Bugs

Investigating a centipede.

Are bugs pets? Not really, but sort of. I refer to them as short term guests. Caught in the wild and nutured and observed. Ideally freed before death results. Bugs are great.

Big caterpillar.

The kids love to catch bugs and store them in jars. They're always more interested in what's outside than what's inside. I'm not sure why spiders and cockroaches and yucky but cicadas and grasshoppers and centipedes are cool, but they are. So I catch bugs inside and throw them out and the kids catch bugs outside and bring them in. We always try to identify them either with our handy dandy book on Texas insects or by searching on the internet. Once you start picking stuff up and trying to identify it, it's pretty amazing how many different things you can find on a pretty small piece of property. This small piece of the world is literally teeming with life. 

Friendly dragonfly.

We have a collection of bug nets and empty peanut butter jars. There's little that flies or crawls that can escape when the kids are in the mood to hunt. I think it's good for them. They learn to look at the world on a different scale. Most people don't notice the insects around them unless they are being bothered by them. We move too fast and the bugs hold still. When you stop moving and watch, just for a minute, it's amazing what you see. The world is full of life and beauty.
When I was writing this post I was assuming that I'd be able to find a bunch of pictures of the summer grasshopper season. Every summer my kids and their cousins collect grasshoppers from around the cottage. We have a silly number of grasshopper houses that they store them in and feed them cabbage and keep them for a few days. When they're in full swing they will have over 30 captured grasshoppers scattered around, it's quite a production. Somehow I've missed taking pictures of this. I can't figure out how that happened. I'll fix it next summer. I will take my camera in hand and hunt the hunters. I promise.