🐇🌱Bonus bunny! Painted with plants. (Buckthorn, wild grape, oak gall, avocado, and sumac.)
🚁🌻: Before the bunny, I actually started off painting a cool hover fly that Neil photographed in the garden (pics 2 and 3). I noticed it not only looked very bee-like, but it was interacting with the flower in a very bee-like way. So I fell down a whole rabbit hole (hehe) learning about hover flies, and how they are a super important pollinator! Adult hover flies feed on nectar and pollen, and are “often considered the second-most important group of pollinators after wild bees.” (🤯) So they don’t just look like a bee, they be like one too!
☣️💪🐍: Critters mimicry of each other is so fascinating. In Thomas Halliday’s book “Otherlands”, he describes how slow loris, when threatened, imitate a spectacled cobra. They raise their arms up behind their head, shiver, and hiss. From this position they can also access a gland in their armpit which, when combined with saliva, produces a venom “capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans”. (🤯🤯)
I didn’t even know it was possible to have armpit envy, and yet, here I am.
🐇📚: Well look at that, cute bunny, you’ve tricked us into learning about hover flies AND a different kind of “pit viper”. Well played little lagomorph, well played!
Have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend folks. Happy August!
~Kate