thebark's Journal

0900 on the last Saturday of the month is the Llano Estacado Audubon Society bird walk, often held at Lubbock Lake Landmark. [Check the LEAS page on Facebook to see where they will meet.]

On the last Saturday in October, 2018, Yellow-crowned Night Herons were seen along with a Belted Kingfisher at the dig site, but in the trees near the entrance to the visitor's center there were a couple of Ruby-Crowned Kinglets and a Vireo.

Don't assume that birds are not to be found close to the building!

And of course out on the short grass range there are sparrows. My last sparrow sighting there was a Savannah.

The posting of roadkill observations upsets me. Unreasonably so, I guess. Documenting roadkill in species and numbers is a perfectly legitimate scientific method of sampling animal life in a region, though it does have limitations, since some species are more likely to be roadkill than others. Still...

We are in the sixth wave. We are part of it. The sixth wave being not only a matter of tigers and Indian rhinoceros and spotted owls and so on, but of what have been among the most common animal species fairly low down the food chain. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/?utm_term=.b27c74fd52dd

What we do here at iNaturalist is to act as eulogists testifying to what was and is becoming not. Or witnesses to a crime. Or co-perps. Take your choice.

Interesting. https://www.inverse.com/article/49975-utah-s-pando-aspen-clone-is-dying One wonders if certain fungi might challenge for that title.