The City Nature Challenge Party

April 26, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

(Reprinted, with light edits, from my post at the Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve blog)

*A cricket frog previously seen at the preserve*

Around Earth Day, iNaturalist throws a party, and the dancing and eating and games all take place in nature. The party is called “City Nature Challenge,” a four-day global bioblitz in which the partygoers look around at all the life that surrounds us and take photos or recordings so that everyone can see all the riches, the birds, fish, insects, trees and grass, all the life that our planet offers.

In our little corner of southwest Arlington, we joined the party at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve. I took a walk Friday morning to see if the trails were too muddy and was grateful that they were drying from recent rain. Along the way, I photographed about 25 things in the woods and by the pond. There was snakeherb, a delightful perennial herb with bell-shaped lavender or purple flowers. Reportedly an early Texas naturalist wrote that indigenous people used it for treatment of snake bite.

We needed the trails to be walkable for the party that evening, celebrating frog calls of north Texas. A wonderful group of folks gathered at 8:00pm and I played recordings of our toads, treefrogs, true frogs, and cricket frogs. And the Blanchard’s cricket frogs at the south pond joined in, giving us a nice chorus of “grick-grick-grick” multiplied by a good number of frogs. That resulted in a call index of 3, using the system developed for rating the intensity of frog symphonies and song cycles. So many frogs calling that their voices, for a little while, were continuous and overlapping.

As the light faded and the moon shone in the darkness, we walked the trails to the big pond. Right away we found a striped bark scorpion which glowed a ghostly blue under Glen’s black light. Then as soon as we got to the water’s edge, we noticed a mammalian partygoer swimming in the pond, reaching the surface and then disappearing, and then briefly heading for shore until she or he noticed all the flashlights and humans watching. Someone noticed the animal apparently had a flattened tail, and so we concluded (without a photo) that it had been a beaver.

As we continued to explore the shoreline, the cricket frogs continued their chorus. These are little frogs – one could sit on your thumbnail – with big voices. So big that I needed to verify for our folks that these loud frogs were indeed cricket frogs. What sounds in the distance like a click, maybe two pebbles knocked together, up close is a “grick!” with a slightly different texture and tone.

And all of that energy coming from a little male pulsing that vocal sac under the chin over and over again to signal his presence to a female. If she comes to him, he will fertilize the eggs she lays in shallow water to start the next generation. Their lifespan is a few months to a year or so, and they are constantly being picked off by a number of predators, and so these choruses are critical to their survival.

In the midst of all those cricket frogs calling, we began noticing spiders at the water’s edge, like the delicate, long-legged ones called long-jawed orb weavers. They’re harmless to us, and those long jaws that grab the spider’s prey are not a threat to us. Their role is to weave webs near the water so as to trap small insects found there.

Another was a spider I thought I recognized from hanging out with spider expert Meghan Cassidy. One of the spiders she photographed and we used in the Mindfulness in Texas Nature book was a small nursery web spider so obscure that it’s known only by the scientific name Pisaurina dubia. Yet another of the small and inoffensive spiders of the preserve.

But the next one was more substantial (yet still harmless to us). At the base of some cattails was a six-spotted fishing spider, resting on the water with legs spread across two or three inches. They are powerful predators that can catch and eat insects, small tadpoles and frogs, and little fish.

The best, or most noteworthy, of these arachnids was caught by Edgar on the last part of the walk. He caught this little beast as it ambled along the trail and brought it for us to try to identify. I was amazed to find that it was a small solifuge, the first that I’ve seen at the preserve.

*A solifuge I photographed years ago in South Texas*

I’ve seen them in West Texas though, and they are fast and have very powerful jaws. Reassuringly, they have no venom, just those big mandibles – two on top and two beneath. They can bite and chew up invertebrates and even small vertebrates. Solifugids have a variety of common names, like wind scorpion or sun spider, though they are neither scorpions nor spiders. They have their own group (their own order) within the class Arachnida.

This little arachnid, who shone blue under a UV light, managed to jump out of the tub Edgar had him in and quickly run under some grasses so that we could not find him or her again.

The next morning, the party continued although I was on my own. Starting at 9:00am I visited the pollinator meadow briefly and then walked up to the bluff, past dozens of blooming spiderworts and whitemouth dayflowers. This is a beautiful time of year, and soon the spotted beebalm should have their time.

I added 61 observations during my two days at the party (just a few of which you can see below). And the party continues through Monday, and so I hope you get all dressed up and have a dance and some party snacks (all this figuratively) out in some beautiful nature spot. Unless you have plans somewhere else, Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve would be a wonderful place to celebrate.

At the Grasslands, With Bug Nerds

April 21, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

(I’ve been preoccupied with writing a series of articles about “nature kids” for Green Source Texas, and if you’d like to read the first one, it is available here. And so I thought I would re-post something from July of 2019. I was getting to know Meghan Cassidy, a wonderful woman who – with her wife Carly – has become family to my wife and me. I remember this walk from nearly seven years ago well, including that rat snake that bit Meghan!)

I’m seeing more of the LBJ National Grasslands this summer than I have in a while, and it’s been wonderful. The rainfall over the past eight or nine months have resulted in a bonanza of plant life, which leads to a bonanza of bug life, and so on down the food chain. Yesterday, I visited again with a couple of “bug nerd” friends (shorthand for “people who know a lot about invertebrates and other stuff I don’t know”).

*Prairies and oak woodlands of the Western Cross Timbers*

Actually, Meghan and Paul are all-around fans of the entire natural world, which is just my kind of folks. We talked about the Post Oaks and Blackjack Oaks which are the signature trees for this ecoregion, and Little Bluestem grass and Partridge Pea and what the difference might be between Meadow Pink and Prairie Gentian, and bent over to look at a hundred different plants. Meghan suggested it would be fun to come back and try to inventory all the diversity of grasses and forbs in a one-meter space, which we all agreed would be a long list.

But just as I am first and foremost a “herp nerd,” these guys are “bug nerds” and more specifically, Meghan specializes in spiders. It’s an interesting and probably helpful collaboration, as I still have enough residual arachnophobia that I won’t handle spiders (though I can examine and photograph them with no problem). As the sun neared the horizon after 7:00pm, we started noticing lots of the orb-weaving spiders that cast their nets between branches and across the trail. I admire the concentric lines in their webs, but hate running into them.

Then, as we talked about the three-lobed leaves of Blackjack Oak with the little spine at the end of the lobes, I spotted a favorite amphibian, resting quietly on one of those Blackjack leaves and waiting for night to fall. It was a Gray Treefrog, currently showing the mottled green color that they can assume when they are not mottled shades of gray. There was no telling which species of Gray Treefrog we were looking at, as Hyla versicolor (sometimes called the “Eastern Gray Treefrog”) and Hyla chrysoscelis (Cope’s Gray Treefrog) are just about indistinguishable except by their calls and their DNA. H. versicolor has a second set of chromosomes, so that they have twice the number of chromosomes as Cope’s Gray Treefrog. Cope’s also has a more rasping and less musical trill than the Eastern Gray Treefrog.

*Little Bluestem in the lengthening shadows of evening*

I’ve noticed that I didn’t take photos of the spiders we saw, but I did take a couple of photos of grassland insects. One was a stick insect we came across, and the other was one of the thousands of grasshoppers (and a few katydids) that scattered as we passed through.

*Grasshopper, with an ant disappearing behind a leaf at lower left*

The grasslands were beautiful as sunset approached and a nearly full moon took its place in the sky. We were privileged to be able to visit this place.

*Sunset on the grasslands, near Alvord, TX*

But we weren’t done yet. Some evening road-cruising failed to turn up the usual Broad-banded Copperheads, but we were treated to a couple of Western Ratsnakes. These snakes are harmless – or let’s just say that they are “non-venomous.” Completely mild-mannered when left alone, they are pugnacious when picked up. I picked up each one so we could examine these beautiful animals, and Meghan wanted to interact with them, too. Knowing they could not hurt her in any important way, she said that she was unconcerned about being bitten. The second one was more than willing to put that to the test, and promptly bit her. After we admired and then released the snake, we looked at the pattern of little punctures on her arm, and she was delighted to see how these snakes have two rows of palatine teeth (fixed to bones in the area where the palate would be in the upper part of the mouth) between the usual rows of maxillary teeth. Four rows of teeth! And being able to discuss and enjoy that little bit of natural history based on the bleeding evidence of your arm, that’s the sign of a real naturalist!

Journal: Canyon Ridge

March 18, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

18 March 2026 – Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge 12:10-2:16pm

Along the Canyon Ridge Trail, Lone Point and the surrounding area is a favorite. The rocky remains of the old CCC structure are atop the ridge with limestone, yucca, and live oak. Today I started my walk from below the ridge, near the lakeshore, where a pair of tufted titmice were hopping around in understory and low tree branches.

On the way up to the ridge, there were lots of bird calls in the woodland. Merlin identified the calls of red-shouldered hawk, tufted titmouse, white-eyed vireo, Carolina wren, red-bellied woodpecker, and northern cardinal. Once I reached the ridge, there was also blue jay, red-winged blackbird, and ruby-crowned kinglet.

Right away I saw a young Texas spiny lizard who ducked under the old concrete picnic table. I would see the same lizard on my way out, and a couple of others elsewhere on the ridge. Just one more way in which spring seems already to be going strong.

The top of the ridge is a limestone-based savanna with live oak, pale leaf yucca, and prickly pear. Butterflies were active, including sulphurs, goatweed leafwings, and a little crescent visiting what appeared to be crow poison beginning to flower.

There are not a lot of flowers yet, but a small blue flower caught my eye along the trail. It was meadow flax, according to iNaturalist, an annual with either white or blue flowers. It’s new to me, but with my limited knowledge that’s not saying much.

Back at the Lone Point structure, I sat for a while and noticed that Texas spiny lizard I had seen earlier. She or he was back at the top of the toppled stone picnic table, basking and reminding me just a little bit of the collared lizards I’ve seen playing king-of-the-hill on boulders at Palo Duro Canyon. Very impressive, little lizard – and thanks for sharing a bit of your afternoon with me.

Journal: Wind and Sky

March 16, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

15 March 2026 – Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve 1:55-3:10pm.

A quick walk on a windy day, as the mid-80s warmth prepared to tumble back into winter for brief reminder that winter has a few more things to say. It was constantly breezy, and then the wind would gust and send the crowns of trees into a spasm of bend-and-rebound. Up close, the upper trunks and branches moved and yet were rigid, a contest between strength and pliability. From further away, the crowns of trees seemed to dance and bow to each other.

Once or twice, strength and rigidity failed and branches snapped or trunks fractured. I did not witness this and did not want to, especially not while standing below the tree. I kept an eye out for crowns that had not sprouted leaves, trees that might be dead or weakened, without the flexibility to remain standing.

At the bluff, I lay back and looked at the blue sky whose currents above me were invisible. When we cannot see the torrents of wind or the languid movement of air on a calm day, we may forget that the atmosphere above is like the water below us. It may slide overhead like a big, lazy river or it may rush along like a mountain stream, shoving and rearranging whatever it touches. As I lay there, streaks of wispy cloud were blown in from the west, looking like fingers reaching toward us. Soon the whole hand was above us, and so I imagined the upper winds were speeding along like those at ground level.

As I walked down the south face of the hill I thought about how little activity I had seen. Even the dragonflies’ flight was no match for this wind, and the couple of birds I saw in flight were really struggling. When the wind is blowing like this, the butterflies are grounded. Even the honeybees barely ventured out of their tree.

Wind dance

For a human, it was a good time to take a walk and feel the power of the air when it is really moving. In some places those wind currents are causing trouble and damage to other people, and I wish that was not happening. Where I walked, it was no more than what the woodlands are adapted to (mostly) withstand every spring.

A Spring Journal Entry from Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve

March 14, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve on a spring afternoon full of wonderful things. I wrote the following at the Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve blog, and I hope you’ll go visit there. But meanwhile I have reproduced it below.

March 13, 2026 – Clear sky, breezy, and temperature in the mid-70s at 3:00pm.

I’m starting to think of spring as beginning when March arrives, as opposed to the more official date of March 20th. Trees are leafing out and flowers are popping up like the delightful crowpoison, which grows from a bulb and looks a little like wild onion but is not. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center says, “Some references list this species as poisonous to humans. The jury is still out about its toxicity to crows.” That part about toxicity to crows sounds a little tongue-in-cheek, but it makes for a fascinating name for the plant.

*A mournful thyris visiting a cluster of crowpoison flowers*

The flowers were visited by several small mournful thyris moths. These are black-and-white moths that fly during the day early in the year and reportedly just for a few weeks. It’s another species with a name that makes me want to find the story, but so far I have not found a reason for it to be mournful. Even its species name makes me curious (Pseudothyris sepulchralis, where “sepulchralis” seems to refer to a sepulchre, that is, a tomb carved in rock).

Meanwhile at the north pond, dragonflies were flying and turtles were basking in sunshine, including a pair of red-eared-sliders sharing a small branch of wood at the water’s surface. Those pond turtles are active even on warmer winter days, but spring sunshine makes them seem very content – though that is a perception from a human point of view that could be completely off-base.

I tried to capture the overall look of the woodland in a photo that, seen on a phone’s little screen, is probably very plain. But the crowns of trees are covered in a sort of mist of pale green, the budding of new leaves and the catkins of the oaks. I checked to be sure of the details because I’m not a botanist or even a knowledgeable plant person, but catkins are the dangling strings of the male flowers of oaks. They will be releasing the yellow pollen that coats your windshields, sidewalks, and noses in the coming weeks. And with any luck, they find their way to the female flowers on the oak trees, which are much less conspicuous.

*New blackjack leaves – notice the spines at the end of each leaf lobe*

The other thing that always seems wonderful to me is how the blackjack oak leaves come in as little red leaves, then turn such a wonderful deep green later on, and next autumn may once again be red – or yellow or some combination – before dropping to the ground.

*Blunt woodsia growing in a protected spot along with some moss*

Along the north side of the woodland, where it meets the patch of prairie, there are shaded spots and little embankments where the land moves up toward the top of the hill. In one of those shaded places I saw a fern that you can find around the hillside and up toward the bluff. It is the blunt woodsia, also called by a couple of other common names like blunt-lobed woodsia. Finding these little ferns, or the various mosses or even liverworts, brings you to a different perspective, like looking at tiny worlds existing in the shaded places in the preserve where moisture is not too scarce.

*The grand old post oak designated as the Caddo oak, after the Caddo people who once lived in the area*

I walked by the Caddo oak, a huge post oak designated as a historic tree by the Texas Historic Tree Coalition, and its crown is speckled with new green leaves, just as it has done every year for roughly 200 years.

Nearby, I watched a medium to large bird sail through trees and across a part of the north prairie, disappearing into understory and trees to the west. I immediately thought of the northern harrier, a graceful hawk that tends to hunt on the wing, flying low and listening for rodent movement. This bird had the right shape and the kind of flight I would expect with a harrier, and I saw that this brownish bird had some white markings but I could not spot the white band that should go across the base of the tail. So I just don’t know. I noticed that Brent Franklin saw one here at the preserve in 2018, which helps make it plausible, but of course doesn’t confirm my observation today.

Walking around the blue loop, I saw a couple of mourning doves near the boulder trail. They were behind a sort of thicket and did not seem perturbed by me and my camera about twenty feet away. They were probably foraging for seeds along the ground.

*Texas spiny lizard, watching me carefully*

On the way down the south-facing hill, glint of reflected sunlight caught my eye. It turned out to be reflected off the back of a male Texas spiny lizard clinging to a small tree trunk. He eyed me in that way that these common lizards do, making his best guess about whether to remain motionless and hopefully unseen, or quickly scurry around to the other side of the trunk. After I took a photo as I moved around him slowly and hoped not to scare him, he quickly scooted around the trunk and out of sight.

It was certainly a walk full of wonderful things today. Everywhere I went there was butterfly and moth activity, either more of the mournful thyris moths or else goatweed leafwings, sulphurs, or a swallowtail or two. And the southern dewberries are blooming with those beautiful white flowers.

*Southern dewberry, which will feed birds and other wildlife later in the year*

A Great Egret, Fishing for Sunfish

February 10, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I shared part of a weirdly warm winter afternoon at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with a wading bird who was hunting fish in the pond. As usual, on the way to the pond I found strange and beautiful shapes in the winter grasses and forbs*.

Winter highlights some of the graceful and interesting shapes that we can find in plants. For example, the leaves of switchgrass remind me of curled ribbons. Many of them arc downward in graceful twists. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center describes switchgrass as one of the primary native grasses of the tallgrass prairie, growing an amazing three to ten feet. You can get a sense of that at Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. There are places within the demonstration prairie where the fine, slender seedheads of switchgrass tower overhead.

I also saw one of the Mexican buckeyes that grows on the preserve. The trees are typically small and are recognizable in winter by their clusters of big, three-lobed seed pods. By now the pods have cracked and the toxic seeds the size of small marbles are still inside. Parts of the plant may be toxic, but the clusters of pink flowers that will emerge in a month or so are beautiful.

It is a short walk to the south pond, but these things hijack my attention and so the walk takes some time – and it is time well-spent.

The great egret was wading the pond when I arrived, searching in the water for small fish or the bigger invertebrates that live there. Spotting me, he (or she) flew a little further away and continued his fishing. What an amazing bird! The great egret spends time in shallow water, mud, and algae while remaining white as snow. The bird moves forward in the most deliberate, stealthy way, with those yellow eyes watching and a bill like a long, yellow dagger ready to stab into the water, propelled by an impossibly long neck.

*Great egret with a sunfish held in its bill*

Sometimes the egret was motionless, a bright white ghost seen through dried yellow and brown reeds and brush. And then he moved like an apparition, lifting one black leg and taking a step, and then the other, soundlessly gliding across the shallows. Without warning the yellow dagger stabbed into the water and brought out a small sunfish.

If you have noticed sunfish, you have seen that there is a dorsal fin on top of the fish, and that fin starts with a series of tough, sharp spines. When caught, that fin is pulled forward so that it is erect, hard and sharp. The fish itself is tall, not bullet-shaped, so that it is painful to imagine swallowing one. But that is what great egrets do.

There was a minute or so in which the bird’s neck twitched, perhaps as the fish struggled going down or as that long neck tried to shift the fish to a more comfortable position. I figured that the egret had been able to get the fish into a head-first position in its mouth, because any other way seemed so much more difficult.

And then the egret resumed that patient, slow strategy of fishing, moving like a ghost into some emergent vegetation and remaining motionless.

It was time to walk up the hill to visit all the familiar spots, the oaks and “toothache” trees, the bee tree, and all the rest. At the base of the hill a mourning dove walked the trail and then flew up into a tree. He called that familiar, soft call: “oo-woo-oo” followed by “oo-oo.” The notes sound as though they might be made by an alto recorder, that wooden, flute-like instrument you hear in some baroque and renaissance music.

The call is very musical and we usually hear it as lonely or mournful, and so the bird is called a “mourning” dove. If we heard those notes from a human voice, low and soft, dropping a little, most of us would hear some sadness and loss. That is how our brains are tuned to recognize emotion in voices, but it’s good to be aware that it reflects our brains, not a dove’s brain. Perhaps the bird is saying, “hey, let’s hang out together, maybe get a pizza.” We can still be moved by hearing mourning doves at sunset, imaging a lonely voice in the gathering darkness singing about the weight on its soul. I’m sure the doves don’t mind.

From the top of the hill, one trail threads past some boulders on its way down, and I sat for a while soaking in the low sunlight reflected off sandstone, bare trees, and dried grasses and forbs. I will miss this quality of light as spring arrives and the sun stays higher in the sky. I also noticed another smaller trail that disappeared under the trees and low juniper branches. And I imagined other lives in other bodies using that trail, the raccoons or the occasional fox or rabbit who wander this place, mostly when the people go home.

I wonder what they think of the big people who share this space with them, who seem not to hunt, not to fear predators, but just move among the trees and prairie patches. Some jog, some walk their dogs (triggering wariness and fear among the animals that live here), and some go from flower to tree, from dragonfly to moss, stone to bird, as if they cannot get enough of this patch of creation. “Oh hi, rabbit – I see you watching me. Thank you for being part of this place.”

So that was another day wandering this little patch of creation for a while, having the privilege of sharing the pond with the egret and seeing some of the beautiful shapes and forms of plants in winter. It never becomes repetitive, and hopefully these words and photos convey some of that freshness and beauty.

* That word, “forb,” is not one that most of us easily recognize. Nature folks may know it, and certainly botanists would know it. According to Etymology World Online, forb comes from the Old Norse word “forbær”, which meant a fodder plant. Back then it referred to any of the plants used for animal feed, but later it came to mean a herbaceous plant other than grasses and sedges.

*Sun and sky through the crowns of trees*

For the Luck of the New Year

January 1, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

We had black-eyed peas and cornbread at my house today, like many people do on New Year’s Day. It’s supposed to bring luck, and we can use all the luck we can get in the coming year, so I’ll throw a bit of salt over my shoulder if it will help.

And after lunch I took a walk in a lucky place, a familiar place that I thought should be visited at the start of the year. Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve is clearly a lucky place. It escaped the bulldozer and remains a little fragment of the original oak woodlands and little prairie openings while everything around it has been scraped, paved, and built to become streets and houses. It’s a survivor. And it’s a talisman for all the people who have spent time there and become rejuvenated, charmed, educated about the living world, calmed, or inspired during their visit. So, to start the year off right, I made a loop to the north pond, up to the bluff, and back down the south side of the hill.

It felt somewhat warm but looked like winter. It was 72 degrees in the area, but long, gray clouds with filmy edges stretched across the sky, and the sun shone in a diffused way through part of them, like a light behind a thin cloth. This sky would have been a match for a winter day with temperatures in the 30s.

The north pond has become smaller and more shrunken as the weeks have gone by with no rain. I skirted the water and climbed the hill behind it, and then sat for a little.

After that, I walked eastward along the north prairie. On that walk at the edge of the woodland, honeysuckle was beginning to bloom. And really, how can you blame the honeysuckle for such a crazy thing, when we’ve been breaking records for warmth. So the preserve can be forgiven for sending out mixed signals like this. I also noticed a very small bird nest from last year, now plainly exposed in a low branch after the leaves have dropped. I hope it brought the birds good luck.

I climbed up to the bluff, where there is a spot nearby that is great for sitting, writing, or just being there. As I sat, pulses of breeze came through, a whoosh of air or hiss in the branches and a papery rattle as the breeze scattered a few leaves on the ground. And a butterfly blew in, a painted lady (or maybe American lady) that landed about eight feet away and rested briefly before taking flight on the wind.

More insects were busy today, like the bees coming into and out of the bee tree. Maybe they found the blooms of honeysuckle, or maybe they were bringing water from the pond back to the hive. The colony of Comanche harvester ants was clearing another opening at trailside and maybe searching for a few more seeds.

My walk lasted just over an hour, but it was enough. Now 2026 is off on the right footing, with a little time in nature along with that southern tradition of black-eyed peas and cornbread. May we all have a good, healthy, peaceful year in the coming months. It’s not too late for a walk at the preserve, and you can come by for some peas.

Tandy Hills on December 12th

December 12, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

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.

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.

Jack o’ Lanterns in the Woods

November 29, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

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.

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.

A Sad Underwing

September 26, 2025October 5, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

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.

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.

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.