Outdoors
-
Cemetery Botanizing | 2
Back to some more botanizing of cemeteries today! This one is a very tiny family cemetery, with one or two more recent burials. On aerial imagery this area is mostly undeveloped, some farm field and thick pine forests but when I arrived I found one of the pine forests clearcut for a housing development. “Progress” continues onward… There were a lot of Carolina anemones (Anemone caroliniana) here! I think I still love the tenpetal anemones better but I do love seeing these! And then I found something interesting! The leaves were tall and they had what looked like sporangia on the back, which led me to thinking this was some…
-
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,…
-
Cemetery Botanizing | 1
Small skullcap, Scutellaria parvula Possibly bare-bottom sunburst lichen, Xanthomendoza weberi Carolina anemone, Anemone caroliniana Common blue violet, Viola sororia Southern bluet, Houstonia micrantha Early buttercup, Ranunculus fasicularis I’m not sure why I haven’t though to do this before but I got the idea from several botanists and naturalists who do this on social media: they go to old cemeteries to look for plants! A lot of times the cemeteries are somewhat neglected or at least frequently mown short which in turn promotes the growth of species that like that type of attention. Sometimes they are rare plants that can’t be found many places due to habitat loss. I typically frequent…
-
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…
-
Heart’s A Bustin’ on Valentine’s Day
I totally meant to actually schedule this post and write something more formal but I forgot I had even drafted this to begin with! Euonymus americanus, also known as strawberry bush or hearts-a-bustin’, is a really cool native shrub that comes over into east Texas. Unfortunately it is also known as Deer Candy so it isn’t something we really really grow, though I do have one in a pot on the potting bench that I am hoping to possibly grow in my perimeter bed in the edible garden once we get that finalized (someday). But, I hope your heart’s are a bustin with love for someone, or at least for…
-
Eagle Watching
We get bald eagles on our pond every year around this time. In fact, when my parents arrived to visit after Christmas, one had landed at the shoreline behind our house and stunned and thrilled them to see. My dad managed to get an iPhone photo but I missed the chance to get a photo with my camera as it had flown away by the time I went in to get it. The birds have been around here a lot lately and so yesterday morning I spent some time sitting on the dock trying to get some photos. I got some decent photos but nothing to send to a bird…
-
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…
-
Insects Lurking About
One of my favorite things to do when I have the time while hiking is to move slowly and see what insects and arachnids may be lurking about on a plant. There’s a good chance one is hiding in plain sight, like this American nursery web spider, Pisuarina mira. Common boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum, the perfect haunt for that spider as it waits for insects to come nectar! This unassuming goldenrod looks devoid of faunal life but… you would be wrong. I’m unsure which bee this is and I may not ever get an answer because I only have the one photo, but it may be one of the leaf cutter…
