One of things that we really enjoy on our Water Island place is the wildlife. Of course it’s nothing compared to what we have on the farm in Central Texas, but at least none of it is venomous! Buttercup ran into this bad boy one night, he’s one of a couple that hang out downstairs:
An upset land crab
These land crabs seem to be in a a contest with the more numerous hermit crabs for dominance of the basement. The hermit crabs have figured out our dinner schedule and come out at the same time every night for free food handouts.
They really like leftover Korean Barbeque sauce
Another fun fact about hermit crabs is that they will change their shells from time to time. We decided to save them some work and collected some shells so they could do one stop shopping:
New shell lot for the hermies!
Another cool sight in June was land turtle mating season. We actually witnessed one session, but unfortunately didn’t get any good photos. It was very slow, as you might suspect, but also surprisingly vocal. We didn’t know up to that point that the turtles could actually make any noise. At this time some unwelcome visitors were a couple of Thrasher birds who kept trying to build a nest inside of our house. Every night for 3 weeks they built while we were sleeping, and every day we took down their night’s work. We tried bird repellant and water spray bottles to keep them out, but they just ignored us for the most part. They also were very noisy. Part of their revenge on us was to hang out by our bedroom door on our shipping container at sunrise and wake us up. Princess finally figured out a way to scare them off:
House Scarecrow
We’ve also got a couple of small iguanas hanging around from time to time, but no permanent residents.