Bastrop County

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Most of my blog posts are about birds. However, I occasionally like to focus on other aspects of the natural world, particularly when I haven't had much success in finding birds, as was the case on our weekend trip to Bastrop.

On our drive up to the hill country, we saw very few wildflowers by the roadside: It was a little late in the season, plus we have been in a drought for months. So when we came to explore Bastrop and Buescher State Parks and the Lost Pines Nature Trail, I was surprised by the variety of wildflowers that we ran across. Here is a selection.

 

 

 

 

Given the number of flowers, it wasn't surprising that we also saw quite a few butterflies, including many Pipevine Swallowtails enjoying the yellow prickly pear blossoms.

 

Not all of the butterflies were busy looking for food. These swallowtails  were getting on with the equally important business of mating.

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Old Friends

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I've been surprised by the lack of bird action in our yards for several weeks. Not only have no winter birds arrived, but even our residents have been largely missing.

Yesterday morning started out much the same. After half-an-hour I'd seen only three House Finches, a White-winged Dove and a Northern Mockingbird. The latter comes regularly to our suet feeder and to the peanut butter I put on some trellises.


I gave up on birds and started photographing butterflies that were paying a lot of attention to the zinnias in our front yard. As at the college recently, most were Gulf Fritillaries.


However, as has been happening at the college this week, some migrating Monarchs also turned up.


A Red Admiral was hanging out in our mulberry tree.


Then I heard a drumming high up in our elm. A Yellow-bellied Sapsucker! A pair comes to our yards every winter and they raised one youngster last year. I spent several minutes trying to get a good enough view to tell which bird it was. However, having just arrived and having not yet gotten used to me again, it was nervous and kept hiding from me. Finally I got a clear view of its head and neck.


A red chin. So it's the male!

A few minutes later a male Downy Woodpecker appeared and snacked on one of the suet feeders. Unfortunately, it too seemed to have forgotten me and so I couldn't get a photo. Now that I'm able to spend a little more time in our yards, I hope that he and the Sapsucker will quickly get used to me and will let me approach them more closely. It's always a little awkward when you first meet up with old friends again.

Mercer Botanical Gardens

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On my way back home from W G Jones forest on Sunday, I stopped in for 20 minutes at the Mercer Botanical Gardens in hopes of getting photos of bees and butterflies on some of the millions of flowers there.

As I'm a sucker for water-lilies, I can never pass the pond near the entrance without taking a couple of photos.

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The first bugs I spotted were dragonflies. Don't ask me which type because I don't really know one dragonfly from another.
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I spent a while chasing butterflies with only very limited success.
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I finished up taking photos of bumblebees.

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One for the Record Books

We have a small bed of mainly native flowering plants in our back yard. Yesterday I noticed an unusual butterfly there and managed to grab a photo of it.

A web search revealed it to be a Rusty-tipped Page, a resident of Mexico and other Latin American countries. My sighting is only the third ever in the USA: It was seen once before in New Mexico and once in southern Texas, way down near the Mexican border.

Judging by the condition of its wings, the specimen in our yard probably got swept up to Houston by a recent storm front.