Memes
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Giant Swallowtail on Hercules’ Club | Wildlife Wednesday
Finding a caterpillar chrysalis in the wild can be quite the feat and is something you typically have to be looking for. Even in my own garden, when the monarchs or gulf fritillaries head off to pupate, unless they are front and center and attaching them to our front porch (gulf frits) or on plants nearby the milkweed (monarchs) we typically cannot find the chrysalides. Chris lucked out as he was tying extra ropes from the tent to a nearby tree in preparation for a storm that would hit during our Thanksgiving camping trip that was expected to have high wind—and found a chrysalis on the Hercules’ club (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis)…
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Kentucky Lady’s Slipper, Cypripedium kentuckiense | Wildflower Wednesday
I’ll have a few posts from our hiking trip along the Eagle Rock Loop from 2012 these next few weeks for Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesdays. Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesday is a much better use of “I don’t know what to post but it is Wednesday” than Wordless Wednesday used to be. Though, Wordless Wednesday had ease going for it—just post a photo! I suppose I could turn these into that as well but let’s not, though we can just keep them short and brief. I think lady slipper orchids are one of the Holy Grail orchids to find and also to keep. We had a variety/species of one when we lived in Florida and…
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Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, Limenitis arthemis astyanax | Wildlife Wednesday
As seems to be the general case these days, I was digging around on my backup hard drive looking for another particular photo or set of photos and came across our photos from when Chris and I joined my brother and dad to hike the Eagle Rock Loop on the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas back in 2012. You can read day 1, day 2, and day 3 here. For those entries I had put together the photos into a sort of mosaic, mostly trying to conglomerate how many photos I had per post into something more reasonable, a feat that I’ve never really been able to replicate or reduce because…
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Assembly Moth, Samea ecclesialis | Wildlife Wednesday
I’m always noticing the moths that hang out by our front door. This particular one was on the back door to the office at work one morning when I got there. It was precariously close to the hinge so I nudged it over a little bit and then took a few photos. It turned out to be an assembly moth after I put it into iNaturalist. There’s not much to glean about them from Google but I found out their range is North Carolina to Florida, west to Texas, and south in the neotropics to Brazil. Adults fly year-round in the southern areas of their range. This scientific article has…
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Humpback Whales & Mola Mola | Wildlife/Wordless Wednesday
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Atala, Eumaeus atala | Wildlife Wednesday
Over the last week or so I’ve been deep diving in our backup hard drives. The goal is to look for certain photos for my friend Eliana but as I’ve been sifting through photos I’m finding all sorts that we never edited—especially photos Chris took. Along the way I’m shuffling over files that I want to edit but I know I’ll be going back through the drives to pick out favorites and revisit some items. One of those sets were these handful of photos you see above of an atala butterfly and several larvae. We had seen them at Mounts Botanic Garden in West Palm Beach in March of 2008.…
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Horned Passalus Beetle (Odontotaenius disjunctus) | Wildlife Wednesday
Last week I was out watering the plants on the potting bench when I spotted a beetle coming out of the compost pile. I had a hunch it was a horned passalus beetle and so I took a few photos and threw it into iNaturalist just to verify—I was right! I’d come across one at Lake Livingston State Park a year or two ago so I was already familiar with the insect, which gave me my initial hunch. Horned passalus beetles feed on decaying wood so I suspect this one was actually ingesting the pieces of wood that used to form the perimeter of the compost bins. Those perimeter pieces…
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Echinacea purpurea | Flower Friday
Every time I see coneflowers I am drawn to them. They are one of the long-standing bloomers in a garden and are tough plants and yet I cannot grow them at home unless they are inside our edible garden. You see, the deer love them, too. When we moved in to the house my mom divided some of hers to give to me and now those plants are long gone. I think we may have tried once or twice more before finally giving up on our chances of growing coneflowers out in the open. I am finally growing some inside the edible garden and they delight me every time I…
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Pearl Milkweed Vine, Matelea reticulata | (Wild)Flower Friday
I’ve come to really appreciate the milkweed vine species, particularly the more common one in my area, anglepod, aka: Gonolobus suberosus. It grows freely in our yard and in the garden and even gets colonized by oleander aphids like other milkweed species do. Out in the Texas Hill Country, the pearl milkvine, Matelea reticulata, is more common and a delight to see when hiking in the limestone hills. Endemic to Texas and Mexico, you won’t find this species too far east of I-35, though the USDA Plants Database has one county in east Texas listed that the species is supposedly found–who knows!? iNaturalist only shows central and west Texas and…
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Beluga Whales | Wildlife Wednesday
Beluga whales—something that was definitely not on my agenda of things I anticipated seeing while in Alaska. Humpback whales, porpoises, sea otters, sea lions, seals, possibly orcas—those were all things that were on our radar and for the most part we came across all of them. The orcas were the only things in that list we didn’t see. When we disembarked our ship in Seward we opted to take the scenic Alaska Rail to the Anchorage airport where we would pick up a rental car. Instead of taking the highway between Seward and Anchorage via buses, the railway would be more scenic and offer up chances to sip coffee and…