Yes, more lizards, you thought you'd heard the last about them for a while, but no, they are still up and around every sunny day between 10:30 and noon, even now it's December. Here's one guy who let me follow him for a minute (until I lost my balance.) They climb up the dwarf Alberta spruce and take in the southern exposure for a couple of hours. I don't know how they can stand scurrying around on those needles, which are quite prickly, at least to my unwebbed fingers.
So that was something new and different. There were plenty of familiar octopeds, too.
( I don't know what's for lunch, but it looks like there's plenty of it... )
Would you look at that? Do you see what's in the seed pod, beside seeds?
I usually cut down the daylilies' flower stalks before they develop seed pods, but the ones I miss have, by mid-October, been dessicated into lacy cups of glossy jet beads, like the ones here. I thought it made a nice image, with the shadow and the contrasting textures, and photographed them two weeks ago. Only now do I see.....the snail. (Make that snails. That's one in the left pod, too!) These guys get everywhere. It's not unusual to see the little critters poised at the end of an eight-foot-long willow branch that must have taken them hours to traverse the length of, from the ground to the very tip where now is being chewed up the tenderest, juiciest new growth. But really, you climbed all the way up the stalk, into the seed pod... Did it eat and fall asleep? Was it attacked by a predator and left there, an empty shell? Went looking for that same stalk and seedhead today, but it's gone; it's been two weeks of rain, wind, leaves falling, sun, rain, etc. So. Something impossible to look out for next year...
Michael and Alex with a stormtrooper:
and this was the spider that changed my mind about walking down that particular "nature trail;"
Look what I found on the tomato plants this evening! A tomato hornworm, parasitized by the cocoons of brachinid wasps. I've read about these, but this is the first time I've seen one in real life. He's a goner now; a luckier hornworm would have eaten all the tomatoes and tomato leaves he could hold, then metamorphosed into a sphinx moth. You can see from these photos that the tops of the little white cocoons are mostly all open, so I guess the wasps have emerged already, and all the excitement's over. 
Ken let Olivia drive the last leg of the trip into Key West. (I thought it set a bad example for the boys, what with her being unlicensed and all, but she brings out the scalawag in everybody!) He had to work the gas and brake, of course. 
She basked in the sunshine on Ken's T-shirt for a few glorious, golden moments, until the delicious aroma of bacon began to draw a crowd...
Sooner than we thought, it was time to head home.
Olivia kept the boys entertained with all sorts of rascally antics during the long drive back to the airport. 
A surprise hit with the teenagers: The Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory. Myself, I never pass up one of these places. I was thrilled that everybody else liked it, too. This one had a lot going on in the nursery, where pupae and chrysali and whatnot were hanging and hatching and drying their wings in plain view. Not to mention, button quail chicks = so cute. But it was hard to take photos of that because of the glass and the lighting. (It's always some excuse with me, isn't it?) So no chrysalis photos, sorry.
Lunchtime. Overripe banana, anyone?
This very fancy finch fit right in. A few varieties of finches and Chinese Button Quail live in the huge aviary as well.
Recently hatched, wings now fully inflated and dried, this one was later brought outside to join the big boys.
Blue morphos, from South America, win my vote for Most Disneyfied Look, as they often fly in groups of three or more, following each other in an erratic, cartoon-y line through the air, right past your nose. At rest, they usually fold their wings to display the dull brown pattern of the underside. This one below, who's more than a little ragged, was quite lethargic, too tired maybe to fold up, so we were able to get a good look at its metallic blue coloring. 
So that's my recommendation: take the kids, even if they're old, jaded teenagers. I'll bet they like it.
Key West in August is very warm, very humid indeed. On the bright side, everything's in bloom.
Ken took the shot above, the one below, and the one below that, the banana tree.
Look up there! Bananas!
Chickens were far more visible than cats last week in Key West. They were all over the streets near our inn. It seems unfathomable, I'm sure, that I never obtained the iconic crossing-the-road shot that would have made the whole trip worthwhile, but the chickens would all wait, quite cannily, until I let go of the camera and then they'd dart out! in front of us, into the road and on to the sidewalk across the street. Go ahead, ask the others if that didn't happen.
See those chickens? See that road? They crossed it, I swear. I just didn't get it down in pixels.
