Just a shout out to the nearly indestructible GSF.
This morning while my wife and I were sitting, reading, in our living room, we heard a rattle noise coming from the garage. The dogs were at our feet; the cat was asleep on a bed.

Pati came back from checking the tinny sound with nothing to report other than "It sounds like it's coming from over by the pellet stove." About 20 or even 30 minutes later I walked back to the garage to feed the aquarium denizens some Optimal.

Yikes! There in the steel can that sits atop the pellet stove where I keep some mealworms, lay a desiccated green sunfish, coated with mealworm dust, barely able to flag a fin for help, and hardly able to move its body. It had that look in its eye that only green sunfish can give.

When I dropped him back into the aquarium, he sank to the gravel and amazingly started to move mouth and gills for that precious oxygen. Later in the day I found him hiding in corner, upright but unable to equalize his position in the water column.

This evening he was able to circle up and around, and return to his corner. A moment ago I dropped some more Optimal into the tank. Over he came for several pellets!

You absolutely must respect and appreciate the utter tenacity of the glorious green sunfish. If only our PondBoss Green Sunfish Society were still active. Where are JHAP and all the rest of us cyanellus lovers when pondsters malign the dignity of this remarkable fish?

DD1, I know you'll agree.

It is really no surprise that GSF persist in tiny mud puddles.

At the end of the world, the only living things left will be green sunfish, cockroaches, rats, and osage orange.

We've got one osage orange on our hay meadow fence. I think I'll save the trunk when we cut it down. Very pretty wood.

Oh, to have "one osage orange." We have about a mile of osage fence rows on/bordering our farm and numerous solitary trees scattered around, with all the attendant thorns.

The wood is gorgeous, and has the highest BTU content of any native North American tree, but its damn tough on saws. My wife would love to have a osage orange butcher block, if she could find someone crazy enough to do the sawmill work.

We just called 'em Bois d'Arc trees growing up. Though I did occasionally hear them called horse apple and hedge apple. The wood is really good for corner posts too. One day, back in the late Eighties I was driving to a lease and came upon an accident. A pickup had run off the road and waylaid the corner of a fence along a section line. I stopped and made some calls to help out. My cell phone was huge back then LOL. Anyways the rancher came by and finally the state patrol but I recall mentioning it seemed impossible that the corner post be in one piece. The ground was wet and the truck run over the post pushing up the soil on the back side. The rancher told me that the post had been there since before Oklahoma was a state and that it was made of Bois d'Arc.

The name Bois d'Arc is French for "bow wood" and the wood was prized by Native Americans for making longbows and also arrows.

You guys are talking about bodarks aren’t you?

Yep. Good ole Maclura pomifera.

I've heard it called Monkey Ball and Iron Wood too, tough stuff. Does make great fence posts...and duck calls!

A set I had made out of a fence post that was over 100 years old.

Nice Calls!