Author: Anita Westervelt
-
Anita’s Blog — The Winter of the Birds
This has been an exciting winter on the Resaca. Our little horseshoe lake, as the map calls it, has attracted new visitors. Last year, an Osprey moved in. He’s commandeered a wonderful perch on a dead branch of a huge mesquite tree between the driveway and the Resaca. On sunny days, I see him…
-
Anita’s Blog — Harbingers of Spring
If you ask the trees in Ramsey Park which blooms announce a Rio Grande Valley spring, the Texas huisache, Acacia farnesiana, will say they are the traditional harbingers of spring. Pink Mint, Stachys drummondii, also pushing out their tiny pink blooms typically announce spring from the lower realm of native plants. In the real…
-
Anita’s Blog — Terminology is a Beautiful Thing
Exact terminology is important when words are defined in regard to specific disciplines. For those logophiles (people who love words) who insist on knowing, without question, what something means in context to what one is learning, here are words commonly encountered when listening to native plant lectures or reading favorite plant books. Native —…
-
Anita’s Blog — The Vultures are Back!
“I like vultures,” a friend said when I mentioned my blog idea. “They kettle and they’re easily identified.” They are, except when not yet in full adult uniform and hulking on a dead mesquite branch, head hunched Dracula-cape-esque. A sight I had one morning exiting the garage. Up close, the hulk was huge. Condor…
-
Anita’s Blog — Nature’s Wicked Spooky Fun House
Black cats, jack-o-lanterns, spooky noises and folklore signify the fun fall festival of Hallowe’en. If you use your imagination, nature has its own fall fun, depending on which side of the prickle you find yourself. Let your imagination wander along a shadowy walk under a waning moon through a Rio Grande Valley thorn-scrub forest.…
-
Anita’s Blog — Ebony Loop Surprises
There are always surprises around Ebony Loop as we volunteers move from one garden to another. Ebony Loop is one of the trails at the south side of Harlingen’s Hugh Ramsey Nature Park. Rio Grande Valley Chapter, Texas Master Naturalists and a couple of friends of the park tend specialty gardens each Thursday morning…