We’ve just returned from a 12-day camping trip, visiting west Texas and the southern reaches of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. On this trip, wedged between two birding tours to South America, we reached a milestone that has me thinking about the various natural history goals that Eileen and I have had over the years. […]
Category: Natural History
Northeastern Brazil
We took two back-to-back birding tours from Jan. 18 – Feb. 18 with Field Guides, Inc. (Nowhere but Northeast Brazil and Bahia Birding Bonanza). These tours visited the states of Pernambuco, Ceara, and Bahia in northeastern Brazil, with the bulk of the time spent in the latter. These areas are well southeast of the mouth […]
Zealandia
Zealandia is essentially a submerged continent about half the size of Australia. It is a piece of crust that broke away from Gondwanaland, the great southern supercontinent, about 80 million years ago, and subsequently subsided. About 94% of Zealandia lies below sea level. New Zealand, comprising 5.4% of Zealandia, lies about 1300 miles southeast of […]
Genus Searches, Part 2: Florida Keys to Panhandle, and Home
This blog post covers the month from Sept. 9 to Oct. 9, during which we sought new vascular plant genera starting in the Florida Keys, working north along Florida’s Atlantic Coast (with occasional inland forays), then west across its Panhandle, and back home to El Paso, TX. During this period we conducted 53 searches, of […]
Genus Searches, Part 1: Florida Gulf Coast and Everglades
We drove from Rochester, NY to northeast Florida in three days, arriving on Aug. 8, and the next day started on an intensive series of genus searches that will take about two months. This post covers our first 30 days, during which time we conducted 55 searches, 34 of which were successful (64%, a good […]
Jaguars in the Pantanal of Brazil
This short trip, July 15 – 26, was a birding tour with Field Guides, Inc. (link), led by Marcelo Padua. We were especially pleased to join our friends Terry and Rhys again for another birding adventure. The trip visited the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, in the south-central part of the country, and approximately in […]
Delmarva Peninsula and North
After leaving the Allegheny Plateau of West Virginia on May 30, we headed for the Delmarva Peninsula, named for the three states that encompass it, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. It is separated from the “mainland” by Chesapeake Bay, so it has extensive marshes on the west side, and fine ocean beaches, including a superb array […]
Appalachia
We left the coastal plain of North Carolina on May 12, visiting Carver Creek State Park (SP) in the Piedmont the next day. Here we successfully searched for Nestronia umbellula, a new genus for us, and a hemiparasitic shrub in family Santalaceae, which includes mistletoes. A hemiparasite derives some nutrients by parasitizing other plants, often […]
Carnivorous Plants
In the month since our last blog post, we have been exploring the Coastal Plain from northern Florida to North Carolina. After recovering from Ghana, we had a couple of weeks to kill before starting a series of searches for new plant genera (otherwise, we might have been too early to see them flowering). We […]
Ghana
We’ve just returned from a three-week trip to Ghana in West Africa, on a birding tour with Field Guides, Inc. Ghana is currently probably the best country to visit in West Africa for natural history pursuits. This was only our second trip to Africa, the first being four weeks in Kenya in 2006. The only […]
Nomadic Naturalists 