Outdoors
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Goodbye to a State Park | Fairfield Lake State Park
Carolina larkspur, Delphinium carolinianum Rose bluet, Houstonia rosea Prostrate grapefern, Sceptridium lunaroides Trout lilies, Erythronium sp. Spiranthes tuberosa Carolina violet, Viola villosa—so many all over the park! I have never seen so many. Parlin’s pussytoes, Antennaria parlinii “One waxes pessimistic? Not so much … There is a pessimism about land which, after it has been with you a long time, becomes merely factual. Men increase; country suffers. Though I sign up with organizations that oppose the process, I sign without great hope.… Islands of wildlife and native flora may be saved, as they should be, but the big, sloppy, rich, teeming spraddle will go. It always has.” ― John Graves,…
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Cemetery Botanizing – Cartwright Cemetery | 1
Small skullcap, Scutellaria parvula Possibly bare-bottom sunburst lichen, Xanthomendoza weberi Carolina anemone, Anemone caroliniana Common blue violet, Viola sororia Southern bluet, Houstonia micrantha Early buttercup, Ranunculus fasicularis I’m not sure why I haven’t though to do this before but I got the idea from several botanists and naturalists who do this on social media: they go to old cemeteries to look for plants! A lot of times the cemeteries are somewhat neglected or at least frequently mown short which in turn promotes the growth of species that like that type of attention. Sometimes they are rare plants that can’t be found many places due to habitat loss. I typically frequent…
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Does Texas actually care about its land? The Pending Loss of Fairfield Lake State Park
Sometime in the fall I started a Substack newsletter where I was hoping to focus my writing efforts on Texas nature and environmental writing. I was going to re-purpose some blog posts here but also work on focusing on other important environmental news efforts in the state. It was a different kind of writing than what I typically share here, which is sometimes rambling and a lot more personal. The Substack was a way for me to stretch my writing skills and write for a different audience. If you haven’t heard of Substack, it’s a newsletter platform that allows writers to be paid if they want, so you can write…
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Heart’s A Bustin’ on Valentine’s Day
I totally meant to actually schedule this post and write something more formal but I forgot I had even drafted this to begin with! Euonymus americanus, also known as strawberry bush or hearts-a-bustin’, is a really cool native shrub that comes over into east Texas. Unfortunately it is also known as Deer Candy so it isn’t something we really really grow, though I do have one in a pot on the potting bench that I am hoping to possibly grow in my perimeter bed in the edible garden once we get that finalized (someday). But, I hope your heart’s are a bustin with love for someone, or at least for…
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Eagle Watching
We get bald eagles on our pond every year around this time. In fact, when my parents arrived to visit after Christmas, one had landed at the shoreline behind our house and stunned and thrilled them to see. My dad managed to get an iPhone photo but I missed the chance to get a photo with my camera as it had flown away by the time I went in to get it. The birds have been around here a lot lately and so yesterday morning I spent some time sitting on the dock trying to get some photos. I got some decent photos but nothing to send to a bird…
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Engulfed in Fungus – Attack of the Akanthomyces sp.
Forget COVID-19, it’s fungi we should be worried about! We stumbled across this moth covered in a fungus in Angelina National Forest last October and I knew it was one of the cordyceps family fungi as soon as I saw it, though I couldn’t quite place the name at the time. I had seen several people post their own photos of insects parasitized by this fungus or a related species in the few months prior and just never thought I’d stumble across my own sighting. So, the fun thing about these fungi is that once they parasitize their host, they cover the body with this weird growth so that it…
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Insects Lurking About
One of my favorite things to do when I have the time while hiking is to move slowly and see what insects and arachnids may be lurking about on a plant. There’s a good chance one is hiding in plain sight, like this American nursery web spider, Pisuarina mira. Common boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum, the perfect haunt for that spider as it waits for insects to come nectar! This unassuming goldenrod looks devoid of faunal life but… you would be wrong. I’m unsure which bee this is and I may not ever get an answer because I only have the one photo, but it may be one of the leaf cutter…
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Christian Point Trail at Everglades National Park (2007)
Looking back through some of these photos I wondered why I didn’t bother editing some of them. I had completed a small handful but had left a decent amount untouched for over a decade it seems. And it made me wonder why we didn’t make the effort to go into Everglades NP more often, though I know the reason why—you had to pay to go in! Big Cypress and so many other areas were free, and though we did pay for a state park pass, the pass let us in to a lot of parks and the ENP pass didn’t. That said, it isn’t like I wasn’t spending 5 days…
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Woolly Ironweed, Vernonia lindheimeri | Wildflower Wednesday
We came across this gorgeous ironweed species back in July 2021 at Pedernales Falls State Park. Like many other Texas species, it was named after Ferdinand Lindheimer, the botanist who was the first permanent-resident collector in Texas. I have a book about his journals that I’ve been meaning to read for a year and this might be the year I actually tackle it! This particular species is very much a central Texas plant, and on iNaturalist you can easily see all of the observations starting in DFW and trailing down along I-35 to San Antonio and then west towards Kerrville. There are a smattering of sightings west of this area…
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Thanksgiving on SPI
Having lived in Texas most of my life, minus the 8 years I lived in Florida, I’ve seen a good chunk of the state. There were corners I still hadn’t been to, and even places within regions I have been to that I haven’t seen. Forest asked a few weekends ago if it was possible to see every place on Earth, and he meant as if you could walk across every inch of Earth. We had to break it to him that it just wasn’t feasible to accomplish but I do admire his question and thought process! I knocked the panhandle out early when I was 3, flying for the…
