Category: Supervisors

Posted on

01/28/2024 grasslands field trip

Mom stands on the edge of overgrazed grass at edge of bare winter woods
Mutual photography of bloggers.
Zoomed out view
Close up
More close up
I saw a tiny dew covered spiderweb in a hollow in the ground!
A cute little seedling at just the seed leaves stage, near the dew covered spiderweb.
Briar turns to face the photographer against a backdrop of winter oaks
Who me?
After turning around in the previous picture, briar majestically lifts her head in the bright winter sunlight
Briar can pretend to be majestic and noble!
Still closed mostly
Open!
We saw several Scleroderma earthballs.
A prairie verbena purpled leaves for winter but still alive.
Last year’s branches of queen’s delight (Stillingia), the limestone species.
Briar sat nearby as Mom tried to get a picture of the Stillingia stems too.
So tiny
Unfurling leaves
Mom has been seeing Cymopterus blooming in other nearby sites but in this site they were just emerging.
Posted on

02/03/2024 Lexington WMA walk

Briar the german shepherd dog solemnly waits in the car for her adventure to begin as I load the car.
Ready to go!
Briar the german shepherd dog smiles up at me, wearing her orange safety vest, from a wash filleed with brushy and little bluestem. the dam of Lake Dahlgren is in the distance.
We looked around behind Lake Dahlgren. Here is all I put on iNaturalist. I put a few of the prettiest ones here in the post directly too.
I'm holding the dried stem of the plant "seedbox". Its two visible seed pods are a distinctive cubic shape with a hint of roundness on each side, and a hole in the middle top.
I recognized Seedbox (Ludwigia alternifolia) from its fun pods! We have some in our garden.
Briar the german shepherd, wearing a blue harness and a bright hunter-orange safety vest smiles down from a ravine top at me.
liverwort leaves on damp brown sand
Liverworts!
I point at a tiny green patch of moss on sandstone while Briar sits baffled but smiling nearby.
Dog for scale next to moss.
Briar the german shepherd dog stands in her orange safety vest on a big exposed ridge of sandstone, with bluestem grass and cedars and oaks in the background. she is looking out of frame and smiling.
The clouds came and went. It was cool and breezy but I did okay with just one layer of long sleeves.
Splitbeard bluestem seed tufts lit up by sunshine against red sandstone
Splitbeard bluestem is so pretty with its tufts. I think this picture would be a fun puzzle.
eroded red sandstone leaving nodules. bluestem and goldenrod and other dead plants at the top of the eroding edge
Nodule habitat
round red and dark brown sandstone nodules in softer sand
Close up
I found some nodules in the sandstone!
a blackberry stem and leaf, the stem has whitish speckles
Blackberry stem
close-up of blackberry stem and a bud, showing the white patches with dark centers
Maybe not lichen
I thought this blackberry stem had lichens, which would have been unusual, but I think maybe it was a fungus.

Posted on

01/22/2024 world’s most long-suffering dog

The OU Campus was very wisely closed due to freeezing rain today. It only got above freezing in very late afternoon. You’d think having humans home would be glorious, but instead the whole world has become a very scary shiny floor. Even the patio isn’t safe! She’s gone out three times and has been eager to return to stable footing. (Briar was spooked by slipping on a shiny floor once in her youth, with no physical harm, and at age 6 isn’t really over it.). Hopefully now that it’s at 33 F we can have a little walk before any refreezing occurs in the evening.
Posted on

01/16/2024 walk to OU duck pond

It’s 22 degrees F and sunny and with very light north wind now, so we walked over to the OU duck pond to see what was happening. All the geese and ducks were at the north end at a patch of open, flowing water on the creek. We also saw two Belted Kingfishers tangling in the air – squabbling? Courting?

A woman in a long blue quilted coat looks into an iced over pond at some big slider turtles.
Paula spotted one big slider turtle under the very thick ice!
Three turtles (two close together near shore and one farther out) under cracked ice that’s at least half a foot deep b
Can you find all three? They were all moving under the ice, which looked at least 4-6” thick.
A big iron sewer or water cover with the tidy graffiti described in the caption as well as a small geometric pattern of partial squares at right angles. Briar the dog sniffs the concrete under the lid.
“think, look, listen”… smell?
Paula holds a purplish leaf of the spring beauty. It’s very narrow and long, with dry tan bits of bermudagrass around it.
Paula remembered where she saw Spring Beauties blooming last year and after a few minutes of searching we found several leaves! No buds yet.
Briar’s fluffy tail near a geodetic survey marker in low bermudagrass and small forbs.
We also noticed this geodetic reference survey marker for the first time. Dog for scale.
Posted on

01/16/2024 sneaky

The plant window is backlit brightly. You can see houseplants fully visible on the top shelf and the shapes of decorations and pots on the second shelf. On the bottom cat level, Shackleton’s face is in profile as he faces east to the morning sun.
I think Shackleton thinks he is hidden as usual in the plant window. He seemed very surprised when I growled his name sternly as he tried to climb to the forbidden next shelf!! I left a thermometer in there and on the cold nights it was in the 40s F. I guess the sun is very tempting and the fleece blanket keeps the metal floor from being cold and wet as frost melts from the glass.
Posted on

01/05/2024 before dark

Before it got dark yesterday we did the winter (structural/shape) pruning on the fruit trees. The buds were fuzzy. (Summer pruning is supposed to be about reducing tree size for those of us who want the trees smaller.)
Everybody who’s a fruit tree in this picture got a haircut!
The dwarf peach tree mostly needed a few crossing branches in the middle removed. Otherwise it looked good.

Posted on

11/05/2023 saffron harvest

I’m holding a small clear quilted jam jar filled with 24 bright red threads of saffron
Today we found there were eight flowers in the backyard saffron, which at three threads each gave us 24 saffron threads! Now they sit in a jar in the plant window, with a loose lid to protect from cat ideas. This lets them dry out a bit before they join the spice cabinet. Very few bulbs are blooming so far, which I suspect is because I divided them extensively this spring. Probably next year we’ll have a lot!
Posted on

10/07/2023 weeding helper

Briar the German shepherd dog lays, looking completely and devastatingly bored, with her butt squishing the base of several stalks of Mexican sage, which are valiantly flowering purple and white above her butt.
After kindly avoiding sitting on the Mexican sage while I weeded, Briar finally decided to sit on them. 🙄
Briar the German shepherd dog stands with her head and back wedged under and draped by long arcs of Maximilian sunflower stalks and blooms.
Earlier, Briar helped us look over the now conveniently low Maximilian sunflowers. We can see all the insects easily!