Archivos de Diario para julio 2018

lunes, 23 de julio de 2018

It's July!

At the time of my last post (at the end of May), I had just finished exploring most of Memorial Park, including the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center. Since then, I've explored pretty much all of Buffalo Bayou Park and east into Downtown Houston where Buffalo Bayou meets White Oak Bayou (the founding site of the city). The Arboretum also re-opened a newly redeveloped area that includes a couple of big new ponds and grasslands/wetlands, and I've explored those quite a bit, too. I've also started to explore parts of Hermann Park and have been retracing some of my previous outings in Memorial Park just to see what's changed.

The weather has changed quite a bit since my last post. It's now routinely in the high 90s (Fahrenheit) in the daytime, which means that I'm usually soaked by the time I've finished taking photos. There have been long stretches of dry days alternating with long stretches of rainy days, plus really heavy rain on July 4th that flooded a lot of the city, including Buffalo Bayou Park. (I've gone back to the Park once after the floods, and there are several sections that were newly fenced off, in addition to the sections that had been fenced off since Hurricane Harvey.) Lately, it's been fairly hazy, too, with lots of dust blowing in from the Sahara desert.

In total, I've made 419 observations since my last post. As in my last post, I'm including my favorite observations from each of my outings, but I also wanted to note few things that have stuck in my mind since my last post:

  1. Things can change dramatically in a just a short amount of time. In July, I tried to retrace a May outing in the Hogg Woods / Triangle portion of Memorial Park, and it was totally different. Grass that was ankle-high in May had grown so tall and dense in one area that I decided it was better to turn around than to be surprised by snakes. The ground skinks and tiger beetles that scurried about as I walked along the trail in May had been replaced by grasshoppers and moths. In general, there don't seem to be as many flowers as in the spring, but the plants are definitely still getting bigger, and there's a lot more animal activity.
  2. I'm still discovering something new (to me) with each outing. It's not just new species but new life stages within species and, probably most interesting, new behaviors and interactions. I think one of my favorite observations is one that I didn't realize I had even captured until I was reviewing photos back home. I was taking pictures of some herons in watering hole, and I noticed that several different birds had congregated together in a small area, which I hadn't seen before. I thought it was a territorial dispute, which would have been interesting, but it turns out they were actually ganging up on a big water snake, which was something I never expected that birds would do.
  3. Life can be tough sometimes. I've noticed a surprising number of insects that are missing legs or have broken wings or other broken parts. And yet they keep going. Or even in death, they still help other organisms go on. I'd always understood this was the case conceptually, but I don't think I'd ever really seen this in action.
  4. There's so much life that can happen in a small space. Even without getting down to the level of bacteria, I've seen so much happening on just a leaf in a pond or on a flower. During my first visit to take photos at Buffalo Bayou Park, I remember spending lots of time taking pictures at a random small, muddy pool in the path, where lots of different insects came to drink or gather mud. Later on, I walked over to the Waugh St. Bridge over Buffalo Bayou looking for bats and discovered that there were also lots of swallows nesting under the bridge and starlings, too. There were also lots of herons fishing in the bayou below, which I suppose means lots of fish and other creatures in the water there.

As usual, the iNaturalist community has been very helpful, and I'm starting to become familiar with individual personalities. I've also started to use more power features of the system. There wasn't an existing Place for Buffalo Bayou Park. So I created one, along with a few others, so that I can more easily follow what's being observed in those places. I learned from another user how to query identifications (https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?user_id=pisum&for=others), which helps me find past identifications a little more easily than using the standard interface. I've also started using some Observation Fields, which are useful, too, though I haven't fully figured out how to query against them, other then by clicking on an existing Observation Field in an observation, which is fine for now but lacks customizability. I'll figure it out one day...

Publicado el lunes, 23 de julio de 2018 a las 03:09 AM por pisum pisum | 18 observaciones | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

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