositor has gotten a bit more obvious. Greenbean 2 is definitely a female. :)

She has also remained very quiet; she hasn't made a single click. She is very calm in general; not terribly reactive even when we do reach into her cage to give her her beans or change out the climbing branches.

And now there are three katydids! Just a couple days after finding Greenbean 2, Alex found another katydid on the sidewalk outside. This one is clearly a male, but he is very fussy, lol. He seems to think that literally every single sound is another katydid moving in on his territory, so he sets off with a flurry of clicks. (Pouring cereal, clinking dishes, and crinkling packaging are all very exciting sounds for him.) Due to that constant clicking, Alex named him Clickbait.

Then just last night, Alex came in with yet a third katydid. This one is another male, and I named him Three. He's much less aggressive about posturing, haha. He's temporarily in the old spider terrarium until we get another of the mesh cages, but he settled right in to clicking and eating his green beans.

Clickbait and Three are providing excellent clicks in stereo.

More pictures of Greenbean 2, Clickbait, and Three:

One more of Greenbean 2. :)

This one is clickbait!

Clickbait again, with his partially-eaten green beans.

And here's Three. :) (Mediocre picture from after getting him set up last night.)

Jaspurr! With his one little toof that sticks out.

A couple more pictures of Jaspurr playing

Attack!

Slightly more dignified.

And then...

While I was spending time over at my mom and Taylor's house, they also ended up with a brand new pet.

Their neighbors rescued a garter snake from the window well of their church and brought it home. The neighbor said she thinks this might be a female, though it's hard to tell.

We had a garter snake for about twelve years or so, but he died several years back, and they still had the terrarium setup from before... Mom went back and forth on it for a while, but ultimately decided that she would like to have a snake again.

She's so cute!

More of the snake (as yet unnamed, as far as I know):

Exploring!

She does like the water.

So cute.

Still exploring!

Jaspurr finds her very interesting to watch, ha.

So there's the critter collection! :)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Still catching up on posts!

A couple of weeks ago ~~jesus how has it been a couple of weeks~~ we decided to try another new-to-us park. This one borders Lair o' the Bear, but is actually a Denver park, rather than a county park. (Denver has a few mountain parks that they own and maintain, even though the mountains are well outside the city.) It's a bit farther up the road, but we drove past it on our detour the day we were coming back from Centennial Cone.

Taking a look at the info page on it, it looked like there was a decent 3-4 mile total out-and-back trail up to a spot called "Panorama Point," so hopefully there'd be a nice view. So we headed up!

...And it was "up." The trail is moderate difficulty, but it does pretty immediately head up, haha.

I've been disappointed this year that we really haven't seen any snakes. We finally saw one on this hike!

A really nice big, healthy looking garter snake! So cute.

The whole area was very pretty, a nice forest trail. The trail mostly paralleled a narrow little creek.

I was very taken by all the moss around the creek.

Fourteen more pictures:

Bella! I thought she looked cute next to the flowers.

The narrow creek. It was wider at some points, narrower or even entirely dry at others.

Detour around some big rocks.

Beebalm!

A little pond skater in a calm part of the creek.

Another shot of the snake. :) With his head in the sunbeam, haha. The snake was quite long, probably 18 inches or so? I was happy to see one that's clearly doing so well!

We also saw a bunch of woodpeckers! A hairy woodpecker.

A second one. There were at least three we saw at the same time.

A dramatic hollow stump. Very picturesque.

Alex was having some neck issues, and Bella was getting a bit warm, so we took a break for a couple minutes.

Bella set herself up on the trail. Toll road: must pet to pass. (Kidding. She was very good about coming off the trail when someone did come pass us. Even a couple of dogs.)

Not a great picture, but laying down on one of the branches, a black squirrel! (You can see his little ear against the tree trunk.) We rarely get black squirrels here (I've seen them elsewhere, but not much here! We get red squirrels, and sometimes grey ones, but black ones are a rarity.)

I liked all the little baby trees growing in this meadow.

A little bird! I think it's a junco, which are a winter-only bird down in the city, but sometimes stick around year-round at higher elevations.

We also saw so many of these little chipmunks. So cute!

Bella was still a little warm (it really wasn't too terribly hot, but it was humid, and it was all uphill). Wanting to let her cool down, we cut through one of the meadows along the trail to get back to the creek, which we could hear, but not see.

Where we found my favorite of the day...

*_* Tiny chorus frog froglet.

And well... I did have an unused habitat, from before we moved Berry Mad into the bigger one... And boreal chorus frogs are one of the native species it is legal to keep...

It's so small.

After this we turned around and headed back, since we were carrying precious (tiny) cargo.

We'll have to go back another day to see if we can make it all the way up to the promised "panorama point."

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

(How am I so behind that this was multiple weeks ago now?)

A couple of weeks ago, we also went on a hike to Roxborough state park. It was before the smoke from the fires was too bad, luckily, though the second of the big three had just started that morning.

It was hot, but not horribly, and it was a nice day for a hike! It was also nice to get out and Do Things two days in a row.

The most exciting thing we saw:

A prairie rattlesnake! :D

I was also excited to see a ~~cazador~~ tarantula hawk wasp. I've seen them several times, but rarely in Colorado.

Isn't she pretty?

( Twelve more pictures below the cut: )

It was definitely a nice day, and I was really glad that we got out. It turned out to be even better that we had, because this was the last somewhat clear day before the smoke got much worse. (It was late that night that the closer fire started, and the two farther north got steadily worse for a while.)

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: my apartment

Back in early November, we took advantage of a fairly nice day to go out on a walk.

The water was quite still, so the reflections were pretty dramatic. Also, ducks!

My favorite sighting of the day: a garter snake! A fairly good-sized one, probably three feet long? We saw a bullsnake early in the year, and my mom saw one near her house as well, but otherwise it's been a fairly snakeless year, so I was glad to see one!