“Birds of a feather flock together” is an old saying based on an observable avian truth. When you see a flock of birds, they are almost always all the same species. Until I began to write this post, which is about birds not of a feather, I hadn’t thought much about why birds flock by… Read more »
In my Texas fantasy, I own a small ranch in the Hill Country where I raise longhorns. In my Texas reality, I own a small private nature preserve just north of the Park and I raise carpenter bees. I did not set out to raise carpenter bees, but my haphazard land stewardship could stand as… Read more »
This is the season for juvenile Cooper’s hawks to entertain everyone as they struggle up the learning curve. Cooper’s hawks are about the size of a crow. In their juvenile plumage, which is mostly what we have right now, they are a mass of brown streaks and yellow legs and look more or less like… Read more »
This post was supposed to be a contemplation on the nature of nature. Then nature decided to aim a hurricane towards the small private nature preserve I manage and the time I should have been writing was spent disassembling various decorative archways and moving future projectiles to safer ground. This morning, we got the good… Read more »
Honey bees collect water. They don’t consume it. They convey it. The hive needs water to thin honey and manipulate pollen. But perhaps the most important, they need water for the evaporative cooling that keeps the hive at an acceptable temperature during our long Houston summers. There are bees who specialize in nothing but water collecting…. Read more »
Anyone who spends time with this blog will know that there is a special place in my heart for native bees. So when one of these ladies worked her way onto the screened porch area of this small private nature preserve, I knew I had to save her. I had in my hand a dish… Read more »
The closer you look at something, the more questions you develop. And I have a new lens that lets us look very closely indeed. For example, the photo at the top of this post. It is a butterfly known as a gulf fritillary. It is one of the more common butterflies in Houston, but that… Read more »
Fifty years ago, any suggestion that an animal was more than a stimulus-response machine would be met with accusations of anthropomorphism — ascribing to animals some attribute that could only belong to humans. Pavlov rang his bell each time he fed the dogs and eventually, the dogs so associated the bell with the food that… Read more »
Flycatchers sew buttons. Their flight pattern is so distinctive that you often know it’s a flycatcher before you have seen a single field mark. Flycatchers sit on a perch, usually high up, with a commanding view. They take flight abruptly, flying up, up, up and then back down to the same perch or one very… Read more »
Plants can predict the arrival of birds. Blooming and fruiting Mulberries forecast the appearance of orioles, tanagers and grosbeaks. Their disappearance presages the departure of waxwings. My enormous acacia tree that was taken by Ike could forecast the appearance of magnolia warblers. It was always magnolia warblers. Other warblers hopped through the pecan trees, probing… Read more »