Author: Anita Westervelt

  • Fun fungi to find

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    Anita Westervelt

    Story and photos by Anita Westervelt, Texas Master Naturalist Heavy summer rain in the Deep South of Texas makes for hot, dripping-humid days and sultry, mosquito-infested hours at dawn and dusk. Only the brave and curious venture out to find the odd surprises that nature bestows on the land. Those hot, humid conditions, so annoying…

  • Anita’s Blog — Foretelling the Weather

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    Anita Westervelt
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    The moon belies what the rain crow says. If the moon looks like it’s tipped on its back cradling water, it won’t rain. If it’s tipped forward so water can spill out, it will rain — so I was told by a retired nurse when I first moved to the Valley. The call of a…

  • Anita’s Blog — Achromatic Beauty

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    Anita Westervelt
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    There it was! The long-awaited for visitor — the giant leopard moth — in all its achromatic beauty, perched on the moth sheet. Giant Leopard Moth, Hypercompe scribonia (Tiger moths tribe) Genus Hypercompe — one of seven species in the genus in North America. Wingspan — 2 ¼ to 3 ½ inches — males are…

  • Moths of all sizes show up for moth week 2020

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    Anita Westervelt

    Story and photos by Anita Westervelt, Texas Master Naturalist National Moth Week 2020 saw people around the Valley putting together moth-attracting set-ups to see what flies our nightly skies. https://www.stbctmn.org/post/mothing While some moths that were attracted to a blacklight and moth sheet set-up were as tiny as a grain of rice, most had a wingspan…

  • The siren song summer

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    Anita Westervelt

    Story and photos by Anita Westervelt, Texas Master Naturalist Last summer brought us the superb dog-day cicada, Neotibicen superbus and its nostalgic, resonating song. Another Texas songster is filling the night air this summer with decibel-alarming pitch: the giant cicada, Quesada gigas, the widest ranging cicada in the Western Hemisphere — and quite possibly, the…

  • Moth Week project

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    Anita Westervelt

    Set up a simple moth-attracting activity for a summer project             — National Moth Week is July 18 – 26 Story and photos by Anita Westervelt, Texas Master Naturalist The number of moths far outweighs the number of butterflies around the world with a suspected 200,000 species existing to only 17,500 species of butterflies, according…