Out on a jog again today…I love how the bare branches stand out, stark and netlike, against the sky. There was a mossy, green log and the remains of a stump spiking up in a trinity against the silhouette of the fallen top.
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Pine plantings often remind me of gothic church buttresses. The middle is a natural pot of moss, lichen and fern in a pine stump. In the last, a swamp with grass clumps dotted among what remains of the snow today.
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Thank you for these!
How are you feeling these days? I’ve not been keeping up well.
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Mostly well. My voice is still cutting out randomly and changing pitch without my control. Ribs still hurt. But I stopped taking the pain pills after like 4 days. I’m not weight lifting or running really but I’m still going out on 10+ mile hikes a few times a week.
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I’m glad you’re improving. The coughing is incredible.
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That’s basically the only movie advertisement I’ve ever seen that actually made the movie look interesting.
Yeah it was a decent prehistoric survivalist horror. But a big part of me seeing it was the fact it was close to the naval live oak trails near gulf breeze which is about 2 hours away. So I rarely make it over there. It’s also close to this really good Japanese restaurant that a friend works at. So I got there early and talked with them. Then watched the movie. Then went and got some food and talked with them again there. Then went on a hike for a few hours and just got back.
Seems to be some weird form of the tricholoma caligotum. May even be a tricholoma aff. Caligotum.
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Today was pretty fun. I wandered onto an abandoned golf course that has been left alone for at least 11 years other than annual bush hogging. Saw a dead pine in the distance and walked to it and begin peeling off lose bark. Found a little baby cornsnake.
But even better, saw what I think is a couple but I’m not sure with fishing poles headed towards a pond hidden on the course. They were about 100 feet away and so I walked like 20 towards them and asked if they like snakes and they said yeah. Turned out the girl was an actual herper and the guy did it for a hobby and is a professional extreme weather photographer and has tons of super cool shots of tornadoes and lightening storms and they travel around USA quite a bit chasing weather things and snakes lol. Got their info and they come here quite a bit since the girl lives here. The dude lives in Ohio. So made two new friends to chill with while hiking.
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What kind of snake is this beauty?
It’s a baby cornsnake. It’s Pantherophis guttatus, same
Genus as the rat snake. This may be Pantherophis guttatus subsp. guttatus“ not to sure.
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I’ve been noticing that some plants and animals here are acting as though it’s spring already. It made me wonder how the balance of nature will shift with some species reacting to the shift in climate while others are stuck depending on the calendar: the species stirring here have cycles that depend on temperature, while the others depend on the amount of light each day, and those are no longer in sync as they used to be.
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I’ve been too busy lately to do much photographically, but I did grab something from the front yard after getting home from work. This is all that’s left of our complete flop of a nor’easter.
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I’m glad we had a flop of an ice storm! I’ve experienced two where the ice was so thick it could be walked on even where it was on grass that was four inches high, and while they were entertaining when I was a college student (and suitable for some serious pranks), I’m not really interested in spending a week needing shoes with spikes to walk to the store (which I did in college; I just dug out my high school track shoes and put in the set of long spikes).
Now if we were to get one of the old-times snowstorms that dumped over a foot and a half of snow on us, that I’d love!
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Another eastern bark centipede I found while hiking today. Quite a large one. This is one of the centipede species known to have sexual dimorphism in their toxins. Males and females have different toxins. Their faces, if you remove the pinchers and the antennas , kind of looks like a little seals face to me.
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We had quite a beautiful, heavy snow on Thursday. The weather has become colder lately–still 5 degrees warmer than a usual February, though, I suspect. It’s only the second time I’ve really had to snowblow the driveway this winter–which is really unusual.
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Awesome centipede! They are much bigger than anything I see here. As a child, I visited an area in Nigeria that got a lot more rainfall than we did (we were in the Sahel, nearer to the Sahara), and discovered some huge centipedes and even some millipedes like that…lots of fun. @LM77 would probably have some good centipede stories.
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One of the Jelly Babies. [ leotia genus ] It’s a jelly mushroom thats shaped like typical capped mushrooms but has no gills. I was thinking it’s the Orche Jelly Club mushroom. (orche for the color, jelly for the type and club because it grows in clusters) But a mycologist from the Alabama mushroom Society informed me that recently it’s been realized color alone can’t ID these. You must check fresh colors and then dry them and check the dry colors and even then it is iffy since 1-2 of the mushrooms may get split into additional species. But it was my first time finding the genus and I’m glad .
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We got cold enough for snow, with howling winds that reminded me of a Thanksgiving blizzard that descended on us one year in grad school, but all we got was the wind, no snow; indeed not even any ice – just dry howling cold.
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We had that for one Christmas Birdcount–a cold front coming through, so the high (5 C/40 F)was at 5 am, and the low was at 4 pm (-10C/14 F); with wind gusting from 9 m/s to 18 m/s; thus a wind chill dropping to -23 C/-9 F during gusts.
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