Bay Weekly has acquired a furry friend, an orphaned baby squirrel. He (or she?) first caught our attention when he was stretched across the screen of our front window. We heard his cries through the open windows. Once our awhs stopped, we went back to work.     When the mailman came with his delivery later that day, he stepped over the squirrlel to get through our front door.

Your front porch is the buffet of choice for the orb weaver spiders, and your light is the headliner, attracting the smorgasbord of bugs that the spiders feast on.     As autumn comes upon us, the days get shorter and the orb weavers come out to play. Hatchlings born in spring grow up in summer. Come fall, they’re amping up their eating to make big egg sacs.

It’s a symphony out there. The players are crickets and their cuter green cousins, katydids.     Their instruments are their wings, specifically the tooth-covered stridulatory organ thereof, rubbed one against the other. Males play this instrument to attract females and repel other males.     Katydids, plant eaters, come in 6,400 species worldwide. Crickets, omnivores, are far fewer in species, with 900.     How many are playing near you we don’t know.

Piper, who has been on the Bay Weekly masthead as a distributor since 2007, knows when it’s Thursday. She picks up her leash, route sheet, and she’s ready. She watches over distribution partner Jim Lyles’ shoulder just to be sure he does it right. You can’t always trust humans to do everything correctly, you know. Us dogs must watch carefully.

On top of their Olympic medals, America’s fastest man and woman have another cause for pride. They’re the namesakes of two of the world’s fastest animals, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo’s cheetah twins born April 23 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va.

Masters of disguise, praying mantises camouflage themselves to capture beetles, bees, spiders, lizards and even frogs, then dine on the prey head-first.     Mantises don’t hunt their prey. Instead, they wait unmoving and invisible on a leaf or twig, ready to seize any insect or amphibian unfortunate enough to cross paths.

In the last couple months, you may have seen small white-spotted deer curled up in brush and leaves or taking tentative walks through the woods — or across the road. It’s the tail end of fawning season for whitetail deer. After six or seven months of gestation, a new batch of fawns has arrived in the world.

 

Nests throughout Chesapeake Country are full of baby birds. Fluffy young osprey are learning to tear their fish into bites in nests topping nearly every channel marker and many utility poles. Mom and Pop Osprey are still delivering the fish to their fast-growing babies.

On the beaches of the Chesapeake, you can consort with creatures that predate the dinosaurs and whose existence you’ve benefited from if you’ve been to the doctor in the past 30 years.     Especially if you get up very early in the morning.