Dorothy, When I have big bites out of tomatoes that low to the ground, it often st turtles. The turtles we have here love tomatoes and will stand on their hind legs with their back feet on the ground and will eat tomatoes as high up as they can reach, and we have some huge turtles with shells about as big as a dinner plate, so they can reach surprisingly high into the plants. They use the tomato cage or the plant itself to brace themselves against as they eat the toamto. It also might be possums. At my house, it also could be Duke, our rottweiler-mix who loves tomatoes, whether green or red. I've only had deer close enough to the house to eat the hollyhocks in the front porch flower bed once this year, but they are coming closer every day. I've been putting out deer corn for the nursing moms and the ones with young fawns the last couple of weeks, but I put that pretty far from the house. I know the deer are getting desperate because they are letting themselves be seen in the side yard between the woods and the house even in the middle of the day. I have to watch carefully if I go into the side yard on the north side of the house during the day or I find myself too uncomfortably close to deer. You know they are hungry, too, because instead of looking at me, freezing, and then turning and running, they look at me, stomp their feet and snort air out their nostrils, which I interpret as them telling me to "go away" (and I do back away and go back inside). I don't know what they are trying to eat on the north side of the house. All I have there is southern wax myrtle, purple wintercreeper, wisteria and Virginia creeper. My apple-growing neighbor who lives about 1/2 mile from us as the crow flies and is right on the river so has abundant deer keeps them away from his apple trees by putting a radio in the tree and playing it at night. The deer won't touch those apple trees when the radio is on, but they'll wipe out the garden that is a few feet away. He puts it in a ziplock bag to keep the moisture out. Susan, That's too bad about the sunflowers. When my sunflowers topple over in storms, as long as enough of the root is in the ground, I leave them there. They look awful, but the blooms still are useful to the wildlife. We've had one blooming about 2 weeks now, and now a second one is blooming. Not many even sprouted this year and most of them were eaten, likely by deer, before they had a chance to get very big. That's great that your plant started blooming after the rain. Sometimes it is amazing how much even a little rain helps. We had more rainfall overnight, so our 2-day rain total now is 0.20". Pathetic, but better than 0.0". Dawn

house finch this is a nice picture of the grakle but I still don't like this bird house finch I really like the goldfinch hope you like my picture been working hard to get some good ones bought new lens for my camera so it is a bit easyer for me Anna another one of the house finch

The second one is a yellow swallowtail, but I don't know what the first one is. Really nice shots. I've tried to capture photos of butterflies and they always move too fast for me.

Thanks for posting. Those perky red polls are hard to photograph because they are never still. When we moved into our new house in 1976, we saw read polls on occassion and then as other subdivisions sprang up around our little town, the red polls disappeared. I haven't seen any in 15 years. Another factor may have been a wipeout. About 15 years ago, a bird flu decimated our sparrow population that winter and they have not rebounded. It is only now that I see an occassional sparrow at the feeder. That disease may have wiped the red polls as well.