Outdoors
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Snippets from Florida
Eventually I will get around to editing photos and once my phone photos finish uploading to Flickr I can do more detailed posts, but for now I’ll highlight a few items from our week in Florida. As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, it was quite chilly when we arrived in Florida. Certainly not south Florida winter weather where you can go to the beach and feel comfortable this time of year. But Forest braved the water and played in the sand when he could and we even saw that one washed up horseshoe crab. I was a little disappointed that the shelling wasn’t better than it could…
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12 Miles in Sam Houston National Forest
*write up is at the end of the post!* Trees are banded white to symbolize red-cockaded woodpecker nesting trees. Japanese climbing fern, an invasive species, that has covered the forest here. They may have treated this area but likely it is only brown from winter freezes—it will definitely be back. Sparse-lobed Grapefern, Sceptridium biternatum American Nursery Web Spider, Pisaurina mira One of the winecups… Glandularia sp. Sundews! Carolina satyr About a week and a half ago my brother texted to tell me that he and Zoe were coming down with her scout group to hike on the Lone Star Trail for a weekend and invited us to come out and…
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Easter 2021 at Mission Tejas State Park
White fringetree, Chionanthus virginicus Every time I look back at photos from last year I can’t believe I never wrote about hikes or trips here on the blog. Burn out was flaming high and the only way to tame it was to lay low and focus on other priorities. Thankfully I’m getting back into the writing groove, especially since today is meteorological spring! WAHOO! Which means that this coming week or so of warm weather will definitely awaken the plants and it will be grow-grow-grow from here on out. Thank goodness! So, today we’ll look back at a few highlights from last Easter at one of my favorite state parks…
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Along Beech Creek
I know we’re about to get really going with spring and all that it has to offer but today we’re going to go back to October and into the Big Thicket with a jaunt along Beech Creek in the Beech Creek Unit of the Preserve. Lobelia cardinalis was the star of the creek, the only brightly colored species blooming along the bottomlands here. While Forest and Chris kept towards the creek, I deviated over to a large patch of Netted Chain Fern, Woodwardia areolata, that I felt created a bit of a fairy forest effect. I was particularly enamored with the mossy trunks of the trees and the ferns surrounding…
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Definite tussock moth caterpillar, Orgyia definita
With Spring knocking on the door, I’m looking forward to caterpillar season once again. I’ve seen a few inchworms lately, dangling from their silks in the middle of the trails at Kleb Woods, but no gregarious species are out yet that I’ve noticed. Soon, though. Until then, let’s enjoy this lovely tussock moth caterpillar that I found among the leaf litter at the Big Thicket last October. The bright yellow knobs are called verrucae and while I can’t find that this is a venomous species (all those hairs!), I am reading that they can cause skin irritation, which is why I generally approach any of these fluffy caterpillar types with…
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A Glimpse of Spring
Saturday was one of those February days that lets your know that spring is indeed on the way. Despite all of the rollercoaster temperatures, warmth is coming. We’re going to rollercoaster down once again later this week but for now we’re enjoying the high point of the rollercoaster, getting a look out of the landscape around us and knowing that the the growing season is coming. Chris went and got the final load of compost for the edible garden beds and I filled up my remaining bed, he topped off one of his, we piled on some cypress needle and oak leaf mulch, and then installed the trellises at the…
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Extreme Low Tide at Pine Gully Park
On Sunday we made a trek to southeast Houston to Maas Plant Nursery in Seabrook. Unfortunately the trip was a bust, a lot of plants weren’t out quite yet for spring and their native plant selection was lower than it has been in years past. We’d promised Forest a trip to a playground and just down the street is Pine Gully Park, a park I’ve seen for years during our trips to this plant nursery. We opted to poke into the park and see what it looked like and luckily enough there was a playground to go with the hiking trail that I had seen. But before either of those,…
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Charon’s Garden Wilderness | Wichita Mountains NWR
Getting up to DFW for Christmas break was one of those is it going to happen? ordeals since Omicron broke out. Skipping out on a trip up there last December meant that I really wanted to get up there this year. Plus, my nephew was going to be my parent’s house for a week while his sister and parents went to New Mexico for a scouting ski trip. Which meant a lot of uninterrupted cousin play time for Forest and Grayson and in turn meant that Chris and I could likely slip away for a couple of days and let the grandparents wrangle the two boys for a few days.…
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First Day Hike – 2022
Chris and I got out on Saturday morning to get a First Day hike in at Tandy Hills. Every year the Friends of Tandy Hills hosts a First Day hike over the perimeter trail, which is usually done in a group. This year they continued last year’s option of going solo and emailing them and getting a certificate for completing it solo. I haven’t gotten around to submitting for a certificate but I will say it was a lovely 2.5 mile hike. Plus, we got to see sections of the new Broadcast Hill purchase that has expanded this little prairie remnant just east of downtown Fort Worth. As it was…
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Thanksgiving Out West
I had better write something about Thanksgiving or else I will let the months pass by and I will never get around to writing here. And to be honest, I have never finished editing last Thanksgiving’s photos! Or writing here…or finishing up writing about Alaska. I truly have been trying to let go of my need to write chronologically and yet, here I am still fighting the desire. I believe the last time we set out for the Davis Mountains three years ago at Thanksgiving, we left on a Friday evening and stopped in Kerrville for the night. This time we left on Saturday morning, stopping in Sonora instead. Which…