Welcome to my nature blog! I love sharing my photos of North Texas! I will keep looking out and hope you do too.
Comments welcome. Thank you, Mary
Yeah, for the sunshine I say but of course grateful for the rain we got. The wood of a dead Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis). Kinda of an oxymoron, eh. A few scales left on the armadillo tail. Snake skin in our garden pond. The Loggerhead Shrike has a new item on its menu…the field cricket…
It was a bit nippy today and the rain has stopped. We got almost 3/4 inch of much needed rain over the last several days at our house. The rain really brings out the colors of the lichens on this Bois D’arc (Maclura pomifera). Beautiful fungus at the base of a Post Oak (Quercus stellata)….
On October 27, 2017 we had sleet (at least at my house). Glad it is not a repeat performance today. Thirty-three degrees is the lowest we have had today. That is cold enough for me. Sure makes Gracie frisky. Drips on honeysuckle vine. Drips on Frostweed (Verbesina virginica). Drips on the grasshopper (might be Chortophaga…
The eggs I found on the Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) took about 16-21 days to hatch. This is what they looked like when I collected them back in September. Closeup of the eggs hatched. I identified them to the superfamily Chalcidoidea because they do not have any venation in their wings. I could not…
It was a birdy day. Saw some very nice birds! Some of my “first of season” birds were dark-eyed junco, white-crowned sparrows, and red-shafted northern flickers. Also saw chipping sparrows, vesper sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, red-tailed hawks, mourning doves, meadowlarks,black vultures and turkey vultures. Got a great look at the Red-shouldered Hawk. Meadowlark Multiple Loggerhead…
Are you on the fence? I’m not and I have voted BUT this is not about that. The following is about stuff on the fence, my barbwire fence! The Loggerhead Shrike was quite busy storing its cache on the fence. This beetle was still twitching so it was very fresh. Maybe the Loggerhead Shrike’s poop?…
Armadillo? That is what it was. It had died about a month ago. Gracie did try to gnaw on it then. It was not stinky enough to roll in at that time. But she decided to bring the tail over to the path yesterday. Only thing left of it now is the tail and the…
Can you guess what this came from? I will give another hint at the bottom of the post. Someone had a meal last night. Imagine someone having a cup of coffee and conversations around the table? We often find pottery and glass shards on our place where there was once an old homestead. The unmistakable…
Yesterday’s finds were great. The orchids were the highlight of the day’s adventure, but certainly not all. The following are some of the other highlights. It just blows me away that the remains of these creatures lived some 145-100 millions years ago and that most all of our area was under the sea. Mussels and…
It was cloudy start on the grasslands this morning. The prairie was looking good! Our first exciting find of the day was the Nodding Ladies-tresses (Spiranthes cernua). Closeup. This species of orchid a lot times is self-pollinating (another word for it is androgyny) and the flower never opens. Update: Oct 25, 2020 I have since learned…