This is an archive of articles written by Anita Westervelt between 2015 and 2021 for the Rio Grande Valley Chapter, Texas Master Naturalist. To focus on the most current information, these earlier articles were retired from the original site. We are pleased to provide a permanent home for them here. Please note that the articles are preserved mainly in their original form and may contain outdated information or links. For Anita’s current work, please visit the South Texas Border Chapter’s blog: stbctmn.org/blog.
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Anita’s Blog — A Newcomer’s Year
As the year wraps up, our 2015 new members end their first year, here’s a recap of what they may have learned: January – Not all debris should be cleared. Many now know to leave rotting logs and fallen branches no matter how tempting it is to make a nature preserve look as neat as…
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Anita’s Blog — Consider the Potato Tree
November through February is tree-planting time in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The perfect umbrella-shaped canopy of the potato tree, Solanum erianthum, caught my eye. All the Valley nature park butterfly gardens have one, so it must be important. I bought a small, shapely tree. Not one to accurately judge future spatial relationships, I planted…
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Anita’s Blog — Potato Tree Companions
For those interested in a small, colorful butterfly and hummingbird garden, I’ve listed what’s planted around my potato tree in a 10- by 30-foot plot (listed mostly by height, definitely not by girth of adult plants): Caesalpinia, Caesalpinia Mexicana – attracts hummingbirds and butterflies Potato tree, Solanum erianthum, — all sorts of fun. See “Consider…
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Anita’s Blog — Dicliptera Would Make a Good Spy
The ever-changing disguises of dicliptera, Dicliptera sexangularis, make it a great candidate for the dodge and evade of spy work. The Thursday Ramsey volunteer team has displaced cart-loads of dicliptera since March. At first, there were a lot of questions, mostly, “Is this dicliptera?” “Yes,” we’d say. Cloaked in different attire throughout the year, it’s…
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Anita’s Blog — Murder Mystery at Estero
I stumbled onto a murder mystery series the year I joined RGVCTMN and the Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society. The protagonist is Bob White, an avid birder living in Minnesota, who adds spice to his birding adventures by finding dead bodies and then helping police solve the crimes. Jan Dunlap is the author. The series was…
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Anita’s Blog — Interesting Visitor to Zizotes Garden
Greg Storms was the first to point out the giant wasp while we prepped an area prior to planting our cache of zizotes, Asclepias oenotheroides, the milkweed at the new Zizotes Circle garden in Harlingen’s Hugh Ramsey Nature Park. “Tarantula wasp,” he said. We didn’t doubt him for a second — the thing was as…
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Anita’s blog — Zizotes
As the Thursday RGVCTMN crew of Ramsey Park volunteers finished a project, we ended up with a small clearing ready for re-vegetation. Before we could contemplate what to plant, a surprise visitor appeared. We saw him talking with Frank Wiseman, and then he was gone. However, he had kindly offered us some milkweed plants.…
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Anita’s Blog – A Sunning of Cormorants
One of the first birds I was close enough to photograph, after moving to the Valley, was a Neotropic Cormorant, Phalacrocorax brasilianus. I had no idea what it was. Nor had I ever been close to a bird that big and that had such a wicked-looking, er . . . smile. I admit, I was…
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Anita’s Blog – I’ve Not Seen an Alligator in Ramsey Park
It’s rather fun digging in the soil in Ramsey Park. What once was a landfill is now covered with more than 250 species of plants native to the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Sure, there are pockets of dastardly Guinea grass, but that can be dug up easily enough with a garden fork (and a lot…