This week I met several groups of kids in a little patch of wildness at their school, looking for the various ways that plants make seeds, or, with younger ones, playing a game of “Food Chain” (no one was eaten, even during the wild rumpus). The kids know the place well, and many of them have explored the Ranger Circle, the Dark Forest, Maria’s Meadow, and other spots many times over several years at the private school.
The climbing tree – a juniper with well-worn limbs perfect for climbing
My role is to channel some of their energy into new forms of discovery and understanding of what lives there. I can be a counterweight to a child’s fantasy about “poisonous” spiders or aggressive snakes, trying to replace such ideas with realistic caution and a sense that, overall, nature here is a safe place. I can invite them to think in new ways about animals in nature.
For example, the third and fourth graders know a lot of animals, but their knowledge of what the animal eats – and in turn what eats it – is limited. And so, in the “Food Chain” game, when we name one of the animals that the kids have seen there, a child who can name that critter’s predator or prey comes over to the “naturalist’s corner” and we ask about the next animal, until all the kids have come over to the naturalist’s corner.
But running around and exploring is part of it. When I sent the older kids out in groups of three or four, they sprang into the woods and fields as if shot from a slingshot. They scoured the place and came up with lots of wonderful examples of seeds. There were huge bur oak acorns with the stiff, curly fringe around the acorn cup. They found the small, dried pods of the partridge pea that was flowering just a couple of months ago. They noticed all the yellow, fleshy berries of horse nettle that we had talked about on an earlier outing. Yes, they look a little like tiny tomatoes, and they are even related (but poisonous). There were mimosa pods and the dark blue berries of privet, and I mentioned how invasive and destructive privet is in a place like this. They found seed heads of Indian grass and a couple of other grasses. One girl brought a sprig of juniper, so I mentioned that this species has separate male and female trees (and the sprig with the yellowish tips was from a male plant).
The kids found acorns, berries, dried flowers, a buckeye pod, and other things
The younger kids were ready to run well before I was able to tell them what they should do. They would have been delighted to simply run. There was a lot of “wait, sit back down – no, you’ve got to stay with your group.” The instructions were as short as I could make them. “This group goes to this area, your group goes this way … and look for animals or signs that the animal was there, like a bird nest.” Then I sent them out. I might as well have said, “Let the wild rumpus start.” And kids started coming to me in excitement, “We found a bird nest! Also a beaver nest!” I had to see what this last really was, and they led me to some piled up brush someone had cut. That’s fine; the important thing was excitement about finding things. A spider web. A hole or burrow of some kind (armadillos had been digging in various spots). A dragonfly.
If you’re looking for evidence of animals, you might find these
The trick which I do not claim to have mastered is to allow and even join a bit of wild rumpus while keeping things structured enough to accomplish what we set out to do. Some kids are quieter and are already locked in on the goal, and usually they bring a good bit of knowledge to the activity. For other kids, nature study is not on their “to do” list, but running and discharging energy is. I think that we won’t get anywhere without some kind of curiosity and joy, so I would never turn any of this into “nature boot camp.” Working with groups of kids gives me additional appreciation for what teachers do (and they do it every day, not occasionally as a volunteer).
But it’s great to hear a kid say they look forward to these outings, or ask hopefully if we’re going to “play that game again” (from last month, an activity drawn from Joseph Cornell’s book, Sharing Nature).
Tandy Hills Natural Area is over 200 acres of prairie in east Fort Worth. In spring there are beautiful wildflower meadows at the top of a ridge, and then the prairie drops down toward the Trinity River (on the other side of Interstate 30) to the north. The whole area has stands of oaks and other trees, with many of the ravines having thick stands of juniper.
The Fort Worth skyline seen from the Tandy Hills prairie
I paid Tandy Hills an overdue visit today. It had been a while, and I missed this lovely place. When I wrote Mindfulness in Texas Nature I wanted to wrap up the purpose and the message of the book in an epilogue, and a late winter visit to Tandy Hills was just right. Its significance was that it is a survivor in spite of everything, and it offers small and humble but beautiful gifts like the annual appearance of trout lilies. Its resilience and the broad support it receives gave me reason to hope for a renewal of connection between humans and nature.
I talked about it as an island of nature that was under constant pressure by the surrounding city. The city has done many things right, from buying the property to the support of the parks department. What I meant was that it absorbs the impact of a lot of human visitation, including prohibited motorized vehicles (for example, I saw motorcycle tracks in a muddy spot today) and certain commercial photographers who cynically treat it as a backdrop while trampling the area. Its boundaries do not shut out the nearby highway noise, and invasive plants – especially privet – are constantly trying to make inroads, choking out the native species.
Tandy Hills Natural Area is looked after by a devoted group, the Friends of Tandy Hills, who work with the city to battle invasive plants, manage and improve trails, catalogue the over 2,000 species of plants, animals, and other organisms, and offer programs to the public.
The prairies are beautiful, and they remind me of the places I explored at the western edges of Fort Worth as a kid. Thin, dark soil over white limestone, and a treasure trove of grasses and other plants: little bluestem, Indiangrass, eryngo, basket flower, gayfeather, and many others. And even at this time of year, in their dormant state, they amaze me. There are the subtle colors as well as the beautiful shapes of flowers and seeds.
basketflowerlittle bluestemLiatris or gayfeatherLiatris – detail
This was one of those days when the weather is unusually warm, and I go for walks in a t-shirt and enjoy the bright blazing sun when it is low in the sky and makes everything just a little bit warmer in color without the walk itself being overly hot. A few grasshoppers hopped and flew away and several dragonflies hovered and darted around. The prairie changes in each season, and much of it may become dormant in winter, but it is never quiet for long.
Thank you to the prairies, oaks, and junipers. And thank you to the people who keep this place as natural and undamaged as it can be.
After the warm days of October and November, now we are seeing a bit of cold with a first freeze (barely, in some places) yesterday morning. And it is December now; in the “meteorological” way of tracking seasons, winter starts on December 1st. Most of us use the winter solstice, December 21st this year, as the boundary between autumn and winter, but North Texas is at least hearing a few rumors of the winter to come. And that calls for a walk somewhere, putting our ear to the ground to listen.
I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, eastward along the “yellow” trail near the big pond and then turned and walked up through a tangle of woods to the “blue loop” and back toward the boulders. It was 63 degrees, a jacket needed only when the breeze blew. The place was full of sun and damp sand, native grasses going dormant and a coolness that balanced the sun perfectly.
In my journal I wrote “Phenology Note” on a sketched calendar page, and made a few notes about the trees and leaves. “The trees are still mostly leafed out and green. Many oak leaves are tinged with caramel …. Some trees look ragged but we’re still waiting for autumn color and/or leaf drop.” Back near the parking lot, many of the cedar elm trees are becoming bare, but the oaks seemed barely touched by autumn.
Phenology is the study of seasonal events in nature, and so looking back through a nature journal can show how the seasons change from year to year in a place. What’s the average time when trees lose their leaves, and how much is climate change pushing such events to new places on the calendar?
Some caramel color or a tinge of red in leaves that are mostly still green
Using a journal in that way puts me in the mode of science and data, my thoughts separated from emotions about climate change as if severed by a scalpel. But journaling can – and I think should – be more than intellectualizing. On a good day I’ll make room in those pages for what I miss from a time when life was anchored by things you could count on. Winters could be hard or they could be mild; summers might vary in how hot or dry they got; but after whatever variation in the weather, we always returned to an arithmetic mean, an average that we all recognized as something we could count on. But now the math isn’t our friend, and the arithmetic mean is shifting upward and we don’t know what we can count on.
I kept walking, looking and listening for wildlife. A one-minute sample using the Merlin app detected no sounds of birds. I did find a delightful grasshopper resting on a leaf turned nicely red. Uploading a photo to the nature app iNaturalist, the insect was identified as a “mischievous bird grasshopper.”
The mischievous bird grasshopper
Now this was a find – what kind of mischief does this sort of grasshopper get into? This particular one was sitting motionless, perhaps too cool for tomfoolery and just feeling lucky to have survived yesterday’s freeze. Adult grasshoppers often don’t survive winter except as eggs deposited in some protected spot, although with increasingly mild winters, more adults like this one might get lucky.
southern jack o’ lanternunidentified mushroom, probably genus Calvatia
I wanted to follow up on the walk with Logan a few days ago in which we saw southern jack o’ lantern mushrooms. In that particular spot we visited, mushrooms were still there. It might be some particular combination of the right soil, shade, and moisture, but that place stood out with all those mushrooms. There was even a new one of a different sort. According to iNaturalist, it was a type of puffball mushroom. I want to go back to see if it matures to rupture and release a tiny cloud of spores.
Even without a lot of fall color, there were places where the bright, slanting December sunlight backlit a group of leaves and created a dramatic display of color. Going slow, we can notice so many small and wonderful things.
Beautiful blackjack leaves
And that includes the mosses. After the way Logan brightened with every new patch of moss he found, I was attuned to them today and really appreciated how they grow on the sandstone up at the bluff. Looking at some boulders was like seeing a miniature topography of meadows and hills.
I also noticed, on the way down the hillside, that the bee tree is active again (there were no bees visible on that cool and cloudy November 29th). I stood for a moment, imagining the extent of the hollow space within that tree, and all the honeycomb built within the spaces, and all that honey!
Yesterday we found several golden orange jack o’ lanterns in the woods, though it’s been a month since Halloween. There were no carved faces, just smooth clumps of orange. My young friend was delighted to find all these mushrooms, just as he was with all the mosses growing in the woodlands. And I was, in turn, delighted to watch his excited discovery of these small wonders.
Southern Jack o’ Lanterns
The “southern jack o’ lantern” is a large mushroom that grows from wood, often in clusters at a fallen tree limb or at the base of a tree. They’re common from summer through autumn at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, which is where we were. It has been very dry from late summer through much of autumn, but now that rains have come, orange mushrooms are popping up.
A Missouri Department of Conservation website says that the southern jack o’ lantern is bioluminescent, so that “the gills of fresh specimens may sometimes give off a faint greenish glow at night or in a darkened room.” It would be fun to return at night and see if we could observe that.
A big cluster of jack o’ lanterns that Logan found and photographed
We are used to seeing a plant or animal that we can point to, whose body or structure is gathered together in one place as one “thing.” However, with fungi it’s more complicated. For much of the year, the jack o’ lantern is a network of tiny filaments and threads running through soil and decaying wood – the mycelium. If I said, “show me a jack o’ lantern,” you would have to dig in the soil or turn over a rotting log to find those little fungal threads and say, “well, there’s part of one.” The mushroom itself is just the reproductive structure, producing spores that are almost (not quite) like seeds that will grow tissues that will become a new fungus. So a mushroom is a little like a flower – the part that catches our attention but is only the reproductive part of a larger organism.
Logan takes a closer look at a jack o’ lantern
Logan wanted to know if it was edible, so I looked it up using iNaturalist and found that it is poisonous. Not like a death cap mushroom that might be fatal, but the jack o’ lantern would give you the sort of upset stomach that one website said might “make you wish you were dead.” Definitely a mushroom to admire just where it is.
The other thing that really captured Logan’s imagination were the mosses. These little soft, green mounds growing along the ground in protected places can bring many of us into miniature worlds, sitting beside a butterfly and drinking from an acorn cup. They are plants, but without true roots and without the little tubes (vascular tissue) that flowers and trees use to move fluid and sap around. And so they must grow in short, compact mats or mounds. In shady places, an oak tree may grow a garden of moss along one of its bigger branches or at the base of the trunk. At the preserve, the sandstone at the bluff can also provide good growing conditions. The porous rock can hold moisture and is easy for moss to anchor itself to.
Mosses can survive periods of drought to an amazing degree, seeming to spring back to life after a rain. At the top of the preserve there are many partially-shaded places where mosses grow. In the heat of summer, especially when it is quite dry, they become dark green crusts along the rocks, waiting for rain. Then, the plant’s cells fill with fluid and they become green and springy.
Another small growing thing that can produce a sort of miniature garden is lichen. Dead oak branches provide a great substrate for lichen to grow, either as the greenish- or bluish-gray foliose lichens that cover the surface in a ruffled coating, or else as little shrub-like fruticose lichens. One of the latter, the golden-eye lichen, is a favorite of mine.
Lichens are not plants. They are partnerships between two things. Not just a fungus, and not just an alga, but the two things fused together (or sometimes a fungus and a cyanobacterium). The fungus provides a structure and anchors the partners to a rock, a branch of wood, or other suitable place. The algae provide a means to manufacture food via photosynthesis. Together, they can survive sun, drought, freezing, and keep on going.
Several forms of lichen growing on a twig
Regardless of the biological details, these living things add wonder to a walk in the woods. To pause and get on the same level as a moss or mushroom shifts our focus from the everyday world down to a small scale and we see everything in new ways. The details of leaves and the texture of moss, or drops of dew like tiny crystal orbs on the strands of a spider’s web, these things can transport our imagination to new places. It was wonderful to watch Logan find each new patch of moss and each new mushroom with that sense of delight. It was a little like what I see when I take my granddaughter to such places; the emotion and fascination isn’t tied to a particular age (you might see it in me if we took a walk together).
Experiencing nature in this way with children is just the best. It can be a window back into our own childhood, or the childhood we would wish for our younger selves or for others. It is also a hopeful sign for our future, that children can still find magic and connection in nature. And if they carry that forward, we might protect wild places and heal some of the Earth’s hurts.
From our house to your house, we hope this is the kind of day when it’s easy to reflect on blessings, when good food and good people inspire gratitude. May it be a day when challenges and troubles quietly recede to the background for a while.
Autumn color a few years ago at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve
And beyond today, of course. A regular practice of gratitude, acknowledging even the little stuff, is good for us. I hope that we all have plenty of reason for gratitude every day.
Among my reasons to be thankful are those of you who read what I write here (or at Green Source Texas, or my books). After retiring from my work as a Psychological Associate nearly six years ago, I have been able to do more with my writing than I would have guessed. I’m very glad for anyone who has read an article or book of mine and got something worthwhile from it.
So today, don’t let those turkeys, sweet potatoes, or pumpkins have died in vain – enjoy it all and remember all the little things that we can be thankful for.
I went for a walk at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with gratitude for the warm day and yet wanting very much to find autumn. That’s a season I look forward to each year, and in this changing climate it is apt to hide behind 80 degree days and dusty drought.
Starting at 3:00pm under sunny skies, I walked up to the top of the hill and sat down to watch, listen, and write a little. it was 82.7F in the shade, with the crowns of post oak trees still covered in green leaves and swaying in the breeze. A little sumac shrub in front of me was brightly backlit by the sun in vibrant green with a little red. Other sumacs had mostly just dropped their leaves, skipping the part where they might live up to names like “flameleaf.”
A few red leaves on some sumac along the hillside
After a while I walked over to the boulder trail and watched a couple of gulls wheeling and hovering above me. There was some wispy high clouds like a feathery splash of cream in the pale blue sky, while on the ground the shadows were lengthening as 4 o’clock approached.
There was some red in nearby sumacs and a few red leaves of some other plant species. The scarcity of colorful leaves made them that much more welcome. Part of my wish for autumn is the hope of seeing yellows, reds, and oranges as the retreating chlorophyll exposes whatever other colors were masked behind the green. Those colors are part of what confirms that autumn is here, and so I’m grateful for each turning leaf. The rest of the woodland, in somewhat desiccated shades of green, seemed stripped of their place within the season, a shadow of summer.
A patch of sunlight backlit this sumac so that it glowed like fire
The clouds drifted, and a few had a hook or curve before stretching out southward or westward, caught and pulled by the currents flowing across the sky. This would be a great afternoon for lying back and watching how clouds are pulled along or drift with the upper winds. Yesterday they seemed in a hurry, but now their movement played out in slow motion.
Merlin reported a blue jay and a hermit thrush, though I did not hear them. Overall it seemed quiet; the traffic seemed to be some distance off and the preserve itself was nearly silent. At 4:12pm it felt like sunset was approaching, and the breeze had come up a little.
In a few days, things will change. There are reports that it will rain, maybe quite a lot. After that, the high temperatures are supposed to remain in the 60s for a while, like we might expect in late November. I will keep walking regardless, because these places like Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, Tandy Hills Natural Area, the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge, are gifts that must not be neglected in any season.
I walked back to the trailhead and was gone at 4:30pm. But I won’t be gone for long.
The top of a heart-sepal wild buckwheatA sumac in darker red
How are we doing? That’s a complicated, uncomfortable question. To a significant degree, we seem to be worried, dissatisfied, depressed, and isolated. A 2023 Surgeon General’s report notes that people feel “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” People often remark that they “don’t have the bandwidth” to do something, meaning they don’t have the mental or emotional resources to think about something or take on a task. Such people are ordinarily capable and even resilient, but these days it’s all too much.
A Yale Medicine website talks about depression and suicidal thoughts among young people constituting a crisis, linking to a Centers for Disease Control report that has been removed by the Trump administration (the removal of trustworthy information being, in itself, emblematic of some of our troubles).
A Gallup poll early this year showed a continuing decline in the proportion of people in the U.S. who are very satisfied with how their personal lives are going. A recent American Psychiatric Association poll showed Americans anxious about current events, family safety, economics, their health, and other issues.
Why all this unhappiness? I cannot remember a time when we faced so many challenges. Even during the 1960s when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war, I don’t remember things feeling like this. Maybe it’s because so many things seem to be falling apart in society and government, all at once. Maybe because grinding poverty and gold-inlaid greed have surpassed the Gilded Age in which people became obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps because we are continuing to wreck the climate while societies and governments struggle to even admit that it’s real.
“Polycrisis.” When you do a search for it, you find page after page of articles. There’s even a website devoted to understanding it. An article from a couple of years ago on the World Economic Forum describes it as multiple crises happening at once (like climate change, the Covid pandemic, loss of social cohesion, war in Ukraine and Russian expansionism, oligarchy, resurgent fascism) which can interact with each other producing an effect different from the sum of the separate crises.
What can we do? Each of us, individually, can make choices that will help, though the tasks seem overwhelming – beyond our “bandwidth.” What comes to my mind is a quote from Tolkien, an exchange between Gandalf and Frodo that (in the books, not the movies) occurs when Frodo is discovering that the fate of his world may hang on what he does with a supremely dangerous tool of the enemy:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, chapter 2
This is our time – the time that is given us. What can we do that might nudge us toward a better life and a better culture? Individually and as a society, what do we value and how do we show it in our lives? What ways of living do we choose, and does it align with our beliefs? I think we need to do more than vote people out (even that option seems to be in jeopardy) and get back to what we were doing. Instead, we need to think very purposefully about the kind of society we want to (re)build and the kinds of kids we want to raise. Can we relate to each other as thinking and feeling individuals worthy of the same dignity and compassion that we expect for ourselves? Does that extend to people of different genders, races, and other ways of sorting each other into “us” as opposed to “them”?
Can we relate to the Earth as more than a big-box store and a theme park? We insist on measuring economic health in terms of growth, so that we must pretend that we can never slow down in our extraction of material from the Earth in order to produce more “product” to sell. We pretend that growth can be unlimited, that if the trend line on the graph becomes flat, the economy is stagnant and the ponzi scheme might unravel. But we could dream of a sustainable way of making our living from each other and from the Earth. We could use the same creativity and intellect that we have expended on nuclear physics or computing technology. If we applied that effort to creating such an economy, surely something good would emerge.
But we could dream of such things only if we want to live more equitably, more in harmony with each other and with the planet. As long as we consider such things to be naive fantasies, nothing much will happen. If we are raised to believe that ruthless competition is the only way to survive, that other people are objects that can be useful or not, we will stay on our current path. If we have been taught that the land, water, air, and every living thing was divinely intended to be used and despoiled by us, we keep in motion a scheme that ultimately will run out, regardless of how we might use our technology to keep it going a while longer.
That seems to be the society we have created. Clear-eyed, remorseless competition and wealth creation because we cannot imagine an alternative in today’s world. More technology, machinery, and artificial intelligence as the only salvation from the messes we create. More of what Joanna Macy called the industrial growth society.
Joanna Macy was a teacher of Buddhism and Deep Ecology whose later writings describe what she called The Great Turning, in which we begin to turn away from the industrial growth society and build a culture that can sustain healthy societies and ecosystems. Her writing, and that of writers like Rebecca Solnit, offer a useful perspective on hope for us – what Macy called, in her book of the same name, Active Hope. It is not an optimism that says “it’s gonna be OK” and allows us to wait in passive expectation for things to get better. It is not something we have, but instead something we do. It is acknowledging the actions that are still possible and working to bring about change, even if it’s little by little. I strongly recommend her writings and her work that she called “The Work That Reconnects”.
This morning I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve for about 45 minutes, underneath a blue sky with the almost-full moon still floating up there, reminding us that we’re just objects in space. And so I remember; we’re on a big, round, blue planet, ever so gradually circling Brother Sun. And we can watch Sister Moon and almost detect her falling and rising as she circles us, mirroring some of the sunlight back to us in the middle of the night so that we won’t forget the day. Or in this case continuing to reflect the sun, framed in morning sunlight, because sometimes it’s better to shine than to go dark.
To shine seems easy and natural for Sister Moon, at least the way we understand it in terms of science. Does she sometimes struggle to do so, like we do? Maybe get up in the morning and say to herself, “I just can’t do this today.” If she is a barren sphere of rock and dust, then I suppose not. But we don’t have to reduce everything to such understanding. Native American wisdom recognizes the moon as a source of wisdom and guidance, and in the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address she is the oldest grandmother, governing tides, watching over the arrival of children, and serving as a leader of women. In the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon of Saint Francis, the Earth and the heavens – all of nature – are precious gifts reflecting a wonderful Creator. And so in multiple wisdom traditions, the moon is more than what we can measure with instruments.
And she shines throughout the year. Even when our planet is so dark, when human hatred and fear threaten to extinguish every light, Sister Moon gives us light in the darkness. When masked, armed men kidnap the innocent and march zip-tied children into the cold, and when soldiers carry out genocide, she does what I often cannot do: continue to provide light, not be overwhelmed by the darkness.
I would like to be as constant as Sister Moon, but we are not made for such constancy. Being human means simultaneously holding on to the light, doing our best to shine, while also accepting how complicated and imperfect we are. There are times when climate catastrophe, cruelty, runaway greed – the various crises we are facing – temporarily rob us of light. Some days our faces do not reflect the light, even if we want to shine. The important thing is not to accept defeat, to let the light die. We still can imagine something better, we still recognize truth, and we still have within us compassion and empathy, even if some people have discarded it. Such things are our light, and we must let it illuminate us and all those around us.
I visited Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve today, much as I have for the past ten years. I followed the trail to the sandstone ridge at the top of “Kennedale Mountain,” walked around the hill and down the boulder trail and back to the west. Despite one recent rain, it is dry at the preserve and many of the plants are drooping. On some sumacs, the leaves are giving up and becoming dark and shriveled. Some others are turning colors and autumn has barely begun. I suppose it reflects the stress of recent hot and dry conditions. Soon, the rest of the sumacs will turn bright red and orange, if they can hold out until the days get a little shorter and the temperature cooler.
Sumac leaves turning red
As I walked, a medium-sized moth flew across the trail in front of me and landed on an oak’s trunk. I was able to get a photo of this slightly fuzzy delta of moth beauty, and then it flew away. Those wings near the head were frosted gray with vague scalloping black lines and then irregular bands of darker color, then a brown band and alternating colors like soft squiggles. Finally there were dark/light dots – one above each scallop of the wing’s edge, with a pattern like tiny feathers. There were a couple of warm reddish-brown spots at the edge of an arc of dark color, symmetrical on each wing. The subtle patterns and colors were beautiful.
The iNaturalist app identified this as a “Sad Underwing,” with the scientific name Catocala maestosa. The genus (Catocala) means essentially “beautiful below” and the species (maestosa) is a reference to “majestic.” The underwing moths have hindwings of a contrasting and often beautiful color, thus “beautiful below.” Those hindwings are covered by the forewings when the moth is resting, and that explains the “underwing” part of the name.
The Sad Underwing
Many underwings have splashes of orange or pink color in those hind wings, which might startle a predator when the moth suddenly takes flight. But this species, the sad one, has hind wings that are very dark brown to nearly black. Some sources suggest that this is the reason for the “sad” in the name, either that the darkness reflects something sad or perhaps that being deprived of color is a reason for sadness. The moth had no comment about it.
From what I can see, the larva – this moth’s caterpillar – is even more camouflaged than the adult, mottled brown and gray to look like tree bark. Multiple sources say that the caterpillar feeds on three tree species: Water Hickory, Pecan, and Black Walnut. The moth is found from eastern Canada down through roughly the eastern half of the U.S., including Texas. NatureServe says that it is found in woodlands and river floodplains.
Walks through this and other parts of the Cross Timbers are often like this. Some small treasure crosses your path somewhere, a moth or bird or flower with a fascinating life story and a beauty that you discover by staying with it for a minute, looking closely, and wondering about it. I have probably walked by underwing moths before and missed all this. I’m very glad I noticed this one today.
With one more week of summer, I wanted to walk in the LBJ National Grasslands. Summers there can get really hot; I will never forget a midsummer walk years ago in these grasslands. I was out with some herpetological society members on a day when the temperature was supposed to be more moderate, and everyone was probably on the verge of heat exhaustion. At least one member was feeling faint, and we made our way back to the cars by walking from one patch of shade to the next.
This day at the grasslands would get no hotter than the mid-90s. That’s how warm it was at 2:00pm when I arrived at a trail taking me into open fields and oak woodlands. There were patches of prairie dominated by Wooly Croton, a slightly fuzzy plant whose seeds are sought by doves, among other birds. And so, another common name for it is Doveweed. It is also a host for caterpillars of a beautiful butterfly with the strange name Goatweed Leafwing. Accordingly, another name for this plant is Goatweed. All those names can get confusing (it’s also called Hogwort by some) but the names tell interesting stories. In other areas, Western Ragweed was common. Allergy sufferers may wince at the mention of this plant, but consider the scientific name of its genus: Ambrosia. It may not literally be the food of the gods as the name suggests, but if you crush a leaf between your fingers, the smell is wonderfully aromatic.
Wooly Croton in the foreground, with Little Bluestem too the right and further back
There are plenty of native grasses, including Little Bluestem, which is easy to recognize because its blue-green stalks with pale smears of magenta stand so straight and tall. Today, some patches were shoulder to head high, giving a particular color and texture to some parts of the prairie. Switchgrass is common in areas that get a little wetter, growing in big green clumps.
The land gently rises and falls, with swales and ridges that are a part of the natural shape of the earth. In most places, the soil is very sandy and erodes easily. It is not unusual to come across a spot where the ground suddenly drops into a gully or maybe a spot where rainfall gathers into a little pond. In other places, humans built embankments years ago that created ponds either for cattle or to slow the runoff and conserve soil.
At the fork in the trail, I turned and followed the bare sand and clay track to the north, through stands of Post Oak and Eastern Redcedar and out into grassland openings, grateful for the breeze as well as for the bright sunshine. Along the trail were clumps of Bitterweed, with thin leaves and stems and bright yellow flowers. In each of those flowers, the central bowl-shaped disc is full of tiny yellow disc florets, and arranged around it are the ray florets (most of us are taught to call these structures the “petals”), each one scalloped at the edge. The plant is said to be bitter, so that if cattle must forage on them the cows produce bitter milk. But Bitterweed is a familiar and welcome sight to me, and I often find them blooming deep into winter.
Bitterweed
I sat in the shade of an oak and wrote for a bit and then decided to turn back. I became increasingly grateful for breeze, and thankful for the bright sunshine only in a more abstract sense. It’s true that it was a beautiful day, but the day was determined to show that it was still summer for another week. I found myself looking down the trail for the next spot of shade and heading for it. Perhaps my age is catching up with me, or perhaps it was poor judgment in choosing midafternoon to take this walk.
Down the road was the big pine grove in Unit 30 where people love to camp. And it is a wonderful place to sit and listen to breezes sifting through the crowns of those big Loblolly Pines. Not only that, it is dotted with a number of ponds with turtles and frogs. That made it a perfect place for me to sit beneath those trees, breathing the smell of pine trees and listening to breezes and birds. The grove is a good crow hangout, and I heard several. The identification app Merlin also heard Great Blue Heron and Northern Cardinal.
I walked to a spot near one of the ponds and sat beside a big pine tree and across from another. My camp stool rested on a mat of pine needles and dropped twigs that had accumulated over the years. At the water’s edge were the bent but mostly straight trunks of twelve to fifteen understory trees, and beyond was the water, brown from the sand and clay of the soil. On the surface of the water were mats of Floating Water Primrose and clumps of small reeds.
As I watched for the movement of a frog or turtle, I saw skimmer dragonflies dart this way and that. By now it was 4:20pm and the sun was getting lower and the slanting light more golden. Some insect trilled a steady “wrrrt-wrrrt-wrrrt” – almost but not quite like a gray treefrog. Occasional concentric ripples appeared in the water, maybe from fish or some invertebrate. Between the insect trills and the low, hushed sound of breeze in the pines it was very quiet.
It was peaceful here. The smell of pine needles, the lullabye of the breeze, ripples in the water, the sudden appearance of dragonflies; I was very lucky to be there for all of it. And while I’d like to share all of it, I am thankful for the solitude.
False Gaura on the ridge
At 6:00pm I had moved to a limestone ridge in Unit 71, with a clear view to the west. Here, the Leavenworth’s Eryngo adds some spikey purple to the landscape, and False Gaura is scattered around with flower clusters looking like popcorn waving in the breeze. During the next hour, the sun was obscured behind some clouds near the horizon and it began to feel like the day was ending. Although there were some distant noises, a pump somewhere, an occasional car or jet, it seemed very quiet. No sounds of birds or insects. In the blue sky to the south, a few wispy clouds were drawn out like a downy feather.
Leavenworth’s Eryngo
The sinking sun reached a point where it was behind some clouds, lighting them from behind so that they looked like islands and archipelagos in an orange sea. The ones several degrees up from the horizon were orange, while the ones just at the edge of land were dull red-orange.
Out of all this, I began to hear gunfire. Somewhere nearby, someone was shooting a rifle or shotgun. When visiting the grasslands, I understand that hunting is allowed with the restriction that only shotguns are allowed (not rifles, where stray bullets would be more dangerous) and shooting is not allowed near trails and campsites. I find bullet casings at the grasslands frequently, so I know that people who like to shoot may not care about the rules. And so, hearing gunfire is a real concern for me. I moved further south along the top of the ridge, and after a while I heard more gunfire – not very close, but not very far off. I sat on the other side of my car from where the sound seemed to be coming.
Forest Service land, including the National Grasslands, are supposed to accommodate various uses, including everything from logging and drilling to hunting and fishing. I understand that public lands cannot be reserved just for one kind of user such as birders or naturalists. However, some kinds of use pose no threat and little chance of degrading the land. Other uses could result in someone being shot or patches of habitat being bulldozed and potentially poisoned for gas and oil drilling. Maybe the “multiple-use sustained-yield” law that opens forests and grasslands to all these uses should have taken into account these different impacts on the land.
Hunters and gun owners might claim I was overreacting. I must acknowledge that the statewide hunting accident data in Texas for the past three years show one fatality each year and between 10 and 18 non-fatal accidents per year from 2022-2024, a lot of them while dove hunting (it is currently dove hunting season). Statistically, I’m safer at the grasslands than I am on Texas highways, where there were over four thousand fatalities last year.
At 7:25pm that orange, red, and blue sunset sea was more brilliant and well-defined. And every minute changed the view. The sun was now fully hidden, shining down between the cloud and the horizon like fire, glowing red-orange in the mists. Then the ball emerged below the cloud, reaching for the horizon.
Ten minutes later, a cool breeze came up, steady this time. With it, the beginning of a pulsing, buzzing insect song. The last burning ember of the sun disappeared at 7:37pm, leaving a brilliant sky. The edges of the clouds were left like burning scribbles, and closer to me the undersides of clouds were lit in gold. Even the tattered clouds overhead were lit up in yellow-orange. Just a bit later, looking back from the west the clouds were blue-gray brush strokes edged in pink and orange. The sky was deep blue overhead but pastel all the way around the horizon, perhaps from light pollution and haze.
Nearing 8:00pm, still not full dark, stars were not yet visible. The color had left most of the clouds and the ridge was quiet. Just as the summer was ending, the day also was coming to an end.
Our Lives In Nature 