Good guys in your garden

We get a lot of pest pressures here. So I always try to give the good guys a tip of the hat when I see them.

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Nice pictures

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Nice! There’s a little toad living in our garden. I am glad he’s there, but he scares the crud out of me all the time!

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he scares the crud out of me all the time!

Why?

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I have a pretty severe snake phobia (can’t even look at a picture!), so whenever something small moves unexpectedly, I freak out.
Mowing the grass is torture.

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You would love the black racers we have around here. My wife wants to kill them, but I told her no, they help with the rodent control. Have also had a hog snake up in the rafters of our shed, that was interesting. It was after some birds that nested in the soffiting. We didn’t hear anymore “cheep cheeping” much longer after that…

Have also seen king snakes, and I haven’t seen any poisonous ones around, but my wife saw our dog barking at a rattler down in the front yard once. She ran up the hill to get the shotgun, but by then the dog was on our porch, so I guess it got away. She suspects it was a timber rattlesnake, yikes…

Check out this thread:

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I know they are good to have around, but uhg. Any that are in the back yard get a chance to escape (meaning I run away and avoid the area for a while), but any that show up near the house get chased by my husband with a sword. It is named Serpentbane.

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Yeah, twice I’ve seen a poisonous snake in my garden called a Mamushi. One of my wife’s relatives died from this snake, but that’s pretty rare. Apparently they’re really clumsy and it’s difficult for them to get a good bite and inject enough poison to do serious harm.
I caught a very beautiful pheasant on my hunter camera in the garden last week. And a couple nights ago I saw a kind of fox like creature in the garden.
I also had a monster bee come around my head when I was bagging the peaches last month which really freaked me out.

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Couple more I saw on my Mikan tree:

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Yikes, I just found out that last picture is a really bad guy for citrus: Citrus long-horned beetle - Wikipedia

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Went back tonight, One of those hot humid nights when you can’t sleep, looks like I wasn’t the only one:

Kids like playing with exotic beetles here, so I’ll see if anybody wants a mating pair:

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They certainly are a striking looking couple

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Saw a couple more tonight:

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I recognize the praying mantis, but what is the other one? My goodness, it’s weird!

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Is top one a centipede?

In my experience, the poisonous one is the one with red legs. Hurt like hell.

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That’s a centipede, and they can bite people too. I really don’t like those things. My first year in Japan I was getting ready for bed and a giant one came out from under my pillow. I had trouble sleeping in that bed for a while!

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