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Swamped at the Knobby Knees Day Use Area | Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge
Ruddy Dagger, Acronicta rubricoma Knobby Knees Day Use Area Trail Map After our hike at Brierwood Day Use Area we drove south to the town of Liberty where a few more day use areas were closer to civilization and had a higher liklihood of being maintained. Or, that was the thought. This trail series begins at the back of Liberty Municipal Park. Forest looked sadly at the flagged off playground and wished he could play. I would have loved letting him run around for 30-45 minutes! A few people were out walking, a father and son were having batting practice on the ball field, and otherwise it was fairly quiet.…
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Exploring the Bottomlands at the Brierwood Dayuse Area | Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge
Last weekend we trekked to the Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge to try to do some hiking. We ended up at three different refuge unit day use areas, the first one being the Brierwood Day Use Area east of the town of Cleveland. I wanted to escape a bit further from our usual haunt of Sam Houston National Forest, or at least the west side of the forest, and also get into some different habitats. The Brierwood unit looked like it would be perfect for social distancing, and it was! Trail map here —- I had to dig to find this, by the way. It isn’t easily found on the…
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The Savage River Trail | Denali National Park
Continuing to flash back to last August and September, another world really. I just read a journalist’s article on flying in this pandemic and how extremely nerve-wracking it is for everyone, somewhat post apocalyptic. I’m feeling fairly certain this big trip to Alaska was our last big trip for a a good while. And my flight to Florida back in January will be my last flight for several years. So going back to these posts and seeing life as normal, it makes me miss it all the more. Our first stop after lunch on the day we arrived in the Denali area was to the Visitors Center to pick up…
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Hiking a New Section of the Lone Star Trail
Two weekends ago on a warm, sunny Sunday we drove up to Sam Houston National Forest for another hike on the Lone Star Trail. We started from the Trailhead #6 parking lot on FM 1375 and found ourselves with a very full parking lot. We knew this was likely and the trail heads on FM 149 as we drove past were also quite busy. But we had a plan—go south from Trailhead #6 because we knew that heading east towards Lake Conroe would be busy. And we were right. During our hike in we encountered one family leaving and didn’t see anyone else until we reached the parking lot at…
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Life Lately | Early May 2020
Thinking: Basically my thoughts run from COVID-19 to regular life in almost the same thought. “OMG, we’re all going to die!”…half a second later, “Mmm, looks nice outside, I think we’ll do pool in the afternoon and I’ll crochet while Forest plays!” As someone who has been in exactly two buildings since mid-March, my own house and my work office, I have definitely felt a little bit disoriented at times. I haven’t even been to my work office in at least three weeks, maybe four. I have to run up there tomorrow to get a GPS ready for someone but otherwise I’ve been at home. Chris has been going up…
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Neighborhood Nature | 3
Last weekend was the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge, though iNaturalist pushed it as less of a “challenge” and more of get out and enjoy nature safely and where you can locally. That didn’t put a damper in folks getting out to explore their greater local area, though, and I did my best to capture as much as I could on foot in the neighborhood. Some of these are from that weekend but many are just from daily sightings around the yard or just beyond! And of course this isn’t all of what I documented for the CNC, just a few highlights. Fall Webworm Moth, Hyphantria cunea I have no idea…
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Friday Five | Isolation Things
It’s been a bit since I’ve done a Friday Five, so here are five good things for your Friday! +The Wild Wander show on YouTube—primarily based in north Florida, the episodes are only a few minutes long, though this last one was about 15 minutes. All of them share some kind of interesting natural history feature about north Florida. It’s a show you could find on NatGeo or Animal Planet! +Easter: Easter weekend has zoomed on by but we had a great weekend at home for Easter. In fact, our first Easter at home! We’ve either gone to my parents or camping for Easter since Forest was born so this…
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Hibiscus Sawfly, Atomacera decepta | Wildlife Wednesday
A couple weeks ago I noticed something chowing down on our Turk’s cap hibiscus and took a few photos thinking they were caterpillars. I wasn’t having any luck with iNaturalist so I grabbed the caterpillar book and started flipping through. A few Families gave me some ideas but then I continued to hit a dead end. That’s when I took to Googling caterpillars and Turk’s cap hibiscus and started sifting through the images. There was a photo of a sawfly larvae and then I recalled another iNaturalist entry sometime in the last year where someone had thought it to be a caterpillar but it turned out to be a saw…
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The Green Milkweed Patch
A cute little jumping spider… Large milkweed bugs, Oncopeltus fasciatus The green milkweed patch around the corner from our house has been the highlight of these weeks in isolation. Someone mowed the empty lot this year which was good. I had been contemplating doing it myself because grass and shrubs were encroaching on the milkweed and I wanted to increase the milkweed habitat. This year the milkweed is thriving! Lovebug with a bumble bee in the background. This lot is where I’ve primarily gone to get milkweed for the monarch caterpillars the last few years. I’m raising 16 caterpillars this season, eggs harvested from our tropical milkweed. Our tropical milkweed…
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Northbound to Denali
Proud of his Spider Man birthday shoes! Let’s pretend they aren’t threadbare now! Skipping over more glacier photos to jump to Denali for a bit… The morning of Forest’s fifth birthday we woke up very early at our hotel in Eagle River, north of Anchorage. Coincidentally our friend Eliana had been staying at a friend’s house in Eagle River as well so that made our ability to pick her up and take her with us to Denali a lot easier. The night before we’d met up in Anchorage to have dinner and as we told her our plans for the rest of the week she abandoned her plans to do…