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White-striped Longtail Butterfly (Chioides albofasciatus)
Over the weekend I came across a new-to-me butterfly in the garden while we were working on the edible garden fencing. It flitted from blackberry flower to blackberry flower and my first reaction was “oh, the long-tailed skippers are here already?” Then I did a double take and realized that wasn’t a long-tailed skipper and it was something different. I didn’t have my phone so I tried to burn the image into my memory so I could look it up in my field guide when I went inside. Flipping through the field guide while I was eating lunch I came across the white-striped longtail in Kaufmann’s Butterflies of North America…
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Around the Garden | Late April 2022
Despite the delay in spring, things are slowly waking up and moving along in the garden. I still haven’t mulched all of the flower beds nor have I caught up on clearing the paths of weeds, but I’m doing what I can. Frankly, I look back at the energy I had even with a newborn and a toddler and can’t believe I managed to stay mostly (ok, not really) on top of what I did. These days I do what I can and say boo to the rest. At some point the paths will be weeded and I’ll get some more mulch down but until then… This gulf coast toad…
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Field Findings | April 2022
Last week I was able to escape into the field for a few hours to a local field site and in between counting trees, logging dbh, and estimating height, I scoped out some of the things going on in the area. This isn’t a place anyone would regularly trek, especially given a lot of the rubus and smilax thickets we had to navigate, but its fun to go into the urban/suburban natural spaces from time to time to see what’s going on. Fork-tailed Bush Katydid, Scudderia furcata, nymph Hoplitimyia mutabilis, a soldier fly! Emerald Flower Scarab, Trichiotinus lunulatus, getting reallllly cozy on a thistle flower! A lot of the herbaceous…
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Ruby Mize Azalea Garden
A few weekends ago we drove to Nacogdoches to attending the SFA Spring Plant sale to pick up some native plants we’ve been wanting for a good while. We had gone once before, I think when I was pregnant with Forest, so considering that was 8 years ago, it has been a bit since we’ve attended. We had some time to kill between the sale and getting lunch in Lufkin before we headed into Angelina NF to do some botanizing, so we dropped by the Mize Azalea Gardens to walk around. Since everything was a bit delayed this year we really caught the azaleas as a good time. Usually they…
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Easter Empty Field Explorations
We drove up to DFW for Easter this year. It’s been quite a few years since we’ve done that, instead opting for camping during Easter. But a variety of reasons had us without a reservation for a campsite and we opted to spend some time up there this year. I snuck away on Saturday afternoon to go check out an empty field down the street from my parent’s house. Well, truthfully, I had steps to get in for my FitBit challenge so that was a major reason, but I had driven by earlier that morning on the way to the grocery store and decided it needed to be walked through…
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The Nature of Apalachicola River Wildlife and Environmental Area
The allure of the area around Apalachicola is that there are so many public land recreation opportunities that you really can’t go wrong with just about anywhere you decide to go. Our first full day of Spring Break we opted to start out our explorations at the Apalachicola River WEA because it had both car and trail access, plus a boardwalk out into Apalachicola Bay at the south end. A note, if you do decide to visit, know that some areas may be impassable with a typical car and many trucks during certain times of year. Water covers some of the more remote roads and it forced us to turn…
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Meeting the Pitcher Plant Mining Moth (Exyra semicrocea)
A few years ago I heard about pitcher plant mining moths on a podcast, probably the In Defense of Plants podcast but I can’t figure out which episode, and I’ve wanted to see one ever since. We’ve been out to the pitcher plants at Watson Preserve and the Pitcher Plant Bog in the Big Thicket several times but I’ve forgotten to look at them. Chris recently learned about them too and was interested in trying to find them while we were in Florida but there weren’t really many new pitchers growing yet out in the bogs so we didn’t see any moths. Last week, however, he was out in the…
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First Quarter Reading Wrap-Up 2022
A few years ago I regularly did Monthly Book Reports but that fell by the wayside. It’s hard to believe it has been so long but I think I’m going to bring them back in the form of quarterly updates with my favorites from the previous three months. For the first quarter of the year I’ve read 19 books. Some were great, others I muddled through, and I abandoned one or two. It has been good to see so many people talk about abandoning books that you can’t get into because I was a former “finisher” and it is something I still cling to and am working on. Sure, it…
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Sounds from Apalachicola River WEA
I thought I’d share a few short videos I took from our first day in the Apalachicola Area. Rain had moved through the day before so the area was quite soggy and water was moving through the area quickly. I wish I’d taken a few photos at least of the very flooded areas there was no way our truck was going to make it through. A very active culvert. It’s hard to explain, but as we drove around all I could think was, “Yes, this is how it should be” because this is what we did in Florida—drive around various public lands to go and explore. It also reminded me…
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Violets, Wild Plums, and More from the Garden
The garden was a bit slow to get going this year for some reason and others around the state have noticed the same. A few folks are relating it to drought conditions that are plaguing various parts of the state to differing levels. We are not nearly as dry as areas west of here but we certainly aren’t nearly as moist and up to normal conditions either. Rhododendron canescens finally got the notice to start blooming, albeit a few weeks later than usual, but I always look forward to this native azalea. Our patch of Texas ragwort, Senecio ampullaceus, has expanded this year to my delight. I’ll have to share…