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 […]
Category: Natural History
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 […]
A Brief Prelude
Eileen and I were originally scheduled to leave El Paso and start a 9-month road trip in mid-January but we both experienced a string of medical issues that prevented us from departing until late February. This left us less than four weeks before we were scheduled to fly to Ghana in West Africa for a […]
Oaxaca at Christmas
Since the last blog post at the end of our 2021 road trip, we’ve been in El Paso, and most of my time has been spent doing research and planning for 2022. This has been made much more complicated by the pandemic for several reasons. First, accessability of destinations, such as remote areas of Canada, […]
A Year of Profoundly Uncomfortable Camping
After finishing up Southeast Arizona, we spent a few days in New Mexico looking for genera before a break in El Paso. We stayed a couple nights in nifty City of Rocks State Park, where we found three target genera and recorded bats, documenting three species not listed for the park (Pallid Bat, Fringed Myotis, […]
Monsoonal Madness
We left northern New Mexico on August 4, heading towards the borderlands to look for plants dependent on monsoonal rains. On the way, we drove through Petrified Forest National Park to look for Parryella filifolia, a pea family shrub, which we easily located. Trees and shrubs can usually be identified even if not flowering or […]
Chiroptera Chronicles
We left El Paso on July 9, spending 6 days in the Trans-Pecos of Texas, followed by three weeks in New Mexico. Our first day and night were in the Davis Mountains, where we were unsuccessful in our first three plant genus searches, despite the floral displays being quite good from recent rains. But at […]
Jackrabbit Habit
This blog post covers just 9 days in the field, June 1 – 9, during which we did a loop from El Paso to Southeast Arizona and back, looking for more new native vascular plant genera. In gorgeous White Sands National Park, New Mexico, which features the largest gypsum dune field in the world, we […]
An East-West Transect Across Texas
Our last week at High Island was generally disappointing. We stayed through the morning of the 7th, about 5 days longer than tentatively planned, because of favorable wind forecasts on the 6th. We were hoping to see a rare May day with good trans-Gulf migrant numbers, plus perhaps some of the later circum-Gulf migrants like […]
Nomadic Naturalists 