April and May are the months when the bulk of migratory songbirds make their way north to their breeding grounds. Most of these songbirds migrate in fall to areas south of the U.S., but some principally Canadian and/or montane breeders commonly winter in southern Florida in good numbers, such as Palm and Yellow-rumped Warblers. Our […]
Category: Natural History
Retreating North
Although the places we visit and the times we visit them are largely dictated by the plant and animal species we’d like to see, all else being equal, we’d rather be comfortable than uncomfortable. 🙂 To get an idea what parts of the country have a good climate at different times of year, we use […]
The Subtropics
In North America (north of Mexico), there are two regions that are classified as being subtropical: the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV), about which I have written previously, and the southern tip of Florida, including the Keys. Both areas harbor not only a substantial number of plant species not found farther north, but also entire […]
Peninsular Florida
We left off last time with our cycad search in Ocala National Forest. We also enjoyed other sites there and elsewhere in the northern portion of the Florida Peninsula. One exceptional feature of this area and the Panhandle is the limestone karst topography, in which carbon dioxide dissolved in rainwater makes it slightly acidic, and […]
Cycadophyta: Zamiaceae
In the previous post (was it really five weeks ago?), I described our project to try to see native species in 95% of the 252 or so of the native vascular plant families in North America (defined here as that part north of the U.S.-Mexican border). In that post I simplified things by saying that […]
Vascular Plant Family Quest
As mentioned in a post over a year ago, one of our goals in retirement is to track down native species representing vascular plant families that we have not seen before in the continental U.S. and Canada (hereafter, North America). Vascular plants have water-conducting tissues, xylem and phloem, and include groups such as ferns, conifers, […]
Panama!
Since 2004, we have on average taken an international birding trip about once every two years. This year our trip was a two-week jaunt with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours to central Panama. Aside from a couple days in Panama City, our bases of operation were at Canopy Lodge, about 2.5 hours southwest of Panama City, […]
Wander Wrap-Up
It’s been about two months since the last post, and about 5 weeks since we finished our 8-month “wander”, as they say in Australia. We’re now back in El Paso, TX, with plans to hit the road again in mid-January. From Algonquin Provincial Park, in Ontario, we drove to Rochester, NY, on Oct. 2. Along […]
Ontario, A Paddler’s Paradise
After leaving Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, we spent four weeks in the province of Ontario, half of that time along the Canadian shores of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, and half in Algonquin Provincial Park (PP). The locations along the lakeshores were new to us, but Algonquin is one of our most visited […]
MT-ID-WA-OR-ID-WY-MT-ND-MN-MI
In case you didn’t figure it out, the title contains the state abbreviations of our route since the last real travelog blog post about five weeks ago. Whereas our first five months of travel involved many stops and few long drives, the last five weeks have been quite different because of the detour to Oregon […]
Nomadic Naturalists 