We’ve stayed close to home this week, digging our way out of the work that piled up after nine days at the beach, and avoiding unnecessary excursions out into the coronavirus hot spot urban Austin has become. But there’s plenty of wildlife to take notice of, even in the 200 feet I walk from our house to the old Airstream trailer I use as my office. Lately I’ve started to pay more attention to the Halloween pennants that seem to be everywhere this summer, especially in our wild yard. We see a tremendous diversity of dragonflies and mayflies here above the urban river, but these are the ones we see most often in the pocket prairie we have growing around our house and on our roof. The Halloween pennants in our yard are not as orange as the name suggests, or as the photos in the guidebooks evidence, but they seem bigger (maybe it’s a Texas thing), and their tiger-striped wings make them easy to spot, even in motion.
Mastodon Chiclets and heavy metal bumblebees
Mastodon Chiclets and heavy metal bumblebees
Mastodon Chiclets and heavy metal bumblebees
We’ve stayed close to home this week, digging our way out of the work that piled up after nine days at the beach, and avoiding unnecessary excursions out into the coronavirus hot spot urban Austin has become. But there’s plenty of wildlife to take notice of, even in the 200 feet I walk from our house to the old Airstream trailer I use as my office. Lately I’ve started to pay more attention to the Halloween pennants that seem to be everywhere this summer, especially in our wild yard. We see a tremendous diversity of dragonflies and mayflies here above the urban river, but these are the ones we see most often in the pocket prairie we have growing around our house and on our roof. The Halloween pennants in our yard are not as orange as the name suggests, or as the photos in the guidebooks evidence, but they seem bigger (maybe it’s a Texas thing), and their tiger-striped wings make them easy to spot, even in motion.