Author: Anita Westervelt
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Anita’s Blog — Papillionian Peculiarities
It’s November and I’ve never seen so many butterflies in Harlingen’s Hugh Ramsey Nature Park! First Fridays (from now through May 2019) begin at 9 a.m. with a Guided Native Plant Walk around Ebony Loop — a one-quarter mile, level caliche trail in the above mentioned park. Every month is different because of what…
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Anita’s Blog — Feed the Butterflies
September’s rain has done a tremendous favor for our fall kaleidoscope of butterflies. It’s created a burst of blooms in our native plant communities. More blooms, more butterflies. If you haven’t given this a thought, the opposite is true in drought years. No rain, no blooms, — butterflies go elsewhere to seek nectar in…
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Anita’s Blog — Easy Bat Habitat
Torrents of rain come to the Rio Grande Valley once or twice a year. After a few days, the air is thick with hordes of mosquitoes. There’s no escaping — except to run screaming into a building swatting at your bare skin. Nighttime comes; bats awaken, unfold their mammalian wings and soar through fields,…
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Anita’s Blog — All in a Row
August and September are family reunion months. Clans get together all over the country catching up on family members not seen for a year. It’s no different on the resacas around San Benito. Mexican Black-bellied Whistling Ducks have arrived en masse as they do every year. Sure, bird migration is all about the food.…
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Anita’s Blog: Cane toad — as toads go, it’s a giant
The largest toad in the world calls the extreme south of Texas home. The cane toad (Rhinella marina), also known as giant toad, neo-tropical toad or marine toad, is a large land toad native in the Rio Grande Valley, south to Mexico and into Central and South America. Cane toads are in the Bufonidae family…
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Anita’s Blog – Dried and Salted
There are three salt lakes in the Valley. That’s where the latest road trip saw freelance travel writer and fellow Texas Master Naturalist Eileen Mattei and me. We ventured to the closest one very early one morning — the one with the shortest hike from the parking lot — La Sal del Rey, 18…