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
This is the second part of our prairie scouting trip on Saturday. This is the Three Sisters farm. David told us he acquired the land in 1991. He named it Three Sisters for his three daughters. Nice name! The land was not in very good shape. David has been trying to restore it. He has…
It was so much fun yesterday to get out with a bunch of experts in the prairie. I always get to learn new stuff. Carol and Richard’s work show on their beautiful prairie, Clark Haven. Thank you for sharing it with us! As I mentioned yesterday, it was quite damp out. Makes it too easy…
Pausing on the Tuesday’s grasslands photos. The ice today wins 🙂 Our temperature ranged from 25 to 29 with a 91% humidity. I did see 3-4 flakes of snow in our woods at 11-ish. The sidewalk had this ice on it early this morning! The field and the neighbor’s haybales were getting ice on them….
Today’s theme may stump you or knot. The Wizard of Oz was a pretty frightening movie to me when I was a kid. I always thought the Fighting Trees in the movie were pretty scary. Imagine now if you were in the forest with the following characters that were the pets of the Fighting Trees……
I watched a zoom presentation by Suzanne and I was reminded our LBJ grasslands are more of savanna than a prairie. The difference I found on the internet was “between the two is based on the percent of land covered by trees. Prairies have virtually no tree cover (less than 10 percent), and savannas have…
It was fairly foggy this morning and stayed damp to wet all day. I thought the temperature was fairly nice in the 51 to 55 degree range all day. And no wind. The heaviest the fog we had here was about 1/4 mile. On dreary days, the orange jelly fungus is always a bright spot….
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…