Hi y’all. You recall that I’ve been talking about the “end” of Our Lives in Nature, suggesting that you come see me at Rain Lilies or Cross Timbers Connection. Here’s one more request.
The end of my paid website/blog here will be here in a couple of days. I’m not taking this website down immediately, but as a “free” WordPress site, it will have ads and very limited storage of media. Photos will presumably disappear along with downloadable pdfs.
So I hope you will check out Rain Lilies (at Substack). And please check out Cross Timbers Connection, a project that Rob Denkhaus and I are doing. I’ve been transferring some of the natural history stuff from here to that site.
And I continue to write for Green Source Texas and will be following up on my recent article about the border wall and related destruction in the Big Bend region.
A number of you have been very supportive of my writing here and elsewhere. I really appreciate it, and hope to keep running into you.
In the Davis Mountains years ago, examining a hatchling whiptail lizard
Another step towards moving away from “Our Lives in Nature” – new Letters to Nature Kids will be offered at the Cross Timbers Connection website. I just wrote about our brutal summer and how to still get out there safely. Recently I’ve had chances to watch green herons and have a surprise encounter with young raccoons out on a teenage ramble. Those are in this letter, found here.
I hope you will have a look at Cross Timbers Connection (CTC). I’ll be transferring quite a bit of the natural history material to CTC. I wrote that:
Cross Timbers Connection is an effort to connect people with the prairies and oak woodlands in North Texas and share the natural history of the region. That effort takes the form of a website, the Post Oak & Prairie Journal (POPJ), and other publications and activities.
It is a project of Michael Smith and Rob Denkhaus, who have co-edited POPJ through its history and who were officers in a more formalized organization several years ago.
Rob, Michael, and several others formed an earlier version of Cross Timbers Connection in 2013 out of a desire to connect people with nature in North Texas. We provided naturalist-led field trips for kids, wrote and distributed Frog Calls (a newsletter centered on young people), and we published the first volume of POPJ. The corporation was dissolved in 2017, but the journal was continued under the editorship of Michael and Rob, and articles were intermittently submitted and published.
And I’ll still be writing at Rain Lilies. In the coming week I will be traveling to the Big Bend region to write about that place and the damage that’s done and the threats it is under (for a couple of planned articles at Green Source Texas). But as much as anything, I’ll be writing about how much we love the desert and the mountains, the hidden gems and open sky and the wildness that we have mostly lost. I hope you will follow that story and help us hang on to the parks, the wildlife management area, the ranchland, and the river, the Rio Bravo del Norte.
Hi everyone – recently I mentioned some changes going on, and I want to invite you once again to visit and subscribe to “Rain Lilies” at Substack. In about a month, Our Lives in Nature will phase out and I’ll be focusing on Rain Lilies. I will also be working on the project and website, “Cross Timbers Connection,” and a good bit of the downloadable stuff stored here will reappear in some form over there. For example, I’ve already updated and transferred the pdf guide for identifying venomous snakes to that site.
I’d love to see you in either or both places. When I write something that is a good fit for Cross Timbers Connection, it will appear over there, and Rob and others will be contributing as well. I continue to write for Green Source Texas (for example, my articles about “nature kids” there). And I’m on the board of Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve and I offer talks and blog articles there as well.
I recently spent part of a morning at one of the ponds at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve and wrote about the green herons that were hunting there. That is at Rain Lilies, and there will be more short pieces from the woods and fields. And more meditations about the human condition and our relationship with nature.
Green heron
I value all of you who are here and hope to keep in touch (and I invite you to make it a two-way street by commenting or making suggestions!). See you at Rain Lilies!
It was July 19th last year when I sat and watched the prairie at LBJ National Grasslands as it shifted into darkness at sunset. The sky gradually changed, with the yellows and oranges, the darkening to rose and indigo, and clouds reflecting those changes. The quiet sounds as activity slows (or awakens), the appearance of the moon, the first call of Chuck-Will’s-Widow.
You’ll find the actual account of that evening in the June issue of “Letters From the Woods” which is posted on the Letters page. It’s a free download, so I hope you’ll have a look.
I also posted it over at “Rain Lilies” where I write at Substack. (I confess that I’m struggling about where to consider home base.) If you’d like to see it there, go over to Rain Lilies and read “Sitting With the Sunset.”
