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
I have divided up the rest of the grasslands outing photos into two posts, one for today and another for the next post. This was cool gnarl. I see a head with arms wrapping around in a cloak. A nice knot hole. It was completely see-thru! This was my favorite tree roots of the day!…
Continuing on with yesterday’s trip to the grasslands down in the creek. This Eastern Red Cedar’s trunk was really red where it was peeling. A nice Purple Cliff-brake fern. This horsetail reminded me of the Empire State building. Not as old horsetail top. This horsetail was pretty fresh. There was places that had quite a…
Turban Lichen (Cladonia peziziformis) was still hanging on. It was there when we were there back in the summer. Purple Cliff-brake (Pellaea atropurpurea), mosses, and Turban lichens. Hanging roots and a hole in the side of the ditch. This nostoc was laying on the ground. It was partial dry and wet. The black part is…
Crustose lichen with moss. Some crustose lichens have their fruiting bodies embedded in the thallus (the pale white-green warty crust in this case) that are called apothecia. The apothecia can either be cup or disk-like. There are many variations to thallus and fruiting bodies which can be pretty confusing. Another pareidolia…wood debris that looked…
Today, we went back to find the head waters of this unnamed creek we had been exploring for the last few weeks. You know, the same one in “up a creek” post, but ran out of time to continue that day. Success today! Barely got going and came across several of these beautiful Lecanora species…
Part II is about all the other stuff that was found on Tuesday, Sept 15th. Millipedes Diplopoda (class) have two legs per segment True Bug (Heteroptera- suborder) Don’t you love those eyes! Underside Just found out from BugGuide what this is…Big-Eyed Toad Bug (Gelastocoris oculatus) What a good name! Texas skeleton (Lygodesmia texana) plant…
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. …