Waking up in Paradise: Making Do in Belize

Another lovely day begins in Belize as I look out from the veranda beyond the south beach toward the mangroves that bracket the mouth of Black Creek.  

This is one of my favorite views, so you may have seen this before. :-)

We  eat our breakfast on the veranda every morning and ease into the day as the sun rises into the sky.  I saw this little spider, maybe a jumping spider, on the veranda   screen and decided to take its photo. 

A hairy little thing, isn't it?

A moth up higher above the screen caught my eye, so I thought I would photograph it too.  It was way over my head, so I had to improvise something to stand on to get close enough to it.

A chair, an ice chest, and 2 kitty litter buckets were my
improvised platform.  Ugh - look at all those ugly patches on 
the screen.  We need to replace it the next time we are 
there.  Dennis just reminded me that all holes got there 
from little birds clinging to the screen to catch insects.
I guess it is worth it to have birds around!

I crept up on the moth as much as possible considering I had to step onto the chair then to the 2 plastic buckets and quickly distribute my weight between the buckets  so they didn't collapse.   You can see the moth up at the top of the  screen.  Dennis handed my camera to me once I got in place.  

It was about 2 inches long.

And had a slightly furry thorax. 

Here is another example of making do in Belize - electric cord spaghetti.  We use a diesel generator to charge a battery bank that stores electricity for us.  But the inverter that converts electricity from the batteries to indirect current creates "dirty" power that can be hard on sensitive electronic things, like computers, mobile phones, chargers for camera batteries.  We need to charge all of our electronics during the 2-3 hours in the mornings and evenings when the generator is running to avoid the dirty power that can damage them.  The electrical outlet is inside and we run the power cords out through the window to the veranda so we can use our computers, etc while on the veranda.

You can see the top of Dennis' head out the window on the left.  He has a power cord going to his mobile phone and another to his computer.  Through the window on the right is the cord is to my mobile phone.  The cord to bottom is for the little fridge to the right.

Got to keep those camera batteries charged so I don't miss any good photo ops like the one below!

This tree trunk has 2 kinds of orchid growing on it; the one with the small 

white flowers on the left (Brassavola sp.) and another one to 
the right that is too young to bloom but has nice green leaves on yellow-green rhizomes.  Two years ago the leaves of the young one were only about
1/4 inch long!  Wonder what its flowers will look like?

Not a bad place to have to make do.

Butterfly and Moth

After a slow, cool start to summer here in Minnesota, our garden came into its own in late July and early August.  The flowers, birds, and insects have been a delight to watch in their splendid glory.  Even though we have been busy getting the house ready to sell, I have managed to take lots of photos of the flora and fauna.  But I haven't been able to manage posting a blog entry, until now.

One of the lovely insects that has been flitting around is the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus).  This female is feeding on butterfly weed; in fact she was holding on for dear life as the wind blustered around.   The blue on the hindwing is seen only on the females.

I have seen her or other females in the garden for several weeks now.  They are quite

large with a wing span of around 6 inches (165 mm) for the females and a little smaller for the males. 

These swallowtails have lovely colors on the upper and undersides of their wings.

The blue (first photo)is more visible from above and the orange is more visible from below.

I find the Eastern Swallowtails to be one of the most beautiful butterflies in North America.

On the other extreme is this moth, Palthis angulalis - Dark-spotted Palthis.  It is in a subfamily called the "litter moths", which reflects their usual habitat.

It is fairly small; that is an oregano leaf it is on in the photos.  And at first glance, it seems drab.  But look at that structure sticking out from its head!  What is that?

From a different perspective, you can see the interesting shape of its wings.  

From above it looks to me like an F16 fighter plane.

In fact, that was how i keyed it out.  I did a Google search on "moths that look like F16s" and found the genus in the 3rd item.

That took me to http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740, a great site that I use pretty often.

  Now if I could only figure out what is going on with that funky schnoz ...