Wonders of Nature

Spending so much time outside lately, I have been noticing odd and wonderful tidbits of the natural world. We found a ground nest on the farm of these baby baby birds... who knows what kind they are? Unfortunately, a week later they were gone, and surely too small to fly they probably became part of the food chain. Then the other day on top of my mint plant I saw this black grasshopper beetle looking thing with crazy long anteneas- I've never seen anything like it here. I wish Google had a reverse google image tool where you could input a picture and it would tell you what it was. I guess that's sort of what a field guide is, just a little more work. Then the weirdest thing I found lately was in the field at the farm, while digging furrows to plant potatoes. I hacked something in half that I thought was an animal part, because it looked like blood or bone marrow. But upon closer inspection, I thought it must be a rock, sort of shale or fossilized looking. But it was so red, it must be blood. But it looked more like rock than bone. Then a friend LICKED it (which admittedly was my first impulse too) to see what it tasted like, and reported that it had NO FLAVOR. Clearly, the only explanation is that it is a blood rock, left from a nightime landing from alien visitors.