No tripod, flash, and have no idea about noise reduction. I am still trying to understand all the icons. There are probably over a hundred if you access the menus. I took some outside and I have to figure out the telephoto zoom because I did not get such great shots of a red spotted purple. It was in the sun and just about 5 feet from me. Oh well. Here are the pipevines, 9 hours later. It is amazing how soon they congregate! There are over 20 on that leaf, which is smaller than a quarter! Cheers, Elisabeth

We had a terrible storm this early A.M. Lot's of wind and rain. I can only spot 7 babies and can only hope the others are just under leaves. They had eaten the top out of one stalk and they were all bunched up at the top. The other stalks had gotten blown over so we propped them up with some poles agaist the one still standing. After a while, they began to move onto the other stalks. If they run out of dill, will they crawl over to the parsley plants? They're right next to each other but the babies would have to crawl onto the ground to get to the parsley. Also, I came across this picnic item while looking for the old curtain sheers. It springs open like an umbrella and is used to sit over food on a picnic table to protect from flying insects. If I use some tent pegs or made some wire hooks out of wire hangers to hold the base to the ground, this might make a good outside protection over the host plants. Of course, once you used it for this purpose, it would no longer be useful for human food protection. :-) I got this one from Camping World and I believe they're about $5 and less when on sale. Does this look like something that might work to help protect them while on the outside host plants? Mary unopened: From __Garden Flowers - plants opened: From __Garden Flowers - plants

Well...I appreciate all your responses, and I'm going to assume it's a common garter snake...for my OWN peace of mind...LOL I believe he was so grumpy because of the flash from the camera...it probably scared the bejeezus out of'm. Plus...I'm wondering if it isn't the onset of hibernation time. I mean, afterall, he WAS way down under some pretty hard, clay covered by about 4" of mulch. He was probably sleeping...or getting his last full meal of night crawlers when I uncovered him. *I'm in SE PA, not Florida at the moment. He's gone now and I don't know where...hehehe...but I covered the hole back up with the mulch. BTW: When I let Picture it! automatically tweak the color and brightness levels, the colors of the snake were changed a bit. Here are two pics showing actual color...

You should never put a nestling of one speices into another speices nest, they all eat a varitey of different foods and raise them differently. For instance a bluebird nestling cannot tolerate earthworms, plus speices in nests in trees typically fledge earlier than those in cavities. Not sure what you did but what you should have done is to put the baby back in the nest, add a sprarrow spooker to the nestbox and watch that the adults were still feeding the nestling. Maybe it was ready to fledge, not sure unless you knew how old the nestling was. Please visit sialis.org for information on sparrow spookers. If you have House Sparrows and want to host bluebirds you really need to do House Sparrow control and get rid of the house sparrows. Donna