Running in for dinner, he stopped for one last squirt skyward.

I love these hardy, succulent perennials a neighbor have us years ago. I just keep dividing, and they just keep blooming. If you know what they are, lemme know in the comments.

We found something amazing in our yard the other day, and it turned out to be an automeris io, or Io moth. This green spiked caterpillar eventually turns into a beautiful moth with giant circles on its wings that look like eyes. It’s common throughout the continent, but I’ve never seen one in all my years of nature gawking. Which is weird, because this thing was florescent green and the size of my thumb.

Enjoy the pics.

While I knew there was no tornado, tonight’s hail storm still impressed me. The white wall coming in off the marsh was cinematic, but the real star came seconds later when the hail arrived.

I could tell right away that the chunks were big, and they looked like broken snowballs bouncing into the windows. It made me think about density, and how if this hail was made from rock, every window in my house would be broken.

It lasted a good 10 minutes, so we waited, listened, and suddenly it stopped. Out I went with a bucket for the kids, which is now in our freezer. Cooper ate some, and said it tasted like water.

This was big hail…maybe the biggest I’d seen since I was a kid. It was easy to spot actual golfball-sized hail, but it was melting fast.

Most of the big pieces had a distinct cloudy ball in the middle, about the size of a raisin, which was surrounded by thick, clear ice. This pattern was enhanced as they melted, and they began to look like sliced kiwi.

Here are some pics of the aftermath…

Have you walked around lately? Flowers are everywhere this time of year, and my yard is blooming like it’s going out of style. On Sunday morning, I took a short walk around the homestead. Below are 16 of the flowers I saw, all shot within 16 minutes of each other. I saw dianthus, coreopsis, guara, hydrangea, oleander, verbena, lantana, society garlic, and a few veggies. Enjoy!

Stars, moon, sun, and jets. Palm tree, cypress, pine, and oak.

I had a moment of food chain serendipity while playing with my boys in the front yard, which was followed by a sight both creepy and presumably moderately rare (vague enough?)

My youngest son was fussing after the cats, who were attentively stalking the mockingbirds, who were feasting on the hundreds of insects wafting up from the street garden. We naturally moved closer, and saw a light fuzzy area near the mailbox. It was moving…moving a lot.

It turns out that it was a swarm of reproductive termites flowing out of the mulch, then fluttering into the stiff breeze. Once we stepped back, we could see the termites in the air like snow. Hundreds of them, haphazardly being swept down the street in the wind (thank god!).

In the end, I think these guys were getting out because the garden became inhospitable. Let’s hope so…at least for the termites.

I have terrible equipment for capturing celestial phenomenon (a 17-40mm), but my not-so-inner geek always pulls me out into the yard. I’ve caught meteors, rainbows, and even the northern lights (rare for SC), and tonight I got two more — a lunar eclipse and a moonbow — only 90 minutes apart.

It was pretty cloudy in Mt. P, so I quickly snapped the moonbow shot at about 7:45 thinking that was that. I caught brief glimpses of the eclipse, and then at 9:15 there was a relatively clear patch. I took a few shots with my wide angle gear, but focusing was nearly impossible. Still, the moment was captured, and along with the moonbow record a wild 90 minutes up there.

I hope all you late risers didn’t miss the show this morning! Commuting over the bridges providing amazing views of the thick layer of fog that had settled over the rivers and marshes. I crossed the Wando bridge around 8 a.m. this morning, and snapped two quick shots.

The first one is looking Southwest down the Wando, towards the Ravenel Bridge. From left to right you can see the Channel 2 broadcast tower, both towers of the bridge, the cranes from the downtown port, and finally a couple of the MUSC buildings on the far right.

This second shot is looking Northeast up the Wando, and seeing nothing but white. The fog seemed to be way thicker up that way, and it reminded my of flying over cloud cover - nothing was penetrating it.

After reading Dr. Seuss’s “Oh Say Can You Seed” all summer long, we welcomed Fall as a great opportunity to do some collecting. Over a two-week period, my oldest son and I meticulously sought out all the best seed caches for our collection. In the end, it looked pretty cool:

Here are the details (from top left to bottom right):

1. Unidentified Weed - This bean-like seed came from a head-high weed that produced dozens of pods, each with two seeds in it. They kind of smelled.
2. Crape Myrtle Tree - We collected these seeds by swatting at our crape myrtle with a plastic baseball bat. The seeds floated down like mini-helicopters and landed on a Frisbee. They are now known as the Frisbee seeds.
3. Wild Blue Aster - I love this wildflower, and it grows under the power lines near our house. These seeds came from a wildflower bouquet we picked for Jen.
4. Live Oak Tree - These acorns are abundant in the Lowcountry this time of year. The big surprise was the larvae that crawled out of each of them. One by one, I picked them out of the container and took them outside, where I assume they wanted to burrow into the ground.
5. Pumpkin - These are the only non-wild seeds we included in our collection. They were so plentiful and unique…we just had to have them.
6. Unidentified Berry - I should know the name of this shrub, as they are everywhere in Charleston. They have thin,  yellowing this time of year, and are covered with red berries.
7. Palmetto Tree - These seeds are everywhere right now too. It’s so cool thinking that each one of them can grow a giant Palmetto tree.
8. Unidentified Weed - This weed produces long, slender pods that contain about 25 seeds each. The seeds remind us of the food we feed our Beta fish.
9. Unidentified Weed - These seeds came from a weed that has 3-inch pods with 8 seeds in each. I like them because they look like tiny Chinese throwing stars.
10. Redbud Tree - I love redbud trees, so I planted one in our front yard - they remind me of Indiana. Similar to the live oak seeds, each redbud seed had a very small insect larvae living in it. They had all hatched before we started the collection, but we saw them this summer.
11. Ornamental Grass - Not sure what species this is, but it’s variegated and is about 4 feet tall.
12. Jelly Palm - These seeds appear on the ground after the fermenting orange fruit decomposes. We like to crack these shells open to get at the three beans inside.

I snapped some shots with the family cam out on IOP on Friday night. The whole area between 3rd Street and Breach Inlet is eroding, and there are crazy formations and wave action - I couldn’t resist. We were there at sunset, and an area the size of a football field had angled waves moving in both directions…wild stuff. Here is a shot of a cool pock-marked area up near the high tide line.

This spider is amazing, despite its diminutive size. It lives in the side-view mirror of my car, and uses the reflected streetlight to catch its dinner each night. When I leave in the morning, it moves in and out of the mirror’s safe interior while cleaning and repairing the web. Twice now, it has fixed its web while going 70 mph on I-526, while I stare open-jawed from inside. What an odd place to thrive.

Here’s the high-res on Flickr, and a cropped detail.