Some Treats to Make You Come in From the Heat and Rest a While!

Here's a link to the story of how a wildlife film maker in Bristol, England, made use of his time during the COVID lockdown, and the discoveries he was able to make in his own yard. Grab your bowl of popcorn and click here to enjoy! The sounds are almost as good as the photography.

After you've enjoyed that visual feast, you might hop over to Sam Drogge's "Eye Candy" page on flickr. His bee pictures allow you to get up close and personal with many of our native bees.

And if you haven't already heard of Carol Leonardi Clark - as a Texas Master Naturalist, a very active member of the Native Plant Society of Texas, as a Monarch Steward working tirelessly as chairperson to Bring Back the Monarchs to Texas, as a math coach, or as an amazing photographer - well, let me hurry up and make the introduction! As you can tell from the few of her many "hats" mentioned here, she's an incredible advocate for the natural world, especially here in Texas, and an all around top-notch human. Check out her blog, Carol's World.

No photos with this post but go on, have a look, and keep coming by for more of what's buzzing!

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A Plant with Purple Leaves

There are a couple of groups on Facebook where I lurk and occasionally dip my opinion into the fray. They're places where people with knowledge of unbelievable scope can be observed, deftly identifying this obscure native plant or that scraggly left-behind orphan found in the backyard of a newly purchased home. One such backyard orphan recently was posted in need of identification. If it were a native plant, two people on "Texas Flora" would've named it within minutes. Even the taxonomy of those impossible grasses is typically put to rest in seconds. Not so with this poor guy. At first I was fairly certain it was one of the purple leafed basils, maybe 'African Blue'. It's fairly impossible to find it still thriving in a Texas January, but two plants in my yard are still hanging in there. They even look like they'll come back if we don't have a deep freeze before spring. BTW, this basil has one heck of a botanical monik

Ho-hum to Habitat: My Path to Native Bees - Resources

San Antonio's Festival of Flowers will resume this Saturday, June 3, 2023, after a break of three years. I've been given the opportunity to share how I garden, as well as a general overview of our native bees. A link to a Google doc containing my handout (the info dense slides from my presentation) follows this list of resources. Note that if you didn't attend, some of the handout pages may not make complete sense. Hyperlinks to more resources: https://www.wildbeestexas.com/ https://w3.biosci.utexas.edu/jha/research/native-bee-communities https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=TX_central https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeginnerBeeFieldGuide_11March2022_LowRez.pdf https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/nongame/native-pollinators/bumblebee-id.phtml https://www.pollinatorphotos.com/ https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yOIlJFjzgAlhc5nfTXkqrVutPxWHLwfQ/vie

Flying Flowers - Butterfly Gardening Handout for Festival of Flowers 2024

Let’s dig into “petals, puddles, and pesticides”. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AkRpm5NGtWnj4aIW1rTnqt7h_w9TpIs2/view?usp=drive_link

Playin' Outside

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