July: Vernon Parish

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I love birds. If you’re following this blog, you know that I love to photograph and count birds. But birds are not my sole winged passion. As soon as spring is in sight, I’ll be bugging my friend Craig Marks, who has written THE book on butterflies in Louisiana, to publish the upcoming summer’s butterfly count schedule. I’ll be on as many of those counts as I can manage, time wise. Thus it was that last July, I participated in the annual butterfly count in Vernon Parish. That count begins at Allen Acres, a B&B run by my friend Dr….

July: Count Them if You Can

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Hot. July 2023 was hot, hot, hot. It is perfectly sane and respectable to just stay indoors in Louisiana in a normal July, and July 2023 was hotter than most. But you can’t see or count butterflies indoors, so…. a bunch of the incurable fortify themselves with bottles of water, field hats, and energy snacks, and out they go. July 31, 2022 – Knowing which flowers to plant is hugely helpful if you want to attract butterflies to your home, and Charles Allen wrote a book about it!* So counting butterflies at Allen Acres is great fun. Beauties like this…

May: All God’s Children…

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…get to sing in my choir! But fair warning to you snake phobes: Don’t click on this one, unless you want to see a lovely butterfly bad enough to also see a beautiful snake! May 1, 2022 – Once again I am driving slowly through Tensas River NWR, probably scanning the roadsides for birds, deer, wild turkey, maybe a bobcat or a bear–any of the things one can see in Tensas. Suddenly it struck me that I had just driven over something on the road. I hit the brake and checked my rear view mirror. Is that a snake? On,…