Another step towards moving away from “Our Lives in Nature” – new Letters to Nature Kids will be offered at the Cross Timbers Connection website. I just wrote about our brutal summer and how to still get out there safely. Recently I’ve had chances to watch green herons and have a surprise encounter with young raccoons out on a teenage ramble. Those are in this letter, found here.

I hope you will have a look at Cross Timbers Connection (CTC). I’ll be transferring quite a bit of the natural history material to CTC. I wrote that:

Cross Timbers Connection is an effort to connect people with the prairies and oak woodlands in North Texas and share the natural history of the region. That effort takes the form of a website, the Post Oak & Prairie Journal (POPJ), and other publications and activities.

It is a project of Michael Smith and Rob Denkhaus, who have co-edited POPJ through its history and who were officers in a more formalized organization several years ago.

Rob, Michael, and several others formed an earlier version of Cross Timbers Connection in 2013 out of a desire to connect people with nature in North Texas. We provided naturalist-led field trips for kids, wrote and distributed Frog Calls (a newsletter centered on young people), and we published the first volume of POPJ. The corporation was dissolved in 2017, but the journal was continued under the editorship of Michael and Rob, and articles were intermittently submitted and published.

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And I’ll still be writing at Rain Lilies. In the coming week I will be traveling to the Big Bend region to write about that place and the damage that’s done and the threats it is under (for a couple of planned articles at Green Source Texas). But as much as anything, I’ll be writing about how much we love the desert and the mountains, the hidden gems and open sky and the wildness that we have mostly lost. I hope you will follow that story and help us hang on to the parks, the wildlife management area, the ranchland, and the river, the Rio Bravo del Norte.

Thanks!