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Life Lately | Early May 2020
Thinking: Basically my thoughts run from COVID-19 to regular life in almost the same thought. “OMG, we’re all going to die!”…half a second later, “Mmm, looks nice outside, I think we’ll do pool in the afternoon and I’ll crochet while Forest plays!” As someone who has been in exactly two buildings since mid-March, my own house and my work office, I have definitely felt a little bit disoriented at times. I haven’t even been to my work office in at least three weeks, maybe four. I have to run up there tomorrow to get a GPS ready for someone but otherwise I’ve been at home. Chris has been going up…
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Neighborhood Nature | 3
Last weekend was the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge, though iNaturalist pushed it as less of a “challenge” and more of get out and enjoy nature safely and where you can locally. That didn’t put a damper in folks getting out to explore their greater local area, though, and I did my best to capture as much as I could on foot in the neighborhood. Some of these are from that weekend but many are just from daily sightings around the yard or just beyond! And of course this isn’t all of what I documented for the CNC, just a few highlights. Fall Webworm Moth, Hyphantria cunea I have no idea…
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Friday Five | Isolation Things
It’s been a bit since I’ve done a Friday Five, so here are five good things for your Friday! +The Wild Wander show on YouTube—primarily based in north Florida, the episodes are only a few minutes long, though this last one was about 15 minutes. All of them share some kind of interesting natural history feature about north Florida. It’s a show you could find on NatGeo or Animal Planet! +Easter: Easter weekend has zoomed on by but we had a great weekend at home for Easter. In fact, our first Easter at home! We’ve either gone to my parents or camping for Easter since Forest was born so this…
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Hibiscus Sawfly, Atomacera decepta | Wildlife Wednesday
A couple weeks ago I noticed something chowing down on our Turk’s cap hibiscus and took a few photos thinking they were caterpillars. I wasn’t having any luck with iNaturalist so I grabbed the caterpillar book and started flipping through. A few Families gave me some ideas but then I continued to hit a dead end. That’s when I took to Googling caterpillars and Turk’s cap hibiscus and started sifting through the images. There was a photo of a sawfly larvae and then I recalled another iNaturalist entry sometime in the last year where someone had thought it to be a caterpillar but it turned out to be a saw…
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The Green Milkweed Patch
A cute little jumping spider… Large milkweed bugs, Oncopeltus fasciatus The green milkweed patch around the corner from our house has been the highlight of these weeks in isolation. Someone mowed the empty lot this year which was good. I had been contemplating doing it myself because grass and shrubs were encroaching on the milkweed and I wanted to increase the milkweed habitat. This year the milkweed is thriving! Lovebug with a bumble bee in the background. This lot is where I’ve primarily gone to get milkweed for the monarch caterpillars the last few years. I’m raising 16 caterpillars this season, eggs harvested from our tropical milkweed. Our tropical milkweed…
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Northbound to Denali
Proud of his Spider Man birthday shoes! Let’s pretend they aren’t threadbare now! Skipping over more glacier photos to jump to Denali for a bit… The morning of Forest’s fifth birthday we woke up very early at our hotel in Eagle River, north of Anchorage. Coincidentally our friend Eliana had been staying at a friend’s house in Eagle River as well so that made our ability to pick her up and take her with us to Denali a lot easier. The night before we’d met up in Anchorage to have dinner and as we told her our plans for the rest of the week she abandoned her plans to do…
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Gulf Coast Penstemon, Penstemon tenuis | Wildflower Wednesday
A year or two ago I purchased this gulf coast penstemon from a nursery. Or maybe I started it from seed. I honestly can’t recall at this time. But I’ve been watching the basal rosettes of this particular plant and several others and biding my time for blooms. Every so often the deer come by and chomp the leaves and set the plants back and I figured I would never get to see the blooms. It really is trial and error here with the deer. You can’t take anything labeled “deer resistant” at face value. I have begun to notice which plant families are actually more deer resistant and have…
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Cruising Closer to Glaciers | Glacier Bay NP
I interrupt this quiet photo journal with OMG SEA OTTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Nature in the City | Burroughs Park
Dusting off another one of those draft posts and OMG will you look at this kid??? Almost 3 years old—this hike was done in early August 2017, weeks before Hurricane Harvey. Forest turned three a month later. Those chubby little legs and oversized backpack—*insert crying emoji here*. Burroughs Park is a Harris county park located just south of Spring Creek, the dividing line for Montgomery and Harris counties. It is a large park with areas for soccer and baseball games, several playgrounds, a dog park, and a large pond with walking paths. In the back portion of the park is an undeveloped tract of land with trails that you can…
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Lepidopterans of Brazos Bend State Park
If you are a blogger like me you may have a stash of drafts sitting in your writing platform waiting to be published. Many of mine will never see the light of day but I thought I should dig this one out and blow the dust off of it and share some photos from a few years ago that I intended to post but never did! One or two might have made it into a wrap-up post about a camping trip but I believe the majority haven’t been shared. It’s mostly an eye-candy post, to feast your eyes on the beauty of the lepidopterans! Looks like state parks are potentially…