Hill Country critters

An assortment of critters spotted around my parents’ house, starting with a curious squirrel:

A painted bunting:

A lizard hiding in a rockpile:

Those were cute and all, but things are about to get a lot less cuddly.  Follow the jump if you dare. 

Presented in order of increasing menace…

The daddy longlegs hiding under a column (they are all over the place and they have this weird habit of congregating en masse and vibrating.  I have a video of it somewhere):

The front walkway spider (fact: I only like spiders when I approach them):

The thirsty wasp (those suckers were in and out of the pool constantly, but they left us alone.  We found a few nests under the eaves!):

The little scorpion that hid under a wall near the pool when he saw me coming toward him with the camera:

Don’t feel bad for him; later he got bold and charged me!  If you have never seen a scorpion charge, they skitter along like wind-up cars:

I should tell you I had been searching high and low for scorpions to shoot, so I was very excited to find that one.  But finding this one cruising around the bedroom floor as soon as I came back inside was a bit excessive:

After that, I didn’t get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom anymore.