On a few small acres in the hill country of central Texas, we live by watching, feeling, and waiting. Together, we come to know by loving and love best when we care enough to understand. Our Loves: limestone, leaf-vein, scales, feathers, friends, and all their shifting reflections in the waters of a small Creek.
Showing posts with label redstripe ribbon snake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label redstripe ribbon snake. Show all posts
Redstripe ribbon snake (Thamnophis proximus rrilineatusub) belly is bigger than its mouth. The leopard frog (Rana) got away after a half-hour struggle.
Ah, yes.
Those blue eyes....
Fox scat on the trail down to the Pond.
Palafoxia (Palafoxia callosa) is the most ubiquitous flowering plant
down in the stone-field of the dry creek bed.
Zexmenia (Zexmenia hispida)
Golden-Eye (Viguiera dentata)
.
Golden-Eye (Viguiera dentata) in big-bloom all over this country now.
Velvet-Leaf Mallow (Wissadula holosericea)
Velvet-Leaf Mallow (Wissadula holosericea)
Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis Drummondii)
Common Wild Petunia (Ruellia nudiflora)
Tube-Tongue (Siphonoglossa pilosella)
Texas Lantana (Lantana horrida)
Curlytop Gumweed (Grindelia nuda) with its sticky
leaves (growing mostly in the stonefield). Indians of the
Southwest would treat ant bites with a poultice made
from this flower.
Sometimes its tops are white instead of yellow.
Spittlebug (see 4 April, 2012 entry)
Snow-on-the-mountain
Tropical Sage (?)
Frostweed
So, daughter K. arrived last weekend with the solution to my paradox-of-choice. I wake in these cool mornings with too many projects, large and small. Stone walls to build. Stones to find. Stones to haul. Juniper to cut and burn. Soil to turn. Scrap to haul away. Pens to build. Steps to complete. Paint to paint. And because the list is so long, I am always paralyzed with the many options and then regretful into the first few minutes of the project because I can't forget the other projects I probably should have chosen instead.
That's when K. suggested that we write on slips of paper the individual projects and label them as "7-hour," "3-hour," and "1-hour" projects. We wad them up and stuff them into an empty cashew jar. Then when I have, say, a full day or most of a weekend's worth of time, I reach into the jar and blindly pull out any one of the 7-hour project sheets and get to work. This process eliminates the paradox-of-choice. I have no choice but the one slip's assignment.
It’s middle April, and according to a quick estimate, the fifteen hundred fortieth Sunday morning since I quit going to church and started spending my holy day of the week outside among the marsh birds, wildflowers, creeks, grasses, and pines. Still, whatever my thoughts now are concerning religion, one thing is for sure: Sunday mornings are sacred. I’ve occasionally tried working or watching television on a Sunday morning, but I cannot. Even agnostics know what sin is.
So I drove down to The Creek for some sunshine, water, and wind. I love wind in the morning. Not a “breeze,” but a wind (breezes are for Romantic poems—real air is a wind). Grass-stem and horse-mane wave to its prompting. The presence of morning wind is one of about ten ways I can know I’m really alive.
But before I even arrived at Church, I passed through scenes from a world that little resembles any sort of Paradise. Three miles from our house, I drove up on a twenty-something year old man hiking into town and not quite walking the white line. A car would approach him, and he'd stumble down the ditch slope like a drunk and then back up to the edge of pavement. I turned around and picked him up. He just needed a ride into town, but along the way was hoping to find sufficient numbers of used cigarettes to resuscitate. Once he was sitting on the seat beside me, I recognized him as the former patient I treated one day. I had just left the emergency room in our ambulance when I saw what appeared to be a manikin lying in the weeds on the shoulder of the highway. We turned the ambulance around and found the poor fellow just coming out of a seizure and still wearing the white wristband he had been issued in the emergency earlier in the morning.
After I dropped him off at the nearest convenience store, I drove past the laundry with the fat man sitting outside on a little plastic chair.
And past the metal barn where the double-amputee sits every day with his parked wheel chair in the open doorway.
And closer to The Creek, past the site where another of my patients met his end because his car collided with a power pole at a bend in the road. An officer's green spray paint remains on the pavement, marking the position of a vehicle.
And past the broken carcass of a white-tailed deer with two hopping buzzards at its side.
And past the little home of another patient who had overdosed one morning. As we were wheeling her across the yard on a stretcher, she screaming and we struggling to keep the cot upright in a cluttered yard, I noticed the woman's young daughter standing silent and lost on her own front porch.
This is what you pass by on the way to The Creek. It's not a paradise on a different road, though. The same road leads us to the carcass and to the creek.
Down at The Creek, between Pond and Pool by shallow waters, we watched these tiny bugs on the surface. Scores of them circled around and around like so many disoriented Sufi dancers. It would be easy ignore or mistake them for small flies from the vantage point of five feet above.
The family Veliidae includes riffle bugs and small water striders. What we are looking at above appears to be a riffle bug. And as always, if anybody sees a need to change the identification of this insect, please let us know.
"Rhagovelia obesa is commonly found in groups varying from 5 to 100. Both nymphs and adults have been observed to swarm in this way usually close to the banks of streams. When disturbed, such swarms tend to disperse, but reassociate later. Such swarming behavior is more pronounced in the nymphal stages.
"Rhagovelia swims by means of a tuft of hairs spread fanwise under the water surface (Coker et al. 1936). Bueno (1907) states that they swim underwater readily especially at night. Bacon (1956) noted that individuals swimming underwater were near death. "According to Bacon (1956) Rhagovelia feeds on small insects and crustaceans trapped at the surface of the water, and on larger insects under laboratory conditions. We have found no record in the literature of the feeding habits of Rhagovelia under field conditions."
Ribbon snakes like this one enjoy a semi-aquatic life, feeding mainly on the cricket frog population of The Creek's banks. Last week, Rita caught sight of this small snake consuming one of the frogs. Unhinged jaws become a necessity when it wants to swallow an animal that's bigger than the snake's head.
This white-flowering plant (Hedge Parsley--Torilis arvensis?) that grows now beside the transplanted roses appears to belong to the Apiaceae family, the one that includes other of our favorite species such anise, caraway, carrot (domestic and wild), celery, chervil, coriander/cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, hemlock, lovage, Queen Anne's Lace, and parsley. Pretty soon, this plant's white flowers will give way to fruiting structures that resemble Velcro seeds attaching at any opportunity to socks and dogs' ears.
Seed pods quickly replacing white yucca flowers
The first of yellow prickly pear cacti flowers. Near the top of Whitman's Rough.
These are the beautifully eroded limestone boulders at the top of the hill.
Carbon dioxide in the air turns into carbonic acid after it dissolves in rain water. And because limestone is basic, the acid in the water can create such other-worldly shapes as these. When the rain water settles onto one spot of boulder and is allowed to chew away at stone, it can form flat pools like the one above. For limestone like this to be dissolved, the following sequence of reactions takes place:
H2O + CO2 → H2CO3
CaCO3 → Ca2+ + CO32–
CO32– + H2CO3 → 2 HCO3–
CaCO3 + H2CO3 → Ca2+ + 2 HCO3–
Mustang Grapes (Vitis mustangensis) just beginning to fill out. These vines are sprawling out on top of short walnut trees out in The Stone Field near The Creek.
Turkey vulture riding thermal lifts above the sandstone bluff.
