invertebrates – Page 28 – Seabrooke Leckie

Daylilies and dragonflies

This is the time of year when my mom’s garden really reaches its peak. It’s a perennial garden, with many different types of flowers, shrubs and plants, but with a focus on daylilies. There are hundreds of cultivars of daylilies, you could fill up acres collecting every one. Mom doesn’t have that many; her collection is somewhere around a hundred cultivars, and was mostly limited by the space in the garden. Most daylilies flower from mid-July through August, and during this time the garden is a riot of colour. The only natural flower colour that seems to be missing is blue, which they haven’t managed to create in the species, perhaps because blue is a structural pigment and isn’t formed through the same processes that produce reds, oranges and yellows. Each bloom on a daylily only lasts one day (hence the name), and a walk around the garden each morning will be just a little different from the previous day, with some cultivars blooming, others not, multiple flowers on some, and first blooms of the summer.

For the last couple weeks, we’ve noticed that the garden is full of these guys, little dragonflies, short and small by dragonfly standards, in red and orange. Dozens of them, all hanging around the garden. They’re meadowhawks, a type of skimmer. About the same length as the damselflies, they can be easily distinguished by their chunky bodies and wings, and oversized eyes. They’re fairly common dragonflies, but there are several species and telling some of them apart can be tricky. A number of species have orangey wing markings, but for those that don’t (and this includes the ones that occur here), the best characteristic is the face. Around here we’re likely to get White-faced, Cherry-faced and Ruby Meadowhawks. There is some overlap in face colour, just to make things confusing, but generally the White-faced have a pure white face, the Ruby has a straw-coloured face, and the Cherry a reddish face (although eastern individuals can be olive-yellow). The book Dragonflies Through Binoculars states that Ruby and Cherry-faced cannot be separated by face colour in the east. The Stokes Beginners Guide to Dragonflies also warns, “A meadowhawk with a dull yellowish or ivory face cannot be identified with certainty in the field.” Rather, definitive identification requires examination of the genitalia under a microscope. And, to throw a wrench in the works, Through Binoculars indicates that all three species hybridize in the northeast, such that intermediate individuals may not belong to one species or another but are instead hybrids.

The brown individuals are all females, or possibly immature males. Male meadowhawks remain this brownish colour for about two weeks before obtaining the bright red of maturity. During this time they’re separable from the females by examining their genital structures, but I didn’t look that closely. It’s interesting how much of dragonfly and damselfly identification comes down to the genitalia. How do the insects know which species another individual is when courting? Are there little visual clues that we haven’t seen, or are too small for our naked eyes? Or do they use behavioural cues? It would be embarrassing to try to hook up with a female just to find your lock and key don’t fit; good thing dragonflies don’t get embarrassed.

More than most other dragonflies I observe, meadowhawks like to perch at the tips of tall pointy things that stick out from the surrounding foliage. It was tough to get a photo of one actually on a daylily bloom because they would favour the long grasses, tall thistle stalks, and even the unopened daylily buds over the flowers themselves. Like all dragonflies, meadowhawks are predaceous, feeding on other insects, using their speed and agility to catch them. I imagine that perching in an exposed location like that offers them the best view of their surroundings, and potential prey, and also allows them to dart out after something without having to navigate around plants. If you watch a meadowhawk closely you can see it turning its head to focus on different things.

I’ve noticed the occasional individual will adopt this pose while resting. It’s called the “obelisk position”, and its purpose is to minimize the surface area of the dragonfly’s body that is exposed to the sun. Since insects have no physiological ability to thermoregulate, they must change their behaviour to prevent overheating. Whereas we would simply sweat and cool down through evaporation, a dragonfly must either seek shade or, where shade isn’t available, or is impractical (such as in hunting in open areas), minimize their exposure to the sun. While most dragonflies are associated with water edges, meadowhawks, as their name implies, are often found in meadows or other open areas that may have minimal shade. Notice how small the dragonfly’s shadow is on the fern frond.

Also interesting to note, the above individual appears to be a male changing from its immature brown into its mature red colouration. You can see the red starting on the top of the abdomen in a couple spots.

In taking close-up photos of a few individuals, I noticed that the pattern of colours and spots on their large compound eyes varied from one individual to the next. For instance, the above individual looks like it has pupils and is smiling at the camera, while the one below has more diffuse spots on its eyes. I wonder if this is a difference in species, in sex (since immature males are the same colour as females), or simply individual variation?

Desktop pond

This week I returned to my parents’ to help paint the exterior of the house. Nearly all of my time over the two days was wrapped up in that, with only a bit of time for wandering about outside, so I didn’t get any photos. The one area I did spend a bit of time looking at was the water garden I mentioned a couple weeks ago. I was looking for Gray Treefrog tadpoles, the possible offspring of my midnight singer, and the garden’s proximity to the house meant I could wander over for a break and poke around.

Peering closely, I spotted a few hanging at the walls of the trough. Tiny and black, their body only a few millimeters, perhaps an eighth of an inch. With their tail, not more than a centimeter, less than half an inch. At this age, I have no idea if they’re treefrogs or another species, though the former seems most likely given the circumstances. Once tadpoles get older, there’s a great identification table put together by a professor at Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario) that I’ll be able to reference, but it won’t be a lot of help right now. For all I know these guys could turn out to be Leopard Frogs, or even American Toads, although I haven’t noticed either hanging around the water garden (that doesn’t mean they couldn’t’ve popped by, however).

Also while checking out the water garden, I noticed these fearsome looking creatures. There were several, all at least an inch long. They’d hang from the water surface with their head hanging down, I presume breathing at the surface. Mom and I brought one inside to check out more closely; it turned out to be a predaceous water beetle larva. These things are ferocious, sometimes called “water tigers” or “dragons of the pond” for their hunting habits. They’re large enough to take small vertebrates as prey – and this includes young tadpoles.

I really wanted to see what these little guys turned into, and I didn’t feel that they really had a good chance of reaching that point with these tigers in the trough. After some thought and a bit of research, I decided to collect some of the tadpoles and bring them in to let them grow in a protected environment. To that end I grabbed a large, shallow tub, filled it with some of the water from the trough, added some algae and surface plants for food and shelter, and then collected some tadpoles. It was late in the day by the time I did, and I suspect a number were already tucked away at the bottom or in corners, but even still, all I could find were five lonely little tadpoles. I brought the five back with me and they’re now sitting here beside my computer, my own little desktop pond.

I brought two types of plants, which I hope will keep the water well-oxygenated. The red ones on the surface are called Azolla, also known as Fairy Moss, Fairy Fern, Duckweed Fern, and others. They start out green, but when exposed to sunlight turn this striking red colour. Mixed in with them are some bits of duckweed, a commonly-found surface plant on still waters such as ponds. These plants happened to be purchased by my mom; Azolla can’t establish itself in our climate because it doesn’t survive prolonged freezing, but it would be possible to find duckweed on many ponds through our area.

The other type of plant lives below the water surface. I snagged a few clumps of filamentous algae, and there was a fair bit of it on the roots of the Azolla, as well. The algae’s purpose is twofold: first, to provide oxygen, but also, and more importantly, to provide food for the little tadpolets. Algae is one of the tadpole’s primary food sources. Many tadpole-raising websites suggest feeding pureed, frozen lettuce, but it seemed easier just to bring along the tad’s natural food item. It has the added benefit of reproducing on its own, so hopefully I wouldn’t need to keep supplying more of it.

The tadpoles supplement their diet with the occasional bits of protein. The websites I checked were unclear about just what constituted good protein for tadpoles, some suggesting they could get enough from algae, others suggesting you can buy such pellets from pet stores (intended for fish or captive amphibians or reptiles). Well, it turned out I brought some of that, as well.

All those little green spots are little invertebrates called ostracods. They’re bivalved, like muscles or clams, only tiny, and not actually related to the true bivalves. They’re sometimes called seed shrimp for their appearance under a high-powered microscope. To my naked eye (and even to my camera) they just looked like little dark dots, about the size of your average printed period, swimming around in circles.

The ostracods tend to feed predominantly on organic detritus, and indeed the few bits of …stuff (I couldn’t identify what it had originally been) that had settled out to the container’s bottom had clusters of little green ostracods on them. During the afternoon I watched as one of the tadpoles came up to one of the clusters and started chasing and eating some of the ostracods. Guess that’s their protein.

I also had a few stowaways in the Azolla. Here are two critters side-by-side, a very small predaceous diving beetle larva (too small to be a threat to the tadpoles) and a caddisfly larva. The caddisfly has a neat little case made of bits of organic debris as well as what appear to be tiny snail shells. Both were less than a centimeter, maybe a quarter inch long.

There are a few snails in there, mostly this sort of conical type. The snails also feed on the algae, and that’s where I found them all. A number of sites say to avoid bringing snails in with your tadpoles, because they could bring disease, but I figured they came from the same water source, they’re unlikely to be a problem.

There are a couple of little predaceous diving beetles in there, adults, little guys. They’re smaller than the heads of the tadpoles. I assume they’re likely to also be feeding on the ostracods in there; there’s not a lot else for them. This may be what the larva, above, will eventually turn into.

Then there’s these guys. I found two of them. I think they’re a type of midge larva. They’d made themselves little homes out of the filamentous algae, kind of similar to what the caddisflies fashion in terms of being a tunnel, but dissimilar in that these larvae weren’t going to be dragging their homes anywhere. They were fairly active, but only insomuch as they would partly emerge frequently from their tunnel and then dart back in. I watched one for a bit and it appeared to be gathering more algae that it would wrap into its tunnel.

This last one was really neat to find. There were two that I noticed, hanging on, it appeared, to the side of the container. It’s a hydra, a type of predatory invertebrate that uses its long tentacles to snag prey. I’ve never seen them outside of my invertebrate zoology classes back in university, so it was really neat to spot these guys. I gather they’re not uncommon; perhaps I’ve just not been looking in the right places. The critter on the left I think might be a type of daphnia, though I’m not sure.

Tadpoles generally take 6-8 weeks or longer, depending on species, water temperature and food availability, to metamorphose into frogs, so these guys may be sitting on my desk for a while. So far they seem to be doing quite well – and I’m finding just watching all the activity in the container to be rather distracting. I may have to move the container to the bookshelf so I can get some work done…

X-rated dobsonflies

About a month ago, I got some really strange insects to my blacklighted sheet while out doing moths one night. Long, gray bugs with giant wings and feathery antennae, I wrote about them in this post. They turned out to be fishflies, a group of insects I’d previously never heard of.

This weekend I found their cousins, the dobsonflies. I had actually heard of dobsonflies before, because one of the reviews I’d read for my new macro lens, prior to buying it, had had a close-up photo of a dobsonfly head. Still, I’d never actually seen one myself. There were four of them, three females and a male, attracted to bright white security lights on the side of a large building out near where Blackburnian’s mom lives. These happen to be Eastern Dobsonflies, Corydalus cornutus, the only species to occur in eastern North America. The other three North American species are found primarily in the southwest.

In the photo above there’s a male and a female. The male is the guy with the giant mandibles. The females were all mostly quite low to the ground and easy to reach. The male was another story, he was up near the top of the wall and I had to stand on a box and reach up with Blackburnian’s shoe to gently knock it down to a level where I could reach it. He was the one I really wanted, though, because he’s so impressive. Males reach about 4 inches (10 cm) long, nearly a quarter of which is the mandibles. Females are only slightly smaller at just over 3 inches (7.5 cm).

I plucked one of each of them up, pinching their wings together over their back. When I snagged their wings they both reared their heads back, trying to grab me with their mandibles, or at the very least startle me. I knew that their wings were long enough that I was out of reach, so I didn’t buy into it, despite the ferocious appearance. While the female might be able to give you a pinch, the mandibles of the male aren’t really built for biting and can’t really do much for you. Most sources I read say that the adults don’t eat; however, one said that an older research paper indicated they would feed from honey water solutions or have been found at fermented baits (like what I’d put out for moths in cold weather). Either way, they’re not hunting their food.

The male’s mandibles are, if anything, even more ferocious-looking than those of the female. As Blackburnian described them, the creatures look prehistoric. Given that they’re not used in eating, what are those huge mandibles actually used for? A commenter to my fishflies post suggested that they have a role in mating. Searching the net turns up little additional information. Many sites simply say the long pincers are used to grasp females during mating. One suggests their impressive length has developed through sexual selection, used to impress the ladies. Another indicates the mandibles are used in male-male confrontations, such as in competing for females (whether they actually fence with them or simply show them off depends on the species).

This site mentions a 1952 paper that describes the mating process: “As part of the premating ritual, males place their elongated jaws on the wings of the females perpendicular to the axis of the female’s wings. The male’s jaws also function in jousting with rival males. However, males were not observed to grasp the females as reported in older literature.” This second site has a slightly different description: “The male uses the mandibles during the mating process when capturing, prodding, and caressing the female, and they are also used when males fight one another. Prior to mating the male will flutter his wings, and both males and females will touch antennae.”

I had the opportunity to find out first-hand.

I actually missed capturing the first stage on camera. When I’d finished taking photos of the two of them I plucked them up, one in each hand, and carried them off to the garden where I placed them on a low brick wall. Not even giving it much thought, I’d placed them down nearly side by side. They didn’t take off upon release (they never do), but instead the male turned his head and I could almost hear the thought run through his mind: “Oho! A female! What luck!”

He dispensed with the foreplay, there was no touching of antennae as described on the pages I read. There was no showing off of mandibles to the female. In fact, the female seemed completely disinterested through the entire session. She just sat there, not moving, her antennae folded over her back, reminding me of how a mammal who is feeling unamused will lay its ears flat. I bet if I looked closely I could’ve seen her rolling her eyes.

The first thing the male did upon making his discovery was (as the first linked site said) turn perpendicular to the female and lay his long mandibles across her back. But he didn’t just rest them there, he appeared to actually put pressure on the lower half of her abdomen and then slid them backwards along her wings to the wingtips. He did this several times, and I presume the purpose was to squeeze out the spermatophores of any competing males. Dobsonflies transfer sperm in the form of gelatinous balls, so it would be fairly easy for a male to remove any left by a previous male, in order to ensure that his own sperm are the ones to fertilize her eggs. A lot of species, both invertebrates and vertebrates, will employ a similar strategy.

I finally decided it might be worth getting my camera to record. When I returned, he was reaching under the female’s “skirt” with his mandibles. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing – perhaps checking for the presence of a pre-existing spermatophore? Removing it, if there was one?

Once he felt satisfied with whatever he was checking for, he started fluttering his wings and curling his abdomen around toward the female. He tried to tuck it under her wings to make contact, but seemed to be having trouble for some reason. Actually, it looked to me that his abdomen just wasn’t long enough to do what he wanted it to do (isn’t this a common feeling with males?). He seemed reluctant to remove his mandibles from under her wings, which appeared to be the main problem, to me.

After making a few attempts from the left, he decided to try from the other side. He shuffled over and swung around to face the other way. Again he checked under her wings first.

Then tried from the other side.

This time he removed his mandibles from under her wings so he could straighten out and reach better. Success! During all this he was fluttering his wings like crazy and generally obscuring the female from view. From what I could see, she continued to simply sit there. It seemed funny that the mating of something with such a long, flexible abdomen would be of the facing-opposite-directions sort, rather than the male above (or below), facing the same direction, and simply curving his abdomen down to meet the female’s.

It didn’t take long, perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, and then he turned himself around again to face the female.

Finally, he rested his mandibles across her abdomen and they both sat there, still. I checked on them a few times as I went about photographing the rest of the moths I’d caught, and they stayed like that for at least ten minutes. Eventually when I went back the female had crawled off the top of the brick into the shade of the side, but the male remained where he’d been. I assume that this was the male mate-guarding the female until the spermatophore “took”, to prevent other males from removing his sperm before they had a chance to fertilize the eggs, despite what I’d read on one site suggesting it hadn’t been observed in the species.

I thought this whole thing was so neat. You know, it’s one thing to just simply see a species (cool as this species happened to be), but it’s quite another to observe a behaviour. Something I’m often guilty of, I find I tend to breeze by, looking at but not really watching what I’m seeing. I’ll identify the birds, for instance, often simply by ear, but I won’t really pay attention to what they’re up to unless there’s some commotion or something to draw my attention. It really is something I should do more – stop and smell the roses, as they say.

Life on a maple branch

One of the necessary chores that comes with keeping horses, of course, is having to muck out the stalls. It’s a pleasant sort of physical labour, where you feel you’ve had a good workout and been productive at the same time. If kept on top of every day it’s neither a lot of work nor very time consuming, but can add up quickly if neglected.

It was while I was busy doing this that I noticed today’s subject. I was returning from dumping a wheelbarrow load, my mind on other things (such as wondering how Mom still does this every day, at her age), and so wasn’t paying a lot of attention to bugs or other critters. If this bug had been anywhere else on the maple tree I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but it was at the tip of the very lowest leaf of the branch that hangs over the driveway, pretty much at eye level. And the bug was red and black. Hard to miss.

It was busy laying eggs. Naturally, I didn’t have my camera since I was working in a spot I wasn’t keen on the camera being, so I dashed indoors to grab it and came back to run off a few shots. She was oblivious, focused on the task at hand, I guess, And I was able to manipulate the leaf to pick up the best light (and also to keep it steady and easier to focus on in the light breeze).

When I came back inside and looked it up in my Kaufman guide to insects, it was shown there as a Box Elder Bug, Boisea trivittata. I thought, Elder? What’s it doing on the maple, then? And it wasn’t alone. A few leaves above it was this solitary individual, who seemed to either be lost or looking for a mate as it roamed from leaf to leaf. A few leaves further I noticed a pair copulating (below). I’m not sure if the larger one is the male (as is traditional in many species) or female (since she’s the egg-layer and needs the size to haul them about). They certainly didn’t seem to feel out of place.

Well, it turns out the Box Elder is actually more often called Boxelder, and is not a type of elder at all, but rather a maple, a member of the genus Acer. The Eastern Boxelder Bug, as it’s called on BugGuide.net, is also sometimes known as the Maple Bug, and will lay its eggs on the foliage, seeds or bark of Boxelder and other maple species, and also ashes. So it wasn’t in fact out of place at all. The nymphs, when they hatch, feed on the seeds of the trees, as well as opportunistically on dead insects. The adults primarily feed on the plant’s juices.

Apparently the adults are most often seen in the fall, but are also around in the spring. BugGuide indicates the spring period is primarily May, so what they’re doing out in late June, I don’t know. It could be that the May date applies to a different area than here, since the species is found across most of North America east of the Rockies. Supposedly they can be a house-invader in late fall, as they’re looking for a place to spend the winter, much like ladybugs, but I don’t think I’ve ever noticed them doing that here.

I left the female to it and she finished up laying. When I checked today there were about ten of these small, soft eggs, no bigger than the head of a pin. I don’t really know, but I would guess that the pale crescent you see on one end of the eggs is akin to the yolk of a bird’s egg – the fertilized cells sit on that, and that’s what the developing embryo uses for food.

Edit: Commenter Ted indicates, “The orange crescent you noted on the bug eggs is actually the outline of the operculum, which is the “cap” of the egg – when the nymph hatches, this cap will pop off and out will crawl the nymph. Eggs of most “true” bugs (order Hemiptera) have these opercula, as far as I can tell.” Thanks, Ted!

The branch was surprisingly full of activity for just a little section of tree. While examining the bugs, I happened to notice a light green caterpillar just a few leaves over. I don’t know what species this is, and I couldn’t even tell you if it was a butterfly or a moth, though I’m inclined to think the former. I used to believe that moth caterpillars were hairy and butterfly caterpillars were smooth, but it turns out that either can be either, and so now I know of no reliable way to differentiate the two. The inchworms, though, those little guys with feet at each end, who inch rather than crawl, those guys are moths, as are the really, really fuzzy ones like the Woolly Bears.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but in looking at the photo as I cropped it down, I spotted a white glob at the back of the caterpillar’s head. I’m fairly certain that this is the egg of a parasitic insect, probably a fly. There are a number of species of flies that lay their eggs at the back of the head of caterpillars, where the caterpillar can’t remove it. When the egg hatches, the larva burrows into the caterpillar’s body, and lives there, without killing the host, until it’s ready to emerge (at which point the host usually dies). Some caterpillars, such as tent caterpillars, have evolved a response of rapidly twitching their front end back and forth when they see a fly so that it’s a much harder target to land on.

Also in the area were many of these fuzzy caterpillars. Again, I don’t know what they are, but they were very brightly coloured, and the density and length of the hairs makes me think moths. There were many different instars, or larval stages, of these caterpillars on the branch, from the fairly mature one above, to a middle-aged and even rather young. On a few leaves I spotted the empty, shed skins (below) of caterpillars as they move from one instar to the next.

It’s amazing how much there is to see when you stop to look; if it hadn’t been for that one bug, laying its eggs on the low-hanging leaf, I would have just walked right on by, thinking the branch was empty.

By the hundreds

Moth jars in fridge

Hundreds of moths

This is my 100th post. It arrived rather quickly, it’s hard to believe I’ve written that many entries already, on subjects as varied as fungus and flora, birds and bugs, earth hour and green parties (the events, not the political groups). I thought the hundredth post deserved special attention, to mark a milestone, but I wasn’t sure how by. I spent some time thinking about it, and finally decided upon a post of hundreds – recent observations of multitudes of whatever it is I’m observing.

I happen to be at my parents’ this week, taking care of the horses while my mom’s away at a conference. Unfortunately, they’re not as easy as goldfish where you sprinkle them some food and they’re good to go for a while. I don’t mind coming out to care for them, though, as it gives me an excuse to visit the countryside. One of the things I use that excuse to do is catch moths, of course. I had a few sheets up last evening, and this. It was on the cooler side overnight last night, about 15 C (60 F), but there was still a good selection of things coming in to the sheets and trap; this evening is warmer and there’s much more activity. Since I need to photograph everything in order to later identify it, I jar the moths I don’t know and tuck them in the fridge. It doesn’t take long for the fridge to fill up. The above photo is the state of things after last night.

Insects on Goatsbeard

Hundreds of bugs

In my mom’s garden there are a couple clumps of goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus), a perennial native to North America and western Europe. It produces sprays of white flowers, which insects absolutely love. I highly recommend that any budding entomologist buy themselves a goatsbeard for their garden. It gets everything: butterflies, of course, but also day-flying moths, wasps, bees, flies, beetles. You can even find mosquitoes nectaring on the flowers. During the plant’s peak blooming period, which lasts a couple of weeks and is about this time of year, the blooms will be alive with activity, covered in bugs. Hundreds is not an exaggeration here. The longer you stand there, the more you see. It attracts some pretty interesting things.

Beetles

Hundreds of beetles

Earlier in the month I did some mothing down at the research station. Or tried to, anyway. I didn’t actually end up catching very many moths, though I’m not sure why; it was fairly warm that evening. However, what I did end up getting lots of were beetles. In many shapes and sizes, but the most apparent were the June Bugs. These guys aren’t a lot of fun to have come buzzing in to a sheet at the best of times, since they’re clumsy and just as liable to run into you as the sheet. Having about 100 come in to the light was almost creepy. In this photo, those large dark spots are the June Bugs; there are 67 visible on the sheet, and there were easily a few dozen more on the other side, on the ground, and in the nearby vegetation.

Colewort

Hundreds of flowers

The colewort in the garden is also still going strong. Because the plant is ginormous, there are easily hundreds upon hundreds of flowers blooming on it. The colewort attracts a lot of insects, too, and has a fairly strong and pretty scent. Yesterday I watched a few interesting beetles, flies, and a tiger swallowtail dropped by to sample things. This wouldn’t be a bad plant for the garden of an entomologist, either, but it does take up a lot of room.

Chokecherries

Hundreds of berries

I noticed while making the rounds of the garden that the chokecherry tree is beginning to put out its berries. They’re still far from ripe, being a green the same shade as the leaves, but they’re nearly full-size now. The tree is covered in them, and staring up into the canopy creates an interesting effect, almost abstract in appearance.

Hail

Hundreds of hailstones (and raindrops)

The last couple of weeks we’ve had regular, near-daily afternoon thunderstorms. Many of the thunderstorms have included hail, often rather large hail. I tried to take a photo of some of the rather large hail, but couldn’t really capture it any better than this. It’s been strange just how much rain we’ve got this year. I heard something about this June being the wettest on record (so far), but can’t seem to corroborate that. All this rain is especially strange compared to last summer, which was the polar opposite – days upon days of nothing but clear skies and sunshine, not a drop of rain in sight. My parents actually had concerns over their well running low and had to implement a strict water conservation plan. Won’t be an issue this year.

I actually started this post last night (Tuesday), but have been quite busy filling my mom’s shoes while she’s gone. In addition to the dentist appointment, which was quick and went well, but still took a chunk out of my day. I have new respect for the amount of work my mom (or my sister, when she’s here and takes over) puts in around here, especially with the horses. I don’t think I fully appreciated just how much time was involved in caring for them.

In any case. Here’s to another happy hundred.