I’m surprised they let you get close enough to photograph them.
Mind you, back home in Canada getting close enough to photograph means that the moose will stomp you to death so I don’t have any comparison.
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These geckos are camouflage-reliant ambush predators; when you get close, they freeze. We were pulling vines next to that little dude for an hour, and he didn’t budge a millimetre.
The skink, on the other hand, raced through in seconds.
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It’s walnut season in the southeastern US. They’ve been coming down for the last month, but tapering off now. Each walnut is big, sometimes tennis-ball big, and hard. You wouldn’t want to get hit with one.
These trees are amazingly prolific. What you see in the buckets is about four days’ worth of nutfall from just two trees. I’ve already thrown five times that much off the back of the cliff. The cars get moved lest they look like they’ve been through a hailstorm. It would not be unreasonable to wear a hardhat when working in the yard, this time of year. Walking about, you hear them coming through the leaves like miniballs from a Civil War rifle, whanging off of gutters and roofing, crashing to the ground. They fall in ones and twos, which knock loose bigger clusters, all coming down with heavy thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump. A Fibonacci of walnuts.
I haven’t yet ridden over one on the bicycle, but given that I ride at night, that’s just a matter of luck. The acorns, though, are unavoidable, and the acorn crowns sound like bubble wrap under my wheels.
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There are a couple of big black walnut trees in our neighbor’s yard that often dump the things in ours. It’s a nuisance to be honest. We pay a service to take care of the yard now, but trying to find them all before mowing used to be a hassle.
Walnut trees also release thujone into the soil, which inhibits the growth off many other types of plants that my wife had wanted to grow.
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You think walnuts dropping are bad? Try horse chestnuts!
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Yeah but conkers have uses.
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The area under construction next to “The Big 550 KTRS” at Westport Plaza in St. Louis.
My photo doesn’t really do it justice, but high-pressure water is spraying out of a valve in the pipe like it’s a firehose. They put that trash can there about 10 seconds before this shot, and it started overflowing almost immediately. There’s a comedy club downstairs with water flowing out of the doors into the building lobby. The guy on the ladder kept trying to get a wrench on the valve but the pressure knocks it off.
My office is on the 8th floor, but I expect they’ll have to turn off the building’s water supply if that area doesn’t have another valve. I’m looking forward to maybe going home from work a little early…
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OMG those spines! That’s like an offensive weapon. I wonder if they serve a purpose for the tree? I can’t see them getting stuck in animal fur and carried away unless it’s in something like yak hair or musk ox hair. Maybe the smaller ones adhere. Maybe it’s left over from when there were more woolly creatures around, like 10,000 years ago.
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You not have conkers?
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They had this show up on some survival programes. Meet the black palm.
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I had to Google for “conkers”. It occurred to me the only other time I’ve heard of them was in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I didn’t know what they were (or have Google, or a dictionary, nearby).
They’re not common in most of the US, and the USDA considers them an invasive pest plant.
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I may have seen the bare brown core, but not with the spiny outer layer on. Maybe our local variant is different? Now I’ll be looking for it.
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So what trees do kids throw sticks into to knock their fruits off in the us?
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https://www.worldconkerchampionships.com/play.php
This is what the horse chestnut tree is for.
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Pretty cool. I’ve heard the term conkers but never knew what that was about.
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I don’t know, but I wonder if it’s actually a form of defense, to make sure that mammals don’t open the outer shell to eat the nut, which would be one less potential baby horse chestnut tree next season.
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They’re often called “buckeye” in the States rather than “horse chestnut”. There are lots of these trees in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc…consider the fact that Ohio is known as “the Buckeye state”. I grew up in Illinois, and at least where I was we called them horse chestnuts instead.
I believe “conkers” is what British kids call the nuts inside, which are played with.
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Ah… I never knew what a buckeye was. (I’m from Florida originally and moved to Missouri, still not sure I’ve seen these trees, at least not enough to notice.)
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They’re beautiful trees, actually. It’s just they’re a huge pain (literally) when the nuts fall.
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