Ten Little Celebrations – November 2024

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Our area finally is getting some rain. We have been celebrating the rainy days after being very dry for months. We got above the annual average rainfall for the month before mid-November. Of course – there was a lot more to celebrate during the month as well.

 Stems for bees in a bucket…and a small turtle. The yard and neighborhood are making the transition to winter…with lots of leaves flying and the tender leaves of the violets wilting. I celebrated starting a project with stems in a bucket (hopefully becoming a good place for native bees to nest) and seeing a small red-eared slider on a branch in our neighborhood pond.

Friends of the Library. I volunteered twice during the month – sorting/boxing used books at two libraries in the county where I live; the next sale is in the spring. Celebrating the opportunity to contribute to the book availability in my community!

Harris’s sparrow seen during our first FeederWatch observations. My husband and I saw a ‘new to us’ sparrow during our first FeederWatch session! It didn’t appear in subsequent weeks so perhaps it was migrating through. Springfield is on the edge of this sparrow’s winter range…well within the migration area.

Soft peppermints. Peppermint is my favorite winter candy flavor…and the soft ones have become my favorite this year – either eaten or dissolved in a cup of hot tea!

Brilliant red Virginia Creeper. I’ve let the Virginia Creeper become the ground cover of my front flowerbed…and celebrated its brilliant red color this month.

Valley Water Mill for a second day. Celebrating the discovery of a favorite outdoor place near Springfield.

McDaniel Park. The last field session of my Identifying Woody Plants class…celebrating a city park with lots of trees.

Accumulating 40 Missouri Master Naturalist hours. The Missouri Master Naturalist training was over at the end of October which qualified me as an ‘intern’ until I accumulated 40 volunteer hours. I celebrated that I crossed that threshold by the end of November!

Seek app identification (the bug on the Rose of Sharon pods). The Seek app can be very helpful. I forgot to use it in the field (at McDaniel Park) but remembered when I got home…celebrated that I had a ‘good enough’ picture for the app to make a good identification: Hibiscus Scentless Plant Bug.

Thanksgiving. Celebrating the day….and the reminder of all that is positive for us right now….that being grateful is easy.

Zooming – November 2024

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The zooming images for November are mostly a celebration of fall in our area of Missouri. There are a few animals in the group that could have happened at other times – a robin bathing in a stream, a grackle at our feeder, and a small red-eared slider in our neighborhood pond.

Can you find the poison ivy seeds (hint…they are white), the glorious fall Virginia creeper, a chestnut husk, 4 kinds of oak, and a maple?

I enjoyed searching out little bits of nature to photograph…fill frame…using my camera to ‘see’ better than I do with just my eyes. My camera’s optics are the great enabler!

30+ turtles and a belted kingfisher

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Almost every time I walk around our neighborhood pond there is something I don’t expect. One morning last week, I set out to see the ducklings. I didn’t see them at all. I took pictures of moss growing on the edges of the inflow channel to the large pond (noted some seeds that were accumulating there too). There were some water plants that were beginning to grow. I wondered how much of the pond they would cover this summer.

The first ‘unexpected’ sight was a row of 30+ turtles on a sunny bank. Seeing turtles was not unexpected…it was the large number that surprised me…and, based on the size variation, they are clearly breeding in our neighborhood ponds. .  (Click on the image to see a larger version if you want to count them!)

Some of them might be large enough to pull down a duckling! I think they are almost all red-eared sliders although there was at least one that did not have the red-ear…maybe some other species.

I continued my walk and saw a dove on top of a bird house in a yard. The holes looked big enough that maybe they were nesting there. Another bird that I couldn’t identify was looking for tidbits on the ground…looking frequently skyward. Was there a predator around?

The barn swallows were swooping over the pond. There are a lot of them.But then something flew across the pond that was not a barn swallow. I managed to follow it well enough with my eye to see it alight in a willow…and then used the zoom on my camera: a belted kingfisher (male)….the second ‘unexpected’ of the day.

There is no vertical bank area around our pond where a kingfisher might build a nest…but I found myself wondering if the sinkhole near our neighborhood might be a place that would be acceptable. These birds burrow 3+ feet into vertical banks to build their nests. It would be great to have some resident kingfishers thriving on the small fish in our pond.

Ducklings 2024!

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Last year I saw ducklings on our neighborhood pond on April 14th. This year I photographed this year’s brood 3 days earlier than last year on the 11th (although a sighting was posted on the neighborhood Facebook page on the 9th). There are 14 ducklings this year; no losses so far. The Mom Mallard was wisely keeping them close to shore protecting them from the turtles (turtles can pull a duckling underwater, drown it, and then eat it). Click on the images below to enlarge…see if you count 14 ducklings. When they are close to shore, one or two seem to always want to climb up on the mud and nibble the grass. The last picture has all 14 (I think). Their down make their bodies look out-of-focus, so count the heads!

Zoomed in, the ducklings show how fuzzy they still are.

Mom Mallard took them on a brief loop out into the pond before going back to the shore. The line of ducklings is somewhat easier to count.

I noticed some other things around the pond: robins,

Plastic swans (an attempt to deter geese from nesting near the pond),

And, of course, turtles. Most were red-eared sliders; there might be one that I photographed that was something else. I didn’t see the large snapping turtle. I’m not sure how large a turtle has to be to pull down a duckling. Fortunately, the Mom Mallard was keeping them at the other end of the large pond.

Before I headed home, I saw the ducklings again in the inflow channel of the large pond; there had been enough rain recently that there was still water in it and the ducklings were loving it! They were moving around finding bits of food and sitting down letting the water move around them. I wondered where the Mom Mallard had made her nest since they seemed to be heading up stream.

Neighborhood Ponds – May 2023

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There is always something to notice/photograph during a quick walk around the neighborhood ponds. This month was the first time I saw a turtle outside the ponds. It was on the side of the walkway away from the pond but pointed back toward the pond. Had it already laid eggs?

Further along, I spotted a large snapping turtle swimming just under the water…didn’t manage to photograph it until it stuck its snot out of the water near the shore. I wondered if this turtle decimated the ducklings (i.e. I only saw them once so there was a predator in the pond that got them within a few days). A large snapping turtle could be that predator.

My favorite sighting of the morning was a bullfrog. It was soaking up the sun in some very shallow water. Somehow it still managed to look grumpy and a little intimidating!

Zooming – March 2023

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The optical (and then digital) zoom on my bridge camera (Canon Powershot SX70 HS) is used on almost every picture:

  • To do composition in the field rather than cropping later

  • To get close without physically being close

  • To see better than I can with my eyes (using the camera like binoculars)

My favorite image this month is the backlit dandelion puff. Enjoy the March zoomed images!

Our Missouri Neighborhood – March 2023

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The temperature has fluctuated wildly – from the teens to 70s this month. I took walks on two of the sunny days. We’ve had enough rain that the drainage into the ponds had running water on both days, and I stopped on the bridge to take pictures of leaves from last season in the rippling water. Oaks, maples, river birch, and red buds are represented.

There is almost always a pair of mallards about….and lots of robins.

Some branches from a magnolia in a nearby yard are upright in the pond. I wonder how long they will last…..or maybe someone is trying to root them (i.e. start new trees)?

The turtles are more active on warm days. They all appear to be red-eared sliders. Their snouts are usually all that is visible unless they are closer to shore or sunning on some high ground in the pond.

One day I started out in sunshine but there were more clouds than I anticipated. I took some landscape shots….experimenting with backlight and the curving walkway through the trees around our pond.

Some geese were on the walkway (and this time of year I give them space since they might be aggressive) so I went up to the street to complete the loop to my house. I noticed that the stormwater drain is labeled ‘no dumping – drains to river’ with a metal shield; in Maryland the labeling was painted onto the concrete.

The red maples are some of the earliest trees to bloom. The trees along the path don’t have low branches so my pictures of the flowers rely on my camera’s zoom.

Sometimes I photograph something because I didn’t anticipate it…the oak leaf stuck in the chain link of the tennis court is an example.

Another is the mats of algae on lower spillway between the two ponds. They had washed from the upper pond but are doomed to dry out on the spillway if another rain does not come soon. Still – they were ‘emerald isles’ at a time of year where there is still a lot brown in the natural world.

Our New Neighborhood – October 2022

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It’s our first fall in Nixa, Missouri. The trees around the ponds in our neighborhood are full of fall color although they may be more muted than some years because of the dry summer we had. Still – there are plenty of reds and yellows that have been added to the greens still left from summer.

I am glad that there are maples around that are as brilliant as the ones we left behind in Maryland. My favorite time is when the tree has a lot of different colors!

At the edges of the ponds, I noticed some honey suckle blooming…and seed pods.

In the water there were two different turtles. Ones was a red-eared slider.

But I’m not sure what the other one was. It was larger than the red-eared slider…had very different markings and shell. Too bad I didn’t get better pictures. It’s good to know that there are at least 2 kinds of turtles in our neighborhood!

Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens – June 2019

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The plants that are the main attractions during  the June and July at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens are the lotuses and the water lilies.

The lotuses were in full bloom in the later part of June when we visited but there weren’t many seed pods yet.

I also found a rolled-up lotus leaf that was interesting. The leaves are round, balancing on a central stem but they start out as a scroll like structure that unfolds. This one was still tightly coiled. I might use it as a prompt to create a Zentangle pattern.

 The water lilies did not seem as dense as they have in previous years and I wondered if the rains and cool temperatures earlier this summer impacted the water lily development.

The button bush was beginning to bloom; I didn’t notice any seed pods yet. There is a ways to go before all the flowers are pollinated…lots of bee activity.

Two trees stood out:

There was a group of developing pine codes high up in a pine near the entrance and

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Some shelf fungus growing around a knot (maybe where a branch had been). It looks a little like a bear face to me. I’d noticed it last year too. The shelf fungus look more cracked this year but they still have the orange underneath.

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I heard green frogs and searched the shallows from where the sound seemed to emanate….but never  saw the frog.

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A pearl crescent butterfly opened its wings as it sat in the grassy path and paused long enough for me to get a picture.

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We saw two different kinds of turtles (identified with the help of a reference from Maryland Department of Natural Resources): a small red-eared slider (not native to our area but invading) and

A large northern red-bellied cooter – which is native to our area. It was a large specimen. I wondered how long it had taken to get that big…about 12 inches.

Both ponds had a lot of algae and muck so the turtle shells looked grubby but the heads were vey distinctive…enough for the identification.

Overall – the field trip to Kenilworth was worthwhile and very enjoyable. We went in the morning before the day got too hot.

Some last images of South Texas

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As I finished up the post yesterday about the San Antonio Botanical Garden – I realized there were a few more miscellaneous pictures I wanted to share from our South Texas adventure. Every day near sunset hundreds, maybe thousands of birds gathered on the roofs and electrical lines around our hotel in Harlingen. The last night I managed photograph some with some sunset color behind them. Many of them are grackles.

The next morning we headed to the National Butterfly Center first but decided it was too cold and wet for butterflies to be out and about when we got there. I photographed a male and female Boat-tailed grackle on the lawn and

The water lily in the little pool.

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Then I noticed a red-eared slider in the water too. It is native in southern Texas…but invasive in Maryland. It’s included in the list of the world’s most invasive species!

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We headed out for a state park in lieu of the Butterfly Center and then heading toward San Antonio. The one rest stop we made along the way had this forest mosaic.

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As we drove into San Antonio, I managed a picture of the Tower of the Americas through the car window. It was built for the HemisFair in 1968 and I remember making the trip to the event with my Camp Fire Girls group; I was in the 8th grade.

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One last bird picture: a cold White-winged Dove taken from our hotel window.

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