Outdoors
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Aurora Borealis Visits Texas
On Friday evening I started seeing folks from around the world posting their aurora borealis photos, not long after sunset. I saw a news snippet or two that said it might be seen as far as some of the southern states but I’d heard that before and it never panned out. Chris started seeing the posts as well and decided to head outside, just in case. He came back in and said something along the lines of, “I think it’s reddish pink outside but I’m not certain.” So, we turned off all the lights in and out of the house and walked down to the pond to look. Sure enough,…
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Totality 2024
A year ago we made reservations for a hotel in Copperas Cove to see the total solar eclipse as it made its way through Texas. When the 10 day forecast started looking pretty dismal for most of Texas, we scurried to make alternate plans, just in case. In the end we ended up driving to the Lindale area in NE Texas to stay with Chris’ mom and step-dad for two nights after we made a detour to Sabine National Forest for some botanizing. But the hourly forecasts for Lindale were still iffy and so on Sunday night we started looking at possibly driving to the Tx/OK border, or even into…
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Boykin Creek Explorations
Let’s travel back in time to October 2022. It’s been almost a year since we were in Angelina National Forest and I’m itching to get over there again. Some days I wish I lived somewhere in central/SE Texas, or rather further east than I currently do live in “SE Texas”. We were over in the Big Thicket/Woodville area on Saturday and as rural as some of that area is, you can tell the suburbs are moving out there and even the rural is still rather built up. I digress… I think I might have shared a little bit from this area last year at some point but I know I…
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Swooning Over Plants at Gus Engeling WMA – June 2023
I don’t know if I can express how much I love Gus Engeling WMA. I wish I lived closer to it, though perhaps it wouldn’t be as special? Nah, I think it would and I would probably know its ins and outs a little better. I’m constantly drawn back to thinking about south Florida and how “close” everything was, how driveable within a 1-3 hours a place could be, most places in the 1-2 hr range and many within the 1 hr or less range. Feel like going to the Keys for a long day? Done. More in the mood for interior slow moving creeks and rivers? Done. Dwarf cypress…
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Cemetery Botanizing – Old Sanders Cemetery | 5
This is probably my favorite cemetery botanizing from last year. Write up at the end! Nuttall’s Deathcamas, Toxicoscordion nuttallii Yellow star grass, Hypoxis hirsuta Tenpetal anemone, Anemone berlandieri Ozark milkvetch, Astragalus distortus Fraser’s wild onion, Allium fraseri Texas toadflax, Nuttallanthus texanus Prairie nymph, Herbertia lahue Right before I went to this cemetery I had seen people in central Texas posting photos of Nuttall’s death camas and had checked iNaturalist to see what its range was. There were some stragglers into the Brazos Valley and knowing where this cemetery was located and how it was on the transition zone between ecological regions, I had a hope that I could possibly find…
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Milkweeds at Gus Engeling WMA
I’ve written two posts about Gus Engeling WMA, Rhexia + Green Lynx Spider and Amorpha paniculata in the wild! but I’ve never finished sharing or writing up about our first trip to the WMA. And then we’ve gone two more times last summer, which means I have a lot to share. This WMA is in my top 5 natural areas in the state and is named after Gus Engeling, a game warden who was shot and killed by a poacher at the age of 41 in 1951. Prior to its name change it was called Derden WMA. The habitat at this WMA is astonishing and diverse, with deep sandhills and…
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September Wildflower Walk at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve
In September we drove over to the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve to help with the scheduled wildflower walk. The preserve typically holds monthly guided wildflower walks for visitors, with a break in July and sometimes August as well as some of the quieter times such as December-February at the preserve. I had primarily been volunteering on work days and wanted to come out for a bit of a lighter load than a work day—really I just wanted to take some photos and enjoy the blooms instead of doing the never ending task of trimming back ti-ti! It coincided with Chris’ birthday and I didn’t have to twist his arm…
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Limpkin Invasion!
It was Saturday late afternoon in September before dinnertime, and Chris decided he needed to run to Dollar General to get a Monster energy drink to cure his lingering headache. Off he went and minutes later I get a phone call from him telling me about a Bird Alert. A Bird Alert is usually when we see a rare or uncommon bird in the area, something to get worked up about! We’re not birders per se, though my Chris is much more in tune with birds than I am. I gravitate towards the more gregarious species and generally ignore the little brown jobbers. Yes, I know this makes me a…
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Cemetery Botanizing – Roberts Cemetery | 4
I have spent the last week catching up on editing a pile–a PILE–of photos from the last year and even some from our New Mexico trip in June 2022! That doesn’t even count the many photos I had edited months ago that are uploaded to Flickr that I never wrote about. This spring will be the Catch Up Spring. At one point in my blogging days (and for most of us) I would write almost daily but now no one has the time to to sit and read (they are scrolling instead) and so even batching posts and scheduling ahead of time for every day of the week seems excessive.…
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American Lady Caterpillars (Vanessa virginiensis) | Wildlife Wednesday
Last spring we were fairy negligent about weeding our paths. Up popped all sorts of interesting but less desired native and non-native plants, including what I think was Pennsylvania cudweed, Gamochaeta pensylvanica. I knew they hosted American lady caterpillars but I had never seen any on the plants around our yard before so I left them to see what would happen. We had adults flitting about the Texas ragwort that grows in the front yard during March-late April and I knew there was a good chance we would see the caterpillars if I gave them time. And they arrived! The caterpillars make little leaf nests like other species such as…
