On Saturday April 18, 2020 I met a couple Hill Country Conservancy staff members at their Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve for the second virtual tour. (The first tour has not yet been edited or posted anywhere besides as ephemeral "stories" on Instagram.) I hope to update this post and my previous post when these videos are edited and online.
It was a fun morning! We spent about 3 hours covering just 1.25 miles of trail on the preserve. When I first arrived I was excited to find a few patches of Antelope Horns milkweed, and one of them had two Monarch butterfly caterpillars on it!
Throughout the morning we got to hear several bird songs and calls that we recorded little segments about.
It was remarkable to find two different White-tailed Deer antler sheds. One was pretty fresh and the other was old. The old one showed lots of gnaw marks from rodents supplementing their diet with minerals from the old antler:
We left both antlers where we found them for future gnawings!
We ended the walk locating a Catalpa tree that I first found when it was just 4 feet tall back in 2013. Now it's 15 feet tall and it was covered in white flowers!
We found 24 species of birds on this morning. Here's my complete eBird list.
Here are a few more photos on Flickr.
Attached are the same photos as iNat observations.
And here's a video summary of the walk that HCC posted on Instagram.
HCC posted the edited video on YouTube. I'm embedding it here:
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
I was excited to see half a dozen patches of Antelope Horn milkweed near the stone benches. And one of them had two Monarch butterfly caterpillars on it!
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
Near the gate in the eastern oak-juniper habitat we found a tree I first found in 2013. (See it as a small sapling here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/274203) Wow, what a tree it has grown into! And I've never seen it flowering before!
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
Amazingly, we found two shed White-tailed Deer antlers this morning. One was a recent shed in the deciduous woods habitat. The other was this quite old one. And this old one is covered with chew marks from rodents supplementing their diet with minerals from the antler.
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
Our second caterpillar of the morning was on this sensitive plant AKA mimosa. The bright pink spherical flowers caught our eye and then we saw a dark caterpillar eating one of them. It's a Yellow-striped Armyworm Moth (Spodoptera ornithogalli).
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
Our second caterpillar of the morning was on this sensitive plant AKA mimosa. The bright pink spherical flowers caught our eye and then we saw a dark caterpillar eating one of them. It's a Yellow-striped Armyworm Moth (Spodoptera ornithogalli).
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
I was excited to see half a dozen patches of Antelope Horn milkweed near the stone benches. And one of them had two Monarch butterfly caterpillars on it!
Taken during the second virtual tour of Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve.
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