u/TarantulaWithAGuitar

Iowa City Mutual Aid will be hosting a community carnival at the Great Plains Action Society's Resilience Hub at 810 Maiden Ln, from 2-6 pm on Labor Day (9/7).

With support from other local organizations, ICMA will be raising funds to help purchase propane and other supplies for our unhoused neighbors this coming winter. We'll have food, non-alcoholic beverages, DJs, and plenty of family friendly games and activities.

Come pay us a visit and support our local community!

If the wildlife is using the pond, it's a successful wildlife pond. That's it. That's the only criteria. Even better when it's an amphibian, because they're super sensitive to water parameters. But even if all you have is raccoons and deer drinking it dry, that's still successful because the wildlife is using the pond. It doesn't have to be X gallons, have Y plants, or attract Z rare animals. It doesn't need to be fancy, it doesn't need to "keep up with the Joneses." It's ok to have tubing or plastic exposed. It's ok if you have to keep futzing with the fountain pump every other day because it keeps getting snails stuck in it. If your pond attracts wildlife, you have a successful wildlife pond.

Today I was disassembling the motor on my pump and refilling it (it's been so hot, it evaporates super quickly) and I found this Northern Leopard Frog chilling in the mud outside my pond. Frogs are wildlife, ergo, my pond is successful.

Hello, everyone! This is Sissy, the light of my life. Just to preface, we see her vet, a cat specialist, regularly and her blood numbers and everything else are "as good as we can expect" for a cat of her age. She's on some pain meds for arthritis and has mild CKD, but otherwise no major health issues.

We've added steps to help her get to the bed, the couch, and her favorite spot in the bay window. She's got a cozy bed under our bed, by the fireplace, in the bay window, and in front of the sliding glass door (so she can watch the bird feeders). Everything we do involves making sure she has safe and easy access to wherever she wants to go.

Well, we're now at the phase where the muscle loss in her hind end is causing her back legs to give out on her or to make her walk kind of sideways sometimes. The vet says it's not neurological or vascular or any other emergency, just muscle atrophy.

Any tips for helping with this in any way? I know it's just a sign of her age and her body starting to quit. But I also don't think she's really "ready" to be done, you know? She still chirps excitedly when I join her in the window, still plays with the drawstrings on my sweatpants, and still demands to join me in the bathroom.

Anyway, her birthday is soon (Aug 4), so even if you have no advice or wisdom, thanks for reading about her for her birthday!

Fight me. Or tell me how to ID them when they're sitting 30 yards away watching my bird feeders. IDC anymore. I'm over it.

I found these native insects displaying a normal behavior on a native tree that they co-evolved with for millennia, a behavior that poses very little risk to my healthy, established tree and helps countless bird species feed their chicks while the ecosystems and climate actively collapse.

I don't like it. Can I kill them?

I found this cool rock in Jackson County, Iowa US (driftless region) below some bluffs.

I can't scratch the little hexagonal protrusions with my fingernail, but I can scratch the (I think) limestone? where the protrusions attach to the rock. The last pic is the bottom of the rock.

What is this? What caused all these cool nearly uniform little hexagons?

Thanks!

I thought it was a clay-colored leaf beetle, but I've been told it's not a beetle. I wasn't given any other information though. ☹️

Found in eastern Iowa in an empty space that's reverting to prairie. The city wants to bulldoze it to build luxury apartments, so I'm trying to catalog the plants and animals while I can (and praying I find something cool to convince them to leave the space "wild").

This was planted as a bare root sapling in 2021, and is about 5ft tall. I don't spray herbicides, and neither do any of my direct neighbors. Some leaves look ok, but others are all shriveled and splotched like this.

I have a crew coming to remove a black cherry tree that's losing a battle to rust (and a couple white mulberries), so if this is also a disease I'm going to struggle to beat, I'd like to be able to have them take this one too while they're out here.

For sale. No low ball offers, I know what I've got.

Used the weeder tool and finally actually got the taproot up on this thing. If you're wondering why you can't seem to keep the invasive honeysuckle from coming back, it's because the root actually went multiple feet down for a plant that's only a handful of inches tall.

And she has been laughing nonstop since I noticed a bird when and where I was not expecting a bird. At this point she's just straight up disconnecting the hardware that's supposed to hold the door closed. Next step is a padlock, I swear to God. 😭🥲😂

I left the dustpan out overnight and he's decided it's his favorite place to sit. Not the soft cat beds, not the tunnel, not the cardboard box with a towel in it. This dustpan is the ultimate innovation in bunny comfort.