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
We found some amazing mushrooms and of course I can’t ID most of them. Maybe someday, just not today. For now I just trying to match the photos and what I can understand in the description to match. I have been relying on the book Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States by Alan and Arleen…
It was a super fun day at the LBJ National Grasslands today. It was 3.5 miles and almost 6 hours of exploring. I’m pooped. This will probably take me a couple of days to show you all the stuff that was found. It will probably take several posts. So I will start with just a…
Spiny-aster (Chloracantha spinosa) is a plant that likes to be near water or in a drainage area. The plant is sorta scraggly and just starting to bloom here. Prickly Lettuce (Lactuca serriola) is an invasive but sure has a pretty seed head. The Poodle skirt mushroom (just what I call it…not an official common name)…
Update: So the insect that was burrowing in the sandstone has been identified by BugGuide to genus. They say there are 5 described species in the U.S and the only two in our area are the Smaller Sand Cricket (Ellipes minuta) and Ellipes gurneyi. So maybe I can catch it and see which it is. Fingers crossed… See post dated 9-11-2020…
I spent most of my day looking at spores under the scope. I did not know what I was going to see or what I was looking at half the time. Thank goodness for Google! Purple cliff-brake spores (Pellaea atropurpurea) are the roundish things to the right side of the photo. This is at 400x. …
Weather was sooooo nice for exploring the grasslands today! Found lots of cool stuff. Left the house by 7:30am A dandy group of small mushrooms. They were a bit wet to the feel and the stem was almost translucent. Shelf mushroom (Polypore) This small shelf type mushroom reminds me of shell Turkeytail polypore Short and…
This is the Beet Webworm or also called the Hawaiian Beet Webworm (Spoladea recurvalis). It is a new county record. It was a little thing; only about 1/4 inch across. I know it’s not a very good photo, but sometimes that all I can get. This was gorgeous red-pink. It is of the Melanoplus genus …
If you remember I posted on 9-6-2020 about some eggs I found on Eastern Red Cedar. They have not hatched but… To my delight some are turning pink. Look at the little knobby hairs at the top. These eggs are only about one millimeter across! Fingers crossed for hatching soon!
Wow, love this cool day and the rain. We have gotten .8 inch but I have heard some of you got 1.5 inches. Just wonderful! Before the rain came this morning, I found this dead luna moth. Its wing span was about 4 inches. I don’t see them real often and the caterpillars even less….
Had to get a drive-about before the rain…fingers crossed! Rough-winged swallows were our first stop along the side of the road. We also had first of season American kestrels. Other birds of the day were Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, doves, Loggerhead Shrikes, roadrunner, red-shouldered hawk, vultures, White-eyed vireo and one mad-at-us Carolina wren. Then…