Outdoors
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Mexican Free-Tailed Bats at Old Tunnel State Park
Over the weekend Chris and I went to the Texas Hill Country near Boerne to do some hiking and exploring of the area. We happened upon a rainy weekend, complete with some flooding in the San Antonio area. Because of this some of the areas we wanted to go to were closed. As I was planning our trip I found a small park on Google Earth called Old Tunnel State Park. So on Sunday night as we drove back from Fredericksburg to our motel in Comfort we took the Old San Antonio Road to the state park. I really wasn’t expecting a lot of people but boy, was I wrong!…
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Pulsating Mass of Daddy Long Legs!
Chris and I were in the Texas Hill Country this weekend and we had a rainy day on Sunday. Instead of hiking we chose to go to a cave, Cave Without A Name and then scoped out some of their short trails afterward. We came up to a sinkhole and what I thought was a spiderweb, but I quickly realized it was a pulsating and moving mass of daddy long legs! Chris got a close up of them so I could tell if they were actually harvestmen or actually spiders and this particular group was harvestmen. So, they are arachnids but not spiders. But still creepy nonetheless…creepy in a fascinating…
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Upland Island Wilderness Explorations
Last weekend Chris and I met up in Lufkin, Texas to attend at Zoo Brew fundraiser at the Ellen Trout Zoo. Chris has been working in Beaumont again and one of our field coworkers lives in Lufkin and his wife was part of the Zoo Brew committee. It sounded like a great event and diversion for our weekend so Chris and I went and enjoyed ourselves. We didn’t get to see a lot of the zoo animals as most were put away to avoid being stressed too much. However, we saw and heard the zoo’s many peacocks. I’m pretty sure they need to invest in some peacock birth control; peacocks…
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More Goats! | Enchantment Lakes NF
(yep, still working on these posts from August….) When Chris and I left Leprechaun Lake we decided to go to the north end of Perfection Lake at the trail junction to Prusick Pass. I wanted to go up there and see what was that way but after lunch Chris wasn’t feeling it, however we did wander down that trail just a bit and found, what do you know…more goats! So adorable!! Our lunch view! We sat just a bit further up, literally at the sign junction. This wouldn’t be our last encounter with goats, we had some hang out with us at our final campsite on Aasgard Pass. To Be…
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Spring Migration | Summer Tanager
In Florida, at our house in Sunrise, every summer a spot breasted oriole came to visit the neighborhood for about a month. I looked forward to his visit during the four years we lived there, knowing that when he/she/it came back the second time that it would come back in subsequent years, and it did. Now, I doubt it was the same bird, but just knowing that we were on the migration route was cool. Now it seems we’re on another migration route so we get to see different bird species. We have a lot of year-round cardinals and when we saw this red bird on Saturday afternoon I dismissed…
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Luna
A few weeks ago I saw a wing in the garden. Just the wing, nothing more. I figured the cats had gotten to it, but I knew it was a luna moth, a species I’d only see online but never in person. The ferals frustrate me in this aspect, they like to chase after the lepidopterans in the garden and I’m not fond of that aspect of their disposition. Or their snake killing aspect…but I digress. Luna moths! Chris came to me a couple of nights ago to show me where two were laying low near the ground down by the pond. We had to walk carefully as they do…
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Leprechaun Lake | Enchantment Lakes
On our hike through the Enchantment Lakes we hiked as far as Leprechaun Lake before deciding we didn’t want to descend further down into the Snow Lakes zone. We figured that going down meant having to come back up and well, we liked up already. Looking back I think we should have sucked it up and gone down into those zones, but at the same time what we ended up doing worked out too, leaving us time to explore other areas of Washington instead of staying only in the Enchantments. There was some rock hopping and precarious log walking involved to get across the streams leading to the lake. I…
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Early Spring At Tandy Hills
A couple of weekends ago I was in Fort Worth visiting my folks and I really wanted to go for a short hike, get out and stretch my legs. I managed to convince my dad and mom to come along to Tandy Hills for an hour long jaunt to see what was blooming, if anything. I noticed paintbrush coming up but not yet ready to bloom. We found a different pocket of trout lilies than we normally visit, but I couldn’t even find an old flowering spike. They would have bloomed in early to mid February. I wonder if the drier winter prohibited their blooming this year. Lots of yucca…
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Alpine Wildflowers In Macro | Enchantment Lakes
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Evening Along The Shore
Ah, Galveston. I love this island. For those who haven’t been reading long, my history with the island is that I spent four years there while in college. The island is equal parts old money, spring break, summer vacation, and ratty hole-in-the-wall. It’s still a little bit of a place called home for me, though. Chris and I spent a little bit of time down at the beach that we got engaged at. We think.. You see, when we got engaged there were more dunes and vegetation and a sign for riding horses on the beach. That was back in 2001. Since then Hurricane Ike came through and well, the…