Travel & Places
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Janes Scenic Drive Ramble | Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park
Zebra longwing butterfly, Heliconius charithonia A weedy but beautiful native, Bidens alba. Firebush, Hamelia patens Northern needleaf bromeliad, Tillandsia balbisiana On our last day of our swamping trek through Fakahatchee Strand back in early March, I spent most of the morning hanging out at the parking area on Janes Scenic Drive at the East Main Tram gate. Chris was going out into the swamp with a few of the others that morning and I was not up for another morning in the swamp. I was still dealing with some mild morning sickness and general malaise at that time and preferred to just soak in the time spent at the cabin…
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Ionopsis utricularioides | Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park
I’m digging through the last of the Florida photos from March and have several orchids I want to share with you, this species being one of them. This is a tiny, epipyhytic orchid with small purple flowers resembling the purple utricularia, a species of carnivorous plant that lives in the water, hence the species part of its name. There’s some other interesting information about this orchid in the Dade chapter of the Florida Native Plane Society’s newsletter here if you scroll down about 3/4 of the way. It’s a sweet little orchid that is easily passed by if you aren’t looking for it.
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Celebrating the Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle
Back in the summer of 2000 I did a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle tagging internship with my university, Texas A&M at Galveston. We spent the summer catching sea turtles adjacent to jetties in Sabine Pass, Texas and two other passes in Louisiana. It was there that I fell in love with sea turtles, namely the Kemp’s ridley which is the smallest and most endangered of the sea turtles in the world. I loved them so much ‘Ridley’ became my trail name while on the Appalachian Trail and is still my trail name today. Two weekends ago Chris and I, along with some coworkers, volunteered for the Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle…
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Late Spring Wildflowers
Here in Texas most of the major wildflowers that are seen earlier in the spring, bluebonnnets and paintbrushes, have faded for the most part. In their place a plethora of other wildflower have taken over, such as these prickly poppies. Their white tops dot the landscape of many fields around the area and the flower is quickly becoming one of my favorite wildflowers. Over the weekend Chris and I went to Lake Somerville State Park in the Nails Creek Unit for a camping trip. You may remember that we went hiking on the Somerville Trailway there last November with our AT friend Red Hat. Chris and I didn’t hike 9…
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Swampin’ in Fakahatchee | Part II
Old logging scars…what a shame, they cut the tree down but couldn’t haul it out. On our second day of swamp walking in Fakahatchee Strand we went to a completely different section of the central slough, coming in from Janes Scenic Drive, the main dirt road that winds up through the park. This would be a bushwhacking adventure instead of the easy walk like the previous day. We also did not end up hiking with Mike this day as he had a group of other volunteers and was leaving from a little bit further down the road than we were. Theorhetically our destinations were the same, a large and deep…
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Swampin’ in Fakahatchee | Part I
Lots of photos in this post! Our first day in Fakahatchee for the yearly Central Slough Survey, we joined park biologist Mike Owen and several other botany and plant enthusiasts for a slow slog down Mink Slough. The best thing about walking through this slough was the generally it was fairly easy walking with little bushwhacking. The Central Slough Survey is conducted by Mike and some other trusted folks who are on the lookout for rare plants. Some plants on the radar are those that are thought to be extirpated from the park. Back in the 40s and 50s the swamp was logged and throughout the swamp logging trams were…
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The Magic of Little Slough | Part II
More swamp and ghost orchid magic…. Nurse logs are one of my favorite parts of the swamp! How could you not fall in love with this place??? I mean, really???
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Finding Texas’ Famous Trees | Trees 135 & 153
The last time Chris and I went to Westcave Preserve I was browsing through their small library of local and natural history books. I picked out one called Famous Trees of Texas. Even though it was published in the early 70s, the book looked pretty cool and I told Chris we should try to find it. Lo and behold a few weeks later one arrived in the mail that he had bought off of Ebay. It had been sitting on our coffee table for the last few months when I decided last minute over the weekend to bring it with us to Nacogdoches when we went to theSFA plant sale.…
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The Magic of Little Slough | Part I
It had been four years since I had been to Little Slough. (More background on what the slough is on that link.) Chris had been in the summer of 2011, but otherwise we weren’t sure what we would find when we returned to our ghost orchid oasis. Because the water levels had not dropped as they normally do during this time of year, we were in for a lot more water than we were expecting. Navigating in was a bit hairy too, the usual pathway in quickly disappeared once we began. That’s a good sign that the area does not receive a lot of traffic, something we’ve tried to protect…
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A Bear Story
I took this photo of Chris when we were in Florida three weeks ago. It is at the location where he was chased out of the swamp by a Florida black bear. Yes…you read that right! Back when we lived in Florida, Chris was out exploring an area in the swamps in search of ghost orchids and also to see what might be out in that area. Many of these sections in the wildlands of Florida are very little explored, particulary the wet cypress domes and sloughs. As he was approaching what he now calls ‘Bear Slough’, walking through dense vegetation and only seeing tall ferns and brush up ahead…