Travel & Places
-
Cemetery Botanizing – Tillis Prairie Cemetery | 3
Oxalis dillenii Carolina anemone, Anemone caroliniana – so glad I got to enjoy these this spring! More prolific than I expected. Missouri violet, Viola missouriensis The non-native largelower sorrel, Oxalis debilis Sidewalk firedot, Xanthocarpia feracissima – I think. Cemeteries are a great spot to find interesting lichens! Bulbous woodrush, Luzula bulbosa – I’m beginning to really love this plant and wish I saw it sold in garden centers. Beaked cornsalad, Valerianella radiata Another Missouri violet Stemless spiderwort, Tradescantia subacaulis What remains of a poor armadillo. It has been a couple of weeks since I’ve done any cemetery botanizing (or naturalizing!) and I’m feeling it a bit. Twice a week physical…
-
Butterflies at Medina River Natural Area
Little yellow, Pyrisitia lisa Dainty sulphur, Nathalis iole Orange sulphur, Colias eurytheme Gray hairstreak, Strymon melinus Reakirt’s blue, Echinargus isola Orange skipperling, Copaeodes aurantiaca Gray hairstreak, Strymon melinus Ailanthus webworm moth, Atteva aurea Vesta crescent, Phyciodes graphica We went to San Antonio for a weekend getaway back in January with no real plans other than going to the zoo, eat at La Gloria on the Riverwalk, and going to the Alamo. I hadn’t been to the Alamo since I was in high school and I don’t know if Chris recalled when he had been, and it was Forest’s first time. We had driven by it several years ago but now…
-
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
For some reason I’ve had the inspiration to finally look at some New Mexico photos from our trip last June! I want to start with our visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which is a place I’ve wanted to go to since forever. My first introduction to O’Keeffe’s work was in my 6th grade art class back in the spring of 1992 and I’ve been smitten ever since! I *may* have seen her work before at the Kimbell in Fort Worth a long time ago but I don’t recall it so the first time I actually recall seeing her work in person was about four or five years ago at…
-
Big Sky Country
A week in the Davis Mountains, spring this time instead of our usual Thanksgiving. Which meant warmer, but much windier weather, and the beginning of spring blooms for plants we haven’t gotten to see bloom before. All the warm weather and early blooms will be dusted with snow this weekend as a cold front came through last night, our last night. The city of Fort Davis was preparing for the storm by salting the roads and brought out a big truck with some weird thing on the front, and after our southern sensibilities faded we realized was a snow plow! Hah! You certainly don’t see those around our part of…
-
Mahogany Hammock Trail at Everglades National Park (2007)
Let’s travel back to Florida and less depressing things like losing a state park—because nature continues on even while we fight to save it. I actually remember very little about this trail. I can recall part of the boardwalk and that there were mosquitoes but I don’t recall seeing some of these plants! The peeling skin-like bark of a gumbo limbo tree, Bursera simaruba The fruits of a Florida strangler fig, Ficus aurea A nurse log filled with long strapferns, Campyloneurum phyllitidis…a common scene in many swampy hammocks in south Florida. An orchid that has died, probably a butterfly orchid. Hammock viper’s-tail, Pentalinon luteum. This is one of the plants…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
South Dakota 2007
(This post is courtesy of my former boss Steve (hi Steve!) who sent me a thumb drive a few months ago with some photos on it from a trip I took to South Dakota in 2007.) If there is one thing I miss a lot about my previous job in Florida, it is the access to travel that I had while there. Several times a year I had the opportunity to attend conferences or trainings in various places throughout the country. I enjoy traveling alone, though sometimes I traveled with co-workers or with Steve. When I was alone I would often spend time wandering around whatever town I was visiting,…
