After placing some sorghum grain on top of a pile of straw bales intended for the various birds to nibble on, this brazen little guy discovered the location and decided to help himself.
One night when I returned from town at about 10 pm there were four raccoons – three babies and one adult – sitting on the straw bales helping themselves. When I shouted at them, two babies just stared back at me with their bandit eyes.
In the last part of October there were two days when swarms of beetles filled the air around the steel building on my property. One day was after two days of rain and the other day was after a day of strong winds. There were many configurations of spots on their backs as the following picture shows. I wonder which are beneficial and which might be detrimental to the plants that I am trying to grow.
In the second picture they appear to be searching for an entry to the building and as a place to hole-up for the Winter.
When one of the beetles is crushed, the aroma reminds me of the times when my mother was not happy about how they invaded the ceiling light fixtures and were roasted.
The Fall webworms have been very active this year. The eggs are attached to a leaf in a small white silky mass. The resulting caterpillars create webs to protect themselves from predators while they eat the leaves inside the web and grow. Some trees have been completely defoliated. The following picture shows a pecan tree with numerous webs.
The caterpillars do not seem to bother oak trees very much. The following picture shows a tall hickory tree completely engulfed whereas the nearby oak trees show very little effect.
Many of the pecan seedling trees in the field were damaged by what appears to be the work of June beetles.
When inspecting the damaged trees, no culprits were found on the leaves. That seems to be the nature of June beetles – hiding during the daylight hours and partying at night. There are good descriptions on the Northern Pecan blog.
The leaflets on some of the trees were completely destroyed – leaving only the stems of the leaves – see the following two pictures.
A second type of bug damage occurs where the attack location starts at the tip of the growing shoot. Adjacent leaves are glued together into a mass where a worm feeds inside – see the following picture.
With other bugs gnawing on the leaves it amazing how the pecan trees keep trying to come back as the following picture shows.
