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
Yesterday I brought home several specimens. When you are in the field with others, they stop and look at different things. So I needed to use the dissecting and the compound microscopes to just to see what we had and to confirm. Thank you prairie friends for your observations! Articles: Meet the White Tern, a…
I left the house before dawn, but I did not start the exploring until the sun had been up for a half hour. It was pretty nice at the grasslands this morning. A breeze would have been welcome. But none was too be had ’til we got a slight breeze on the way back to…
LOL, I just could not resist. I am sure I hear some groans out there. Keep looking!
I have been looking for a hornworm on the nightshade Western Horse Nettle (Solanum dimidiatum) for a number of years. I have yet to ever see one on any of the Solanums except for a tomato plant. Have any of you? But I have found interesting insects from Colorado Potato Beetles to Soybean Loopers and…
Today’s post will conclude Thursday, July 1st outing. We found four different ferns, bugs, fungi, and plants on that day. Always wonderful to get out on the grasslands. The holiday is over and it is back to work. Oh wait, every day is a work day and/or a day off for those of us retired….
We made it down to the creek. It was a pretty creek, but not a creek where you could easily walk along the water’s edge. We only went down to the actual creek one time. But that ended up being a good thing because we found several cool plants up above. It seems we got…
So the visit to the grasslands on Thursday was great as usual. The only thing that would have made it better would have been a breeze, but since we go really early it is not too bad. It started out on the roadside to hunt for a plant. I didn’t find it, but maybe it…
I was going to make this post about my visit to the grasslands yesterday, but changed my mind this afternoon when I found this visitor on my backdoor. (I am easily distracted.)The Mint-loving Pyrausta (Pyrausta acrionalis) sat there for sometime. There are 61 species of the genus Pyrausta in America north of Mexico. Their larva…
The Lizardtail is such a nice plant. It has a wet-like feel to it. It is one of the host plants for a White Lined Sphinx moth. I have not seen one on it this year, but I’m still watching for them. The plant can get six feet or so tall. With all the rain…
Plants have all types of strategies to propagate. Some have seeds that drop to the ground. Some float in the wind, like milkweeds. Some are eaten by critters. Well, you get the idea. The list almost seems endless. Here are a couple and the different stages in the plant life. New Fossil Discovery of a…