On the way from the Missouri Ozarks to the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, we spent two days in southern Illinois, as it was not much out of the way, and we’d done no field work in that state before, just driven across it a number of times. We visited […]
Ozarks and Ouachitas
Eileen is a Civil War aficionado, and had been looking forward to visiting some battlefields she had not previously seen. So we spent the first four days after leaving Alabama touring four battlefields at Shiloh, TN; Corinth, MS; Davis Bridge, TN; and Brice’s Crossroads, MS (listed in chronological order of the battles). The National Historic […]
Uplift Can Be So … Uplifting
Alabama proved to be a very interesting place to botanize, in part because of its diverse geology. We visited seven areas in the northern part of the state, some principally limestone (producing neutral to somewhat alkaline conditions) and others primarily sandstone or granite (both usually acidic). A key event in the geological history of the […]
Songbird Migration
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 […]
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, […]
Nomadic Naturalists 