Lately I have been scanning in some of my old field journals so that I can store them more effectively digitally and so that I can share some of the data that I have with some of my colleagues. It has reminded me that I used to be pretty decent at writing in my field journal and over the years I have gotten out of the habit of keeping one. There are a lot of reasons for it but in the end I feel like I need to make an attempt to write down more of my thoughts when I take my hikes or field trips to observe nature. I am going to give it a go with the iNaturalist journal because I can link all of my observations from the day.

Date: April 10, 2019
Location: Texas: Travis County: Austin: Baurle Ranch Green Belt Park

This morning I decided to take a walk in the green belt of my neighborhood. I walk in it often but I had more time than usual and so decided to make a morning out of it. The park is shaped like a doughnut with some development in the middle of it and so I decided to walk the entire perimeter of the "doughnut".

I started around 0900 and I didn't get back until about 1230.

Conditions: The weather was perfect. It was 23 degrees Celsius when I started (0905) and it climbed to 31 degrees by 1130. The sky was absolutely clear and there was a light breeze. It rained this past weekend quite a bit so all of the low lying areas either had water in them or were muddy. Several of the trails were muddy as well. There are two "permanent" bodies of water in this park on the North and East sides of the park and they were full and overflowing. The stream that runs through the southern portion of the park is usually dry but it had a decent amount of water in it today. I took a picture of the mosquito larva already in it (there were 10s of thousands of them!). I felt like running to the pet store and buying gold fish and dumping them in the water (I would never do that but it is going to be a very mosquito infested area soon).

Notes: Despite the beautiful day today I only saw one other person on the trail for the entire 3 hours. This was a rarity and I really enjoyed it.

My goal today was to try and get a few pictures of birds and then like always I ended up photographing anything that I ran across that I thought was interesting. Some of the notable observations for me today included the large bullfrog (I had heard it calling before I found him), the Echinocereus cactus that I hadn't seen before (there was quite a large stand of it), the little wood satyr butterfly that was in a stand of cedar trees and the completely white bluebonnet flowers (there where 2 of them).

Today I had gone to a new part of the park that I didn't know existed and it took me to a wooded area that is technically outside of the greenbelt park on the north side. It was notable because it was a much thicker stand of trees than the other areas and so had a lot more shade and that is where I got a picture of the little wood satyr butterfly which likes those conditions. It was also shady enough that there was quite a bit of moss on fallen logs there too. This is not the case in the rest of the greenbelt park.

All-in-all it was a great day. I added a couple of new plants to my list of observations that I hadn't seen before and I also added the little wood satyr as well.

Here is a link to the park in google maps https://www.google.com/maps/@30.1667111,-97.8481066,15.72z

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