Everyone stay calm. We are going to talk about snakes, and trigger warning, there is video. I adore coral snakes. They are lovely, secretive and very docile. You pretty much have to ask one to bite you. They have tiny mouths and their fangs are short and fixed unlike most of our venomous snakes. Most… Read more »
In the summer, almost every night, Swainson’s hawks fly through the stream of bats emerging from the Waugh Drive bridge and indulge in an orgy of bat consumption. They grab a bat in one claw and put it in their mouth, often while grabbing another. I really should have written about this in the spring… Read more »
This post was supposed to be about the Cherokee bean plant blooming on the path south of the greentree trail. I took tons of photos of bees feeding on the plant. I even saw a hummer visit but was too slow with the camera to share it with you. I researched all about this pollinator… Read more »
It is perhaps a sign of advancing age, but I often ask myself about the purpose of this and that. Life, emotions, the entire living enterprise that is Earth. This is a blog about a park, so don’t expect big answers, but from the unique perspective of a minor nature blogger, the purpose of everything… Read more »
Bees and wasps have such different reputations. Bees are industrious and beneficial. Wasps are sadistic missiles with attitude. A bee gets in the house and I will lovingly carry it out in a water glass. But if a bunch of paper wasps set up shop behind a shutter, oh honey, where’s that can that sprays… Read more »
Free food! Hang that sign in front of a restaurant and the line will be around the block in no time. This is, of course, a terrible business plan. But it does illustrate a universal truth: everyone wants to eat and the less money or energy expended the better. Places full of food tend to… Read more »
Welcome back to the Cliff Swallow Chronicles. To catch you up with our story this far: There has been a cliff swallow colony under the bat bridge forever. Our cliff swallows winter in South and Central America, return to their mud nests in Houston each year. Upon their arrival, they spiff up the nests and… Read more »
Our red-shouldered hawks have hatched their egg(s) and the nest is no longer even a little sleepy. Mom and Dad are steadily coming and going and feeding the little ones. I think there is more than one, but I cannot tell yet. This week’s post is a video of our happy family. In the video… Read more »
We tend to think of animals as interesting stimulus-response machines. When faced with X set of circumstances, the animal will be triggered to do Y. The bee sees a flower, which triggers the urge to drink nectar which causes the bee to bump into pollen organs. That triggers the bee to groom and pack that… Read more »
For the last 23,000 years (give or take), Houston was a prairie. A tall grass coastal prairie, to be precise. We stopped being a prairie within the last 150 years. We stopped so thoroughly that there is almost no original prairie to be seen. When we look at Houston, we see, for the most part,… Read more »