Author: Sue Ann (Suna) Kendall

The person behind The Hermits' Rest blog and many others. I'm a certified Texas Master Naturalist and love the nature of Milam County. I manage technical writers in Austin, help with Hearts Homes and Hands, a personal assistance service, in Cameron, and serve on three nonprofit boards. You may know me from La Leche League, knitting, iNaturalist, or Facebook. I'm interested in ALL of you!

Bunny and Friends

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by Donna Lewis

More good stuff outside. Grab your camera and go look.

I had just put out some bird seeds for the squirrels and the Doves. I put some for them on the ground to keep them from crowding the bird feeders.

I don’t know if you are aware of it, but White-tail bunnies (cottontails) like bird seed!  I was surprised also. But they do. They come every day now. I had a hard time getting a photo though, because they wanted to run if I got too close. Sometimes there is a fight between everyone wanting the seeds, including Doves, Cardinals, Blue Jays, squirrels, and many others.

Also, on our front porch is a nest full of baby Phoebes just about ready to leave the nest.

Here’s one of their parents watching them dutifully from our doggie yard.

Then while on my walk, I found a Red-eared Slider laying eggs down by our front gate.

What a Spring and Summer we are having. The rains have produced abundant field grass and insects.  Eat up my friends. And please, eat all the mosquitoes you can!

Remember who’s out there.

Beautiful Moth

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by Donna Lewis

I found this beautiful moth (Antheraea  polyphemus), on our kitchen window.  I took two photos outside and one from inside the house.  It was 5 inches across.

A beauty for sure.  It didn’t like me taking its photo, so it took off right after the last shot.

It’s host plants are ash, birch, grape, pine, maple and other woody plants.

It has two broods per year but it is rarely seen, because it is on trees and hidden from birds.

You just need to always be looking out for Mother Nature’s gifts.

Remember who we garden for.

Native Texas Flower Bed Improving

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By Carolyn Henderson

Progress is being made on the flower bed the chapter voted to develop into a native Texas plot. If faces Travis Street, so those of us who are in downtown Cameron regularly have paid attention to the ongoing battle with the non-planted plants running rampant in it. 

The bed after weeding

Some might call them weeds. But, some of them are native wild flowers that tend to be invasive – in that they overrun everything else around them. For example, Persimmons are coming up repetitively all over that bed, and they are very hard to get up.

Luckily, almost everything we planted has survived and is growing. We plan to plant more things in the  fall with the hopes of all of ours overrunning all he uninvited plants. We could put poison on the interlopers, but we don’t want to risk what we did plant. Mulch is on order to be put down this week.

The photos are from work done today. Jackie Thornton and Liz Lewis, both regulars at the plot, as well as Connie Anderle and Linda Jo Conn did a lot of work on the bed today. We also had an unexpected volunteer – Ed Guerrero – who is a master weed puller. I’m pretty sure we would not have gotten the whole thing done without him.

The weed pullers

Past contributors to the project have been Catherine Johnson, Phyllis Shuffield, and Pamela Neeley. If you can pull a weed, you can volunteer. When we are done, we all go have lunch to celebrate winning this battle against those unwanted invaders.