Memes
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Gulf Coast Penstemon, Penstemon tenuis | Wildflower Wednesday
A year or two ago I purchased this gulf coast penstemon from a nursery. Or maybe I started it from seed. I honestly can’t recall at this time. But I’ve been watching the basal rosettes of this particular plant and several others and biding my time for blooms. Every so often the deer come by and chomp the leaves and set the plants back and I figured I would never get to see the blooms. It really is trial and error here with the deer. You can’t take anything labeled “deer resistant” at face value. I have begun to notice which plant families are actually more deer resistant and have…
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Neighborhood Nature | 2
Late last week Forest and I hit up the empty lot across the street to see what kind of nature we could find. Turns out there is quite a bit going on in that little lot! Texas Vervain Verbena halei — I might have to keep an eye on this particular plant, if it doesn’t get mowed, and collect some seed to throw into the garden. Metriorrhynchomiris dislocatus — Since we’re just poking around and going slowly I’ve been trying to look for little bugs a bit more than I usually do. Texas Ragwort, Senecio ampullaceus Scaphoideus incisus – cute little leaf hopper nymph! I wouldn’t have noticed it if…
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Neighborhood Nature | 1
Considering we’ll be staying close to home for the foreseeable future I figured it would be nice to start a new theme here—Neighborhood Nature! I definitely encourage you to join along if you’d like and showcase what you see around your own neighborhood. Yesterday evening we went out for a walk and right off the bat I rescued a caterpillar crossing the road. I took a few photos of course and later when I tried to identify it on iNaturalist nothing seemed to fit. I opened my caterpillar book and still had a hard time thinking any of the potential families that I knew would fit. Then my book haphazardly…
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Silent Sunday | Trout Lillies
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Forest Friday | Was he really that small? Edition
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve done a Forest Friday here. And seeing as the kid is nearly 5.5 and heading for 6 very quickly, I’ve been reminiscing over his baby and toddler days a lot the last few months. He’s hurtling for the bigger little kid era, ditching the preschool years and tendencies slowly but surely. All of this is good, of course, he’s acting age appropriate, but I’m still a bit wistful for the baby and toddler era in many ways…of course in other ways I’m thankful we’re past those—nursing, diapers, whining without saying what he wants—oh wait, scratch that last one, that still goes on! There’s…
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Giant Swallowtail on Hercules’ Club | Wildlife Wednesday
Finding a caterpillar chrysalis in the wild can be quite the feat and is something you typically have to be looking for. Even in my own garden, when the monarchs or gulf fritillaries head off to pupate, unless they are front and center and attaching them to our front porch (gulf frits) or on plants nearby the milkweed (monarchs) we typically cannot find the chrysalides. Chris lucked out as he was tying extra ropes from the tent to a nearby tree in preparation for a storm that would hit during our Thanksgiving camping trip that was expected to have high wind—and found a chrysalis on the Hercules’ club (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis)…
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Kentucky Lady’s Slipper, Cypripedium kentuckiense | Wildflower Wednesday
I’ll have a few posts from our hiking trip along the Eagle Rock Loop from 2012 these next few weeks for Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesdays. Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesday is a much better use of “I don’t know what to post but it is Wednesday” than Wordless Wednesday used to be. Though, Wordless Wednesday had ease going for it—just post a photo! I suppose I could turn these into that as well but let’s not, though we can just keep them short and brief. I think lady slipper orchids are one of the Holy Grail orchids to find and also to keep. We had a variety/species of one when we lived in Florida and…
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Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, Limenitis arthemis astyanax | Wildlife Wednesday
As seems to be the general case these days, I was digging around on my backup hard drive looking for another particular photo or set of photos and came across our photos from when Chris and I joined my brother and dad to hike the Eagle Rock Loop on the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas back in 2012. You can read day 1, day 2, and day 3 here. For those entries I had put together the photos into a sort of mosaic, mostly trying to conglomerate how many photos I had per post into something more reasonable, a feat that I’ve never really been able to replicate or reduce because…
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Assembly Moth, Samea ecclesialis | Wildlife Wednesday
I’m always noticing the moths that hang out by our front door. This particular one was on the back door to the office at work one morning when I got there. It was precariously close to the hinge so I nudged it over a little bit and then took a few photos. It turned out to be an assembly moth after I put it into iNaturalist. There’s not much to glean about them from Google but I found out their range is North Carolina to Florida, west to Texas, and south in the neotropics to Brazil. Adults fly year-round in the southern areas of their range. This scientific article has…
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Humpback Whales & Mola Mola | Wildlife/Wordless Wednesday