I welcome January — Ordinary Time. The hustle and bustle of Hallowe’en-to-New-Year run now behind us. Now it’s time to plan new ideas, and refresh old ones – get out a new note pad, select new pen colors for 2016 and jot down ideas. Some of my ideas are: 1. What to write about next…

As the year wraps up, our 2015 new members end their first year, here’s a recap of what they may have learned: January – Not all debris should be cleared. Many now know to leave rotting logs and fallen branches no matter how tempting it is to make a nature preserve look as neat as…

November through February is tree-planting time in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The perfect umbrella-shaped canopy of the potato tree, Solanum erianthum, caught my eye. All the Valley nature park butterfly gardens have one, so it must be important. I bought a small, shapely tree. Not one to accurately judge future spatial relationships, I planted…

For those interested in a small, colorful butterfly and hummingbird garden, I’ve listed what’s planted around my potato tree in a 10- by 30-foot plot (listed mostly by height, definitely not by girth of adult plants): Caesalpinia, Caesalpinia Mexicana – attracts hummingbirds and butterflies Potato tree, Solanum erianthum, — all sorts of fun. See “Consider…

The ever-changing disguises of dicliptera, Dicliptera sexangularis, make it a great candidate for the dodge and evade of spy work. The Thursday Ramsey volunteer team has displaced cart-loads of dicliptera since March. At first, there were a lot of questions, mostly, “Is this dicliptera?” “Yes,” we’d say. Cloaked in different attire throughout the year, it’s…

I stumbled onto a murder mystery series the year I joined RGVCTMN and the Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society. The protagonist is Bob White, an avid birder living in Minnesota, who adds spice to his birding adventures by finding dead bodies and then helping police solve the crimes. Jan Dunlap is the author. The series was…