I wrote several posts over the summer at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, describing how summer got started and where it went in a season of record heat driven no doubt by the climate that we are wrecking. Those posts are put together here and lightly edited from the originals which appeared on Substack.

A Forest of Monarda, June 11th

Well maybe “forest” isn’t quite right when talking about the various flowering plants in the genus Monarda, known as bee balm. But the spotted bee balm (Monarda punctata, sometimes called spotted horsemint) had grown tall at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve in Arlington – some plants at least four feet tall. Seemed sorta forest-like.

I love seeing spotted bee balm. The flower head looks like a series of flowers stacked one on top of the other. Those pale, often purple-tinged things are not flower petals, they’re bracts. Bracts are modified leaves with a flower (or cluster of flowers) where the bract attaches to the stem. The real flowers are pale yellow with tiny dark polka-dots. Thus “spotted” bee balm! 

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center says that spotted bee balm grows from 6 inches to almost three feet, but several of the ones I saw on June 10 were between three and four feet. They’re having a really good year at the preserve.

Buzzing around all these flowers were honeybees, native bees, and a variety of wasps. There were a number of red paper wasps (Polistes carolina) visiting the bee balm, and I took careful note of them as I brushed through some of the plants. What I’ve read and experienced about these wasps – that they’re pretty nonaggressive unless you threaten a nest – had to compete with all the stories people tell of how bad the sting hurts. 

We got along just fine; I watched out not to directly bump into them, and they didn’t bother me. 

On the way to the ridge top, the trail passes through woodland with a little more closed canopy, and there, on the trunk of a big oak, was a Texas spiny lizard (Sceloporus olivaceus). He was watching me, possibly a little like I had watched the red wasps, as if to ask, “Are we gonna have any trouble here?” Not from me – I love these athletic tree-climbers and always try to approach them slowly for a closer look. 

I say “he” because of the vaguely striped pattern on his back. The female pattern is broken up by jagged black crossbars that break up the stripes. When I got a little too close, he skittered to the side of the tree, raised his body and gave me a few head bobs to show me who’s boss. That let me see some of the blue breeding colors that males get along the chest. 

The other noticeable thing about this lizard was the last couple of inches of his tail, which was different in texture and color from the rest. At some point he had lost that part of his tail, probably as a predator made a grab for him and got only a bit of broken tail. It’s a great survival strategy, having a tail that fairly easily breaks so that you lose your tail rather than your life. It grows back, but with cartilage rather than bones and with a different appearance.

Reaching the top of the ridge, I found a shady spot and wrote about some of what I had seen. I also looked at the high-altitude edge of what looked like a storm cell to the southeast. There had been predictions of storms in our area as the afternoon heated up. In the shade the temperature at the preserve was 93 degrees (with a 54% relative humidity). Not only was it getting hot, the preserve was also dry. The leaves on all those bee balms were drooping and the petals of black-eyed susan flowers were a little shriveled. But the storm cell to the southeast drifted off and no rain fell.

I know a spot on the back side of a little loop trail at the top of the hill where standing cypress (Ipomopsis rubra) likes to grow. Here and there among the bee balm and other plants there was a stem of standing cypress with its bright scarlet flowers. In another spot, a big tiger swallowtail added more bright colors, and woods was animated by plenty of other butterflies. There were hairstreaks, hackberry emperors, and common buckeyes. 

All this visual beauty was matched by the aural beauty of bird song. Carolina wrens were calling in more than one place, and they were joined by cardinals, Bewick’s wren, and a white-eyed vireo. 

There was one other sound: the song of summer, the long, pulsing drone of insects in the trees. This is how a hot summer day in Texas sounds. It has been the background song of many a June or July day at the creek, and I suspect that I could start to sweat just by hearing it. The months are slipping by and it’s nearly mid-June. Summer has found us, and I am grateful. 

(But my gratitude for summer did not last long.)

An Orb-weaver

The following day we did get rain, so I took a walk this morning, June 12th, to two of the ponds at the preserve. Among the numerous wonders I ran into (almost literally) was an orb-weaving spider. More about that later.

Walking the trail to the north pond, right away I passed a small exposed slope with pink flowers among the spotted bee balm and black-eyed susan. Those pink flowers are “meadow pink,” or “Texas star,” or if you prefer, “prairie rose gentian.” Gosh, it’s confusing enough to make you want to swear off common names and just use the scientific name, Sabatia campestris. 

Closer to the pond, I saw a turtle in the path ahead of me. It was a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans), and I jumped to the conclusion that it was looking for a spot to lay eggs. And then I got a little closer and saw that this turtle was fairly melanistic, meaning that the bright yellows and greens that dominate the turtle’s pattern are obscured by dark pigment. Old melanistic males completely lose the red patch at the back of the head and are primarily olive and charcoal colored. What were the chances that this was a wandering male? Wherever the turtle was going, I didn’t want to disturb him or her, so I did not pick the turtle up for a closer look. 

The north pond was edged with floating mats of water primrose, or floating primrose-willow. Oh, goodness, here we go again – we’ll just call it Ludwigia peploides. According to iNaturalist, it propagates so easily that it is found in North and South America as well as parts of the Old World. It is beautiful but it also grows so well that it can get out of hand. 

I sat beside a willow tree and checked the temperature, which was 78 degrees. Above us was a thin cloud deck, and the relative humidity was 74%. It felt comfortable to sit there, listening to a cricket frog calling nearby and a northern cardinal calling from somewhere toward the ridge. A couple of red-eared sliders swam under the surface of the pond. 

Walking back, I took the trail through the woods. Walking among the post oaks and blackjack oaks, I passed a burrow entrance just the right size for an armadillo and then almost walked into a spider web spun across the trail. The owner of the web was having breakfast at the time, and I was only able to get a look at her underside. As a result, my friend and spider expert Meghan Cassidy was reluctant to identify the spider any more specifically than the family Araneidae (orb-weavers).

There was a time that I would have panicked if I walked through a spider web, and I’m still not at all a fan of getting a face full of spider. However, years of time in the field, looking for reptiles and amphibians in places where a side order of spider just happens sometimes, have helped a great deal. The pre-eminent treatment for phobia is called exposure therapy, and it involves having some sort of repeated exposure to the feared thing. Hopefully this happens gradually in a supportive and safe context, which is how it happened for me. And so today, I was able to appreciate this little arachnid and her breakfast (which might have been an ant or small wasp). 

At about 10:30am I walked to the other end of the preserve to look for turtles off the dock of the fishing pond. Along the way, an open area had scattered basketflowers and several lemon bee balm (the other Monarda that we see at the preserve, this one Monarda citriodora). Once again the plant gives the appearance of several flowers stacked on top of each other, with lavender bracts surrounding clusters of flowers. 

At the fishing pond I looked in the usual spots and did not see any turtles basking. I have seen the red-eared sliders and river cooters in that pond almost enough to know their names, if they gave themselves names, but I’ll have to wait until next time to see them.

The Heat Ramps Up

The need for a little exercise and time in nature and/or my oppositional nature led me to visit the preserve on the morning of the 26th, excessive heat warnings or not. (It was morning and I took water and a hat; it was OK.)

I walked, then stopped for a while and sat in the shade (I also took a camp stool) to be quiet and mindful of things around me. Here is roughly what I wrote in my journal, starting at 9:25am:

On my walk through the woodlands, there was a big funnel-web spider sitting on her front porch, outside of that silken tornado-like funnel that leads down into the leaves near the base of a little oak. I heard a chickadee call and the call of a Blanchard’s cricket frog from nearby.

At the north pond, I sat quietly in the shade for twelve minutes starting at 9:36am. I noticed that the Ludwigia (water primrose) was still luxuriant in the pond, with pretty yellow flowers. I heard a cricket frog calling, possibly the same one I heard earlier. While it didn’t spoil the experience, I also heard the ever-present traffic noise from the nearby street. There was also a train’s horn, and later what sounded like a jet engine winding up for takeoff. Dragonflies darted over the pond, and a swallow swooped down across the pond’s surface. Two turtle heads, probably red-eared sliders, poked above the water, and late in my observation a fish broke the pond surface as it jumped. 

A little breeze – for which I was grateful – blew a few leaves from the nearby willow trees. They spun as they floated down in a clear blue sky. At the end, the heat was close and sticky, and the temperature was 86F and relative humidity 73%.

Next, I walked up to the ridge. Along the way I passed an orb weaver sitting with her prey in full sunlight, and no doubt getting pretty warm. The round web was fascinating, as they always are, and especially nice since I had not run into it. The owner of the web was of a harmless species of orb weaver.

Further on there was a Texas spiny lizard that quickly skittered around the tree trunk. Here and there, a white-mouth dayflower still bloomed, and the spotted bee balm still lined the trails and grew in little woodland openings. Some was going to seed while a few had straggling flowers still hanging on.

I heard, with Merlin’s help, several northern cardinals, a painted bunting, and Carolina wren. I would love to have seen the painted bunting!

At the top of the ridge, I sat on that camp stool for another 12 minutes to take in what was going on around me. From below, I could still hear traffic noise, but there were other sounds as well. Insects were droning from nearby trees, and a Carolina wren called repeatedly. Later there were some calls from a northern cardinal. 

It was calm, hot and sticky. Occasionally there was a little breeze. (Just before I settled in, I checked the temperature which was 90.3F and the humidity – up higher and away from water – a lower 66%.)

In patches of sandy soil along the sandstone of the ridge, clumps of little bluestem had thin, blue-green leaves – some more powder-blue or even washed with lavender. Some of them were sending up their tall stems. Just over the top of the ridge, a fox squirrel made its way through the shade of a nearby oak with its tail twitching. A couple of paper wasps cruised around the leaves of that same oak; one then flew toward me, turning at the last moment. It seems to me that their vision for obstacles is not wonderful.

On the way back down the hillside, I passed a bowl-and-doily spider and approached for a look. The webs are pretty unmistakeable, in the shape of a bowl suspended over a sheet that suggests an old-fashioned doily. The maker of all this was at home, suspended upside down under the bowl. 

I left the rapidly-warming preserve at 10:44am.

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By my measurements, taken in the shade, the heat was not excessive but the “feels like” temperature was supposed to reach 114F later on, and so it was reassuring to see so much life going on at the preserve. There was a lot to see, hear and feel in a couple of short walks and a couple of 12-minute periods of stillness.

Wishing everyone, humans and other than humans, the best as we go through record-breaking heat under this heat dome in Texas.

A Morning Wander, July 11th

Once again we were early in a week that was supposed to get quite hot. It was humid on this day, which might send the “feels like” temperature up to 110°F later on. But mid-morning was a different story, with cloud cover and a good breeze.

I started to wander the preserve at 10:15am, and right at the edge of the parking lot I was pulled toward a favorite – silverleaf nightshade (Solanum elaeagnifolium). “Nightshade” seems a bit dark, doesn’t it? The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center says it is an “aggressive, poisonous weed.” Well, yes, it is toxic (though evidently indigenous people had some medicinal uses for it), but don’t overlook those beautiful lavender star-shaped flowers with the clusters of five or six bright yellow “fingers” (stamens) pointing out from the center. The five-pointed lavender stars look like they’re made from a fine, crinkly crepe. And “silverleaf” refers to those narrow, folded leaves with little hairs that make them look a little silvery. Distant relatives include the tomato as well as the potato, so let’s have a little respect for the nightshade!

I pulled myself away and walked to the north shore of the big pond, where I sat for 15 minutes. I had just measured the temperature at 77.5°F, with humidity 76%. With that much moisture in the air, it could rapidly become very muggy, especially since the clouds were breaking up and I sat in bright sunshine. The breeze helped a lot. Looking to the east, the pond surface was covered with bright sparkling ripples reflecting the sun, as if a net of diamonds had been thrown over the surface. To the west, the surface was a rippled deep blue-gray.

Dragonflies flew ceaselessly among the cattails. There were male widow skimmers with their dark brown and white wing spots, and other species as well. Sitting and watching dragonflies in flight is a great pastime. The ones I watched hung on to perches despite a stiff breeze, they flew forward into the breeze when they felt like it and then slipped back the other direction. Sometimes one dropped from the sky, navigating tall plant stalks and other obstacles to go to a preferred perch. I watched a dragonfly glide on fixed wings, occasionally flitting them rapidly to change direction or speed. It seemed effortless and graceful. It turns out that dragonflies can fly just in just about any direction they want, including backward.

While this dragonfly ballet was going on, a red-eared slider turtle surfaced about eight feet away, floating in the water and getting some air. Facing my direction, much of what I could see was that chin with its light yellow-green lines that divide into a sort of wish-bone shape a little further back. After a few breaths, her head disappeared below the surface and she swam off. A couple of butterflies visited. A skipper (these tend to be smaller than other butterflies, with chunkier bodies and antennae with tiny hooks at the end) landed on my backpack, maybe in search of a little salt. Northern cardinals provided an active soundtrack, and the Merlin app identified a barn swallow among the cardinals.

I moved on at 10:50am, walking up the boulder trail and saying hello to a couple of people who were resting on a boulder. They told me that they were doing cardio and enjoying the blue trail and agreed that it was a great day to be out here.

On the way to the yucca meadow I passed a part of the trail where there were small yellow flowers (some of them bitterweed and some that I didn’t know). Many of the flowers held a small beetle, apparently in the Acmaeodera genus, and in each one yellow color appears in an irregular pattern across a dark background.

At the yucca meadow, the land abruptly drops a couple of feet into what you might think of as an enormous sandbox. The sand is deep, and if you step away from the trail (please don’t) the sand crust usually shifts a little, as if little underground pockets and tunnels were collapsing. A thin growth of wildflowers, Glen Rose yucca, and bull nettle grow across this sandy meadow. It also supports a big population of Comanche harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex comanche). These are one of the “big red ants” that old-timers remember as once being common in north Texas, but the Comanche harvester is specialized. As described by Dr. Ann Mayo in the Post Oak & Prairie Journal Vol. 1#1, it only nests in deep-sand prairies surrounded by oak woodland. The yucca meadow is perfect for this species, and they make great use of it.

Out of the meadow at 11:30am and under a small grove of oaks, the temperature had climbed to 87.3°F, but the relative humidity had fallen to a more forgiving 55%.  It was time to walk back, and at the parking lot I ran into the two women I had spoken with earlier. They said they had a good walk and one remarked “my spirit is filled with joy” on walks like this. What a wonderful observation!

Peace and (Relative) Quiet

This year, summer stretches from June 21^st to September 23^rd. And so, friends, I must tell you that on July 23rd we were only a third of the way through this sizzling summer. For many of us, it was just not possible to hole up somewhere with air conditioning and wait it out. Walking in the woods and sitting by a pond somewhere would not wait.

The temperature in Arlington started out in the low 70’s and so I took my opportunity for another ramble. (The Oxford Languages website says that to “ramble” is “to walk for pleasure, typically without a definite route.”) I got started at 8:45am, stopping along the yellow trail under the oaks on the hillside to see how things were going. In the shade it was 75˚F and a muggy 69% humidity.

I’m a big fan of natural quiet, the sort of thing that lets us hear breezes and bird calls without interfering noise from traffic or lawn mowers. I’ve begun using an app that uses my iPhone to measure sound in dBA. That’s decibels, roughly corresponding to loudness, “A-weighted” to be more relevant to the frequencies that we can all hear. As I sat listening to nearby traffic and a small airplane competing with the calls of a tufted titmouse, Carolina chickadee, and blue jay, the average sound level was 39dBA, but in my brief sample it got as high as 43.6 dBA.

An iPhone’s microphone is not a professional instrument for measuring sound, so that could be a limitation, but I’m assuming that the measurements are fairly close. For comparison, a whisper is about 25 dBA and a normal conversation is about 60-70 dBA.

Meanwhile, I had noticed how the Spanish gold, a tall plant with sawtoothed leaves and pretty yellow flowers, was coming into its own. In most places with a good diversity of plants, the seasons unfold in stages, one group of plants giving way to the next. In spring, bee balm was growing tall and flowering in so many places. Now, settling into midsummer, the pages turned and plants like Maximilian sunflower and Spanish gold took off. Another name for Spanish gold is “saw-leaf daisy” and that describes those spiny teeth along the leaves quite well.

Climbing the hillside on the boulder trail, the exertion made it feel hot already at 9:06am, and the insect chorus had started a little, making it officially summer-like. I noticed that it was a busy morning for DFW International airport, as a passing jet registered as 53.9 dBA. As each jet faded in the distance, another approached, and at one point when there were no audible jets, a prop plane flew nearby.

I have always liked the little Glen Rose yucca glade along the blue trail east of the boulders. The trees recede a little and there is space for yucca, grasses, and flowers. At 9:20am I sat for ten minutes under clear blue sky and bright sunshine watching a few insects and listening for birds (the Merlin app identified a bluebird and a cardinal). A male widow skimmer perched at the very top of a dry yucca stalk, with little dark-and-light-splotched cellophane-like wings sometimes fluttering in the breeze. Near the ground, the leaves of young sumac plants were drooping in the heat and drought, but the western ragweed and young stalks of Spanish gold looked fine.

Further along the trail, small yellow flowers grew on gangly stalks alongside the trail. For many insects, this is the produce aisle, and I found a stink bug who had stabbed his little proboscis into the base of a flower in order to suck out the yummy fluids. All the “true bugs” have this kind of feeding arrangement. They may start by injecting saliva through that little straw, to keep the juices flowing. Then they suck out those juices.  

From there, I went down to the crossroads where the yellow trail comes up from the pond and connects with the east-west blue trail. Several years ago, on the yellow trail, I wrote about coping with man-made noise for a book (coming next year) on mindfulness in nature. I wanted to see how much noise was present today. It’s a fairly quiet area, with a hill between me and the freeway, but I measured an average 41.9 dBA (maximum 48.1). I could perceive low highway noise and a small airplane. What I measured would be quieter than a refrigerator and a bit louder than a typical suburban area at night. Hardly what we typically think of as an annoying level of noise, but it tended to mask the sound of the northern mockingbird and northern cardinal that the Merlin app identified.

The trail back passed through some fine oak woodland, with sandy soil in which dewberries grow in places. In sunny openings, Texas bull nettle grows alongside a few Glen Rose yucca. The trunks of post oak and blackjack oak are the favorite playgrounds of the preserve’s Texas spiny lizards, and I saw three on the way down. These gravity-defying climbers hang head-down watching for insects to eat, and then in the blink of an eye they can turn and scamper up the other side of the trunk.

At about 10:30am I walked over to the fishing pond. By then it was hot and that idea of holing up somewhere with air conditioning was beginning to pull at me. But I wanted to see just a little more. Along the boardwalk, in the cattails growing at water’s edge, differential grasshoppers were clinging to those brown, hot-dog-shaped seed heads and I wondered if they were eating them. Not only am I seeking to find that out, I want to know the origin of the name “differential,” which always threatens to trigger recollections of college mathematics and differential equations. No, no – please let’s just stick to the grasshopper.

It was a couple of hours of peace in a beloved place. We link “peace and quiet” together often, recognizing that a certain amount of quiet is needed for a place to seem peaceful. There are many times when the preserve seems quiet, when we can hear breezes, bird song, and the calls of cricket frogs at the ponds. For an island of nature in the middle of the fourth biggest metropolitan area in the U.S., it’s pretty wonderful. I’m grateful for it.

Finding Beauty in Hot, Dry Places

On August 9, I needed to wander the preserve for a while. I can only confine myself indoors for so long, regardless of the heat, and the morning temperature was in the mild 80s. You could make the case that August is not the most beautiful time and certainly not the most comfortable time to be at the preserve. The case I wanted to make was that even in August you can find beauty, and in the midst of heat and drought you can be outside and be grateful for the experience.

But first, let’s acknowledge the basic facts. The Texas Tribune recently quoted our state climatologist saying, “Texas is running about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it did during the 20th century.” According to the National Weather Service (NWS), the average of the maximum temperatures last month in DFW was 99.8°F, compared to the normal average high which is 95.6°F. Today, the Dallas Morning News reports we have had 16 consecutive days with highs of 100°F or more, and there’s more to come.

And the lack of rainfall makes it more difficult. The NWS says the total amount of precipitation last month was 0.47 inches, while the normal for our hot, dry July is 2.08 inches. On the U.S. Drought Monitor map, much of Tarrant County is in “severe” drought.

That was the context for my walk on this morning, but I wasn’t visiting as a way of proving I could withstand heat and drought. At 8:45am it was not particularly hot, and I knew that it would be a good visit because it always is when I go there. What it takes is openness – not letting some aspects of the experience like heat or drought disqualify the good parts.

My first destination was the pollinator meadow, a small restoration prairie at the southern end of the preserve. It was very dry, but I enjoyed the diversity of forms and colors. There were green stalks of Spanish Gold with their sawtoothed leaves. At the top of one, a small yellow cone was encircled by a sort of lush green crown. It was a clear promise of a beautiful yellow flower in days to come. Near where I sat there was the grayish-green of a silverleaf nightshade with a few dull yellow fruits like marble-sized tomatoes. The western ragweed with their skinny-lobed leaves were also a dull green.

Scattered through parts of the meadow were Illinois bundleflower plants that might remind many of us of a miniature mimosa. Its leaves are “twice-pinnately compound,” meaning that the leaves have leaflets that in turn have leaflets. That is, the tiny things that look like leaves to us are arranged in a double row along a leaflet that itself branches off the leaf. After flowering, the plant produces seed pods in rounded brown bundles. But many of the bundleflowers are done for this year (they are perennials, so they’ll be back next year). Small patches of the meadow were rust-brown with the shriveled stems and leaves – and leaflets – of bundleflowers.

Many of the grasses have given up on the aboveground life for now, leaving pale yellow skeletons. There were oats with small bone-white seeds hanging off to the side like little flags, and bunches of bluestem grass with tall, slender stalks ending in a short length of fuzzy seed head. Other plants, too, leave mementos of spring when green growth and flowers had their day. The gray-brown stiff remnants of hedge parsley lie in wait for anything passing through, human, dog, or wildlife. When we brush against those little oval seeds, their tiny hooks are like the most effective Velcro ever. A hiker can emerge from a patch of hedge parsley with a coating of seeds that they may never fully be rid of (and you might as well throw the socks away).

When I was done wandering in the pollinator meadow it was 84°F in the shade, and the breeze in that spot made it feel very welcoming. But at 9:22am it was just a little past time for me to go check on the “amphitheater” area by the fishing pond, preparing for an event planned in a few days.

I sat on the stone steps there with the morning sun beaming down on me, and the topography of the place really cut down on the breeze. The pond itself was drying and rimmed with bright reflected sunlight, and several people were fishing. I settled in that spot for ten minutes and it was really OK. I let go of any thoughts about it being hot and listened, watched, and felt the sun which was warm but not overpowering. Over and over again I was pulled to the pond’s surface, seeing how any breeze created such brilliant, sparkling lines or patches.

Dragonflies were thick around the pond margin, hovering and swooping. I heard a northern cardinal and a couple of other birds. The Merlin app identified that one plus a Carolina wren, blue jay, American crow, and barn swallow. Down along the boardwalk, on a chunk of wood resting on newly-exposed mud, a baby red-eared slider basked in the sunshine.

Maybe such small turtles are a good symbol of hope. Despite all the nests that predators rob, and the years of growth during which they’re not yet big enough (and shells not hard enough) to deter more predators, they go about their business as if they can be content regardless of life’s challenges. The little turtle in front of me balanced with body completely still and head slowly looking from side to side, exposing that little patch of crimson skin – the red “ear” – to the sun.

The Heat Dome, August 19

After a string of days above 100˚F, this day the high was predicted to be 108˚F. For the next nine days, the highs would all be above 100, mostly 105˚F or higher. I’d spend several days absorbed in reading about climate disruption and how people are increasingly experiencing anxiety, grief, sadness and even hopelessness about what lies ahead. This “eco-anxiety” has been an interest of mine for several years, and the reason for my recently being absorbed in it was an article I wrote for Green Source DFW.

And so on this morning I needed exercise as well as some time in nature, and so I walked at the preserve for a while, knowing that being there would not be an escape from climate concerns. Most of Tarrant County was in “extreme drought” and the preserve was full of tan, brown, and rust-colored leaves and stems from vegetation that had either given up on 2023 (with roots surviving underground) or died.

It was like autumn, just not happening at the time of year when days are shorter and cooler. In this false autumn, the bigger trees (especially the oaks that are adapted to periods of drought) still mostly had green leaves. The grasses and greenbriers were brittle and had the earth tones that they normally wear in autumn or winter. Prickly pear cacti were shriveled and becoming yellow or worse. 

Up on the sandstone ridge, I found some shade and a place to sit for a while. In that shade, it was pleasant enough at 84˚F. The real heat would come later. There was little to hear except nearby traffic (50 dBA, similar to the volume of a quiet conversation), and the Merlin app detected no birdsong. I wrote a little and sat looking at this place that I’ve come to know pretty well in each of the seasons. 

It’s not that the preserve is dying. Leaves might be falling and we might be setting temperature records, but this place has seen some droughts and hot summers before. The creeping concern was whether next summer would be the same, with each year’s heat gradually ramping up. After all, climate scientists are telling us that even if we stopped dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today, it would take some years for that climate freight train to slow down. What would be lost – what will be lost – as a hotter and drier climate shifts the Cross Timbers toward something more arid? What might we say to the lives that can no longer live here, or would the stresses of our own survival in a more difficult world shrivel and kill our compassion for any but the closest fellow humans?

I hope that doesn’t happen, because I believe that a broader compassion, inclusive of the plants and animals around us as well as the water and soil, is our only hope of learning to live on this planet with the humility and respect that makes life really worth living. 

I worked my way down the boulder trail (where Merlin still detected no birds) and around to the fishing pond. By now the sun was beating down on the pond as dragonflies raced from cattails down to the water’s surface and soared twenty feet above it. Several species were in motion, chasing, courting, mating, and dipping abdomens to brush the water’s surface and lay eggs. If the rest of the preserve seemed to have shut down, the dragonflies brought the pond to life with activity that couldn’t be contained. 

It brought a bit of gratitude to my thoughts about the day’s visit. The preserve was alive, but much of its current life was hidden, sheltered, underground, hunkered down to survive the heat and drought. The dragonfly activity embodied life in ways we more easily relate to. I took photos and stood watching them longer than I intended, and the heat was building to the point that I really needed to go.

How we take for granted the safety and relative comfort of being outside. The privilege of playing outside, as long as we took water, sunscreen, and common sense, was easy even on most summer days. Now we have to retreat into air conditioned cars and homes. While some folks are well-adapted to indoors, TV, and so on, for many of us it was house arrest. We waited for an end to this heat dome in the atmosphere, hammering us with trapped heat. It was the mirror image of February 2021 when the arctic came to visit an unprepared Texas. And I was afraid that if our infrastructure failed, if we confronted this heat without the electricity that powers the air conditioners, we would see tragedies similar to what we saw then.

For now, I imagined end-of-summer rain storms and beautiful autumn days when a comfortable jacket felt just right. When they get here, we’ll celebrate!

A Little Relief at the Preserve

On August 28^th, after all we’ve been through this summer, most of the oak trees still had leaves, and the ponds still had at least a little water. As I walked the trails up the hillside on this morning, the sand was damp and clumpy rather than parched and powdery as it had been for some time. That’s a result of the front that went through the night before, bringing cool breezes and brief rain. It wasn’t much, but it was very gratefully received.

After I got to the ridge, I stopped to take in everything and write a little. At 9:40am the Arlington air quality was “good,” which was another first in what seemed like a long time. In the shade just above the ground it was 79.2°F and a muggy 74% humidity. The sound level averaged 47.8 dBA, fairly quiet but with the unavoidable sound of traffic and trucks at a nearby construction area. The Merlin app could detect no birds. The sky was completely clear and stepping out of the intense sunlight and into the shade felt good. But even in the sun, this was like normal summer, and I was sweating but not complaining.

Walking toward the boulder trail, I noticed the dried and toasted flowers and grasses. When these plants dry, the resulting forms seem delicate and attractive to me. They’re different from the way we see them in their prime; now they have no bright color but they have subtle and beautiful earth tones. And they stand in the searing sun, day after day, some of them gradually dispersing seed.

At the boulders, the temperature was 85°F, and sitting in the shade was delightful. I noticed the Christmas cactus or tasajillo that grows apparently right out of one of the boulders. This cactus is right at home in arid places in west Texas – who knows how it was brought to the preserve – and seems to be doing fine. Many shrubs, grasses, and flowers however are dormant (or dead) and dry as ash.

Sometimes we personify nature, calling it “welcoming” or “harsh.” Today it was welcoming and I was grateful to be here. I sat on a boulder that felt good – rippled but flat enough for easy sitting, strong and supportive and home to myriad beautiful lichens. The air was soft and warm, tempered by a breeze. When nature in this place has been “harsh,” it is not nature making it hard to be here, it is often us. Despite our wrecking the climate, nature still allows us to come here, to be restored, to witness changes, and to be part of this little bit of the Eastern Cross Timbers.

Elsewhere along the trail, some hardy plant species were still going. Bitterweed still had a few of those bright yellow flowers, and on one of them I spotted a little bug (not just an insect but a true bug) that iNaturalist thinks is in a family of scentless plant bugs. So another insect that sinks a straw-like proboscis into the plant and feeds on the fluids.

Before leaving, I walked down to the fishing pond, out onto the deck. Along the way, a hodgepodge of plants was still green and even blooming. A bumblebee crawled deep into the purple flowers of some of them. Dragonflies swooped and hovered. I spooked what was likely a little blue heron that flew away with several protesting squawks. And the Merlin app finally detected birds – a northern cardinal and a Carolina wren. Adding to the life of the pond, I spotted a couple of red-eared sliders. One of these turtles was an old male whose colors had been obscured and darkened (melanistic), basking on a chunk of wood at water’s edge. The pond was the place to be; truly, water is life.

But all of the preserve was a good place to be on this day. Over the years, I’ve become connected to this place, with connections anchored in recognition, affection, and on nurturing and protection. Such a relationship calls for visiting it in easy times but also in times that are difficult.

September 12 – Resilience After an Abusive Summer

After three months with record heat and significant drought, the first couple of days of September had highs of only 98°F, and on the third day 0.2 inches of rain fell. But then it rolled back up to days that reached 104, 105, and then a record-setting 110°F on the eighth. Then it dropped, with the high on the 12th reaching 83°F. There were eleven more days of summer before the autumn equinox.

Everyone I knew was hoping that we were done with heat warnings and appeals to use less electricity and keep the grid from failing. Everyone was hoping for rain. A friend had to close his small-scale business raising and selling plants (but will re-open). By mid-August, Harris County had seen 15 heat-related deaths, and Dallas was investigating 40 deaths as possibly heat-related.

Who decided to walk away from the summers we remember that brought so much joy? And who invited in the drunken, abusive season that we hope is now ending? Like kids trapped in the household and made to live with this out of control climate, we wonder if he will come back next year? So much that was reassuringly dependable is gone.

Today I visited the preserve in the early afternoon. At 83°F, with clouds and a breeze, it felt like a different place than the toaster oven I had been visiting only in the mornings. The heat had been like an occupying force that punished anyone venturing out in the afternoon. This day was starkly different, easy and welcoming.

In normal summers, it becomes hot and dry, and many grasses and flowering plants become dormant. This time, those plants were withered and dry and it appeared that many trees were stressed by drought. Walking up the hillside, the ground was covered with fallen leaves in various shades of brown. At one point the breeze blew the leaves in a flurry along the trail, and it felt like a scene from late autumn. However, some midstory plants hung on in pale green and many of the oaks had beautiful green leaves.

The Texas spiny lizard waiting to ambush insects on the tree trunk, the pair of Carolina chickadees calling back and forth in the woodland near the ridge, and the blue jay hopping among the tree branches made it seem like we had turned a corner, and life was returning. I found yellow flowers of camphorweed and bitterweed, and a pale violet flower of an aster. Signs of resilience were everywhere, alongside the dried and dormant plants.

Perhaps summer was over, with mild days and some rainfall ahead. What would we do with that? Breathe a sigh of relief and move on, thinking that the summer was a one-time aberration and now we are back to normal? We all deserve to feel some relief, to enjoy comfortable temperatures. But many of us, in recent years, have shaken off extreme heat and drought or arctic freezing blasts as one-offs. Once it’s over, it is back to normal, expecting things to be the way they used to be. After all, the weather has always been variable, right?

Science makes very clear that the extreme events are trending upward, with crazy weather happening more frequently. Fires everywhere, ocean temperatures like bathwater, nature pushed beyond the limits of its ability to adapt, floods, people dying. “Normal” or average is shifting in a more dangerous direction. That doesn’t mean we should spend our days consumed by worry about a future of drought and unnatural heat. When people are convinced that there is no hope, that nothing can be done, they give up and do nothing. (Fossil fuel corporations love that!) What is the middle ground between denial and despair?

If denial is turning away, refusing to see no matter what, and despair is constantly seeing and drowning in it, the middle ground probably involves being able to see it when it counts while able to turn away at other times. We can experience the rest of the world, see beauty, and recognize possibilities for a better future. Not that such a thing is easy. For some of us, visiting a beautiful place in nature raises the question, “How long until this, too, is ruined?” The very thing that could be a respite from worry becomes a trigger. It also seems that evidence for possible better futures is limited and not so easily seen.

It has been seventeen years since the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” slammed us back in the theater seats with a combination of science and “see for yourself” visuals. In all the years since, with all the international meetings and accords, there have been far more good words than meaningful actions. For those in power (I include here the fossil fuel industry, which exerts as much power as do politicians), the future of a livable planet is weighed against disrupting the status quo, and the planet never seems to win. The catastrophe just gets worse.

Perhaps this sheds some light on the recent findings of a survey of young people ages 16-25 in which more than half said that humanity is “doomed.” That’s the sort of thing you have to read twice and sit and think about. What does it mean that potentially over half of young people feel that sort of hopelessness? How can society even move forward if substantial numbers of youth see no livable future? And will Exxon shareholder profit still be more important than those concerns?

With all of that, how do we protect ourselves from despair? We can find hope (while avoiding blind optimism) in the book, Not Too Late. I was drawn to it because Rebecca Solnit is co-editor – along with Thelma Young Lutunatabua – and I had read one of her earlier books, Hope in the Dark. She makes a compelling case for seeing possibilities for change and not losing sight of the times when we have made progress. Not that the future is rosy, but that the future does contain possibilities for us to make things better.

In this more recent book, Solnit says, “To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis.” She goes on to remind us that there have been plenty of times that people with little power have come together to create movements that made change happen. And the book contains what it calls “An Extremely Incomplete List of Climate Victories.” In 1974 the Chipko movement of rural Indian people (mostly women) saved a forest from loggers by encircling the trees – “hugging” them – to protect them. In succeeding years there were events like activists shutting down the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999, the Ecuadoran court finding against Chevron in 2011 awarding damages to Indigenous people, the fossil fuel divestment movement that has removed trillions in investment from fossil fuel companies, the growth of solar power capability, and so on.  

We should listen to the message that we are not as powerless as we feel as long as we work together. We should also stay closely connected to places in nature. Being in nature offers beauty and awe and restores our bodies and spirits. That is one of the reasons you’ll often find me in places like Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve. That place and several others sustain me and remind me to look for signs of resilience in the face of hard times.