Tag: mammals

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04/08/2023 mule deer!

Maybe a dozen or more Mule Deer heading across the camp road and up the hill! Here are two young or female.
One male was with them near the end of the herd!
Pausing on the hillside.
Two deer pausing in the rocks. We are still here at Black Mesa State Park.
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04/04/2023 day two of Boiling Springs State Park

The world’s most cooperative Falcate Orangetip butterfly! Feeding at a dandelion here and we also saw it on henbit and speedwell.
The tree with some green is an elm and the pod tree is a catalpa!
This grass was everywhere. Mom says not coastal Bermuda, but otherwise we’re not sure.
The River Trail was full of old and fallen and standing cottonwood trees. I liked the pattern on this barkless log.
Dad spotted this well-camouflaged Buprestidae beetle! I used my macro Moment lens on the phone camera to admire its nice punctate (the dimples) elytra (the hard wing covers).
There were also quite a few Kentucky Coffee Trees with their distinctive seed pods. Mom hadn’t seen them before so we looked it up and they’re not in Texas much.
Briar dog for scale on a bridge over the small springfed creek with a big, big cottonwood tree in the background.
I liked this tree’s bark!
The Civilian Conservation Core pump house near the spring’s source. Briar hopes it has air conditioning???
We didn’t go in the pump house but continued in the visitor center area (everything here was paved and accessible) to see the very channeled spring creek.
Briar did find the cool flagstones in the shade to be acceptable. the “boiling” sand is in the fenced area. Mom will be blogging it eventually so look at her site for video coming in the next week or so!
Mom spotted our second ever Olympia Marble butterfly! It was fast and flighty. It was mostly feeding on henbit flowers in the lawn area behind the visitor center.
On our walk back we saw this beaver-gnawed tree. The park office person told us the beaver had recently moved and she didn’t know where to, so we showed her yesterday’s beaver den and she agreed that was probably it! We have been listening to a great book about beavers lately called “Eager” by Ben Goldfarb. I recommend it so far!
Briar looks out over more CCC work- the stone edged bridge.
Now this afternoon and evening we’re hunkered down in a big dust storm! Glad we walked this morning and early afternoon when the sky was still blue.
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08/14/2022 straw bale potatoes

We lifted and sorted through our two straw bales of potatoes since the leaves were all eaten off by blister beetles. Upon moving the bales, we found eight bess beetles…
One fast isopod…
A second fast isopod…
Three baby house mice…
And one click beetle. This brings us to a total of 14 photographed animals plus a whole nest of ants and a small earwig that got away.
Compare this to our glorious harvest: ten potatoes from two bales. Paula is researching where we went wrong. I feel like maybe we should just go back to growing them in soil. (These experiments were my idea so I’m not blaming anyone else.). At least this year’s harvest is safer than last year’s crop of black widow spiders??