Gnarly

I’ve got money to give anyone who can guess what this mystery photo is:

It is not related to a family of bats we found by our front door:

My drone got homesick, tried to fly back to China and got stuck in this tree. Can you spot it?

Click for a bigger view. Upper middle. I used it as an excuse to buy some new toys and after a couple of weeks finally got it back!

We hosted some dinners and had some good visits with guests:

I hacked our HVAC venting to mix our up and down air better:

Doggies have a daily hunt for the elusive chipmunk:

Occasionally they corner one, but they have un-penetrable defenses:

Helen continues to populate the forest with “Tchotchkes”

And the forest continues to provide it’s own surprises:

It even gave us an octopus:

(or maybe it was just a decomposing tulip flower)

The best forest surprise this month was a beehive in a cliff tree trunk. I flew the drone up for a visit:

The last forest discovery is what gave us that mystery photo. It is one of the bumps on the most gnarly tree trunk in the history of our backyard:

Not sure why the tree trunk does this. I’m sure mother nature knows why, but she has not told me yet.

Bruce