Doeskin Ranch

Click for greater clarity and considerably larger size.

It’s winter in Austin now, although you who live up north would have a hard time recognizing our milder weather as winter (the high temperature the last two days was in the 60s, for example). That said, even here there are fewer wildflowers now than at any other time of year, so, as you’ve already seen with the recently posted picture of a four-nerve daisy, I thought I’d take advantage of this slack season to show a few more of the many photographs I took last year that I didn’t manage to squeeze in sooner.

On August 31st of 2012 I spent some time wandering at the Doeskin Ranch, a nature preserve in Burnet County about an hour northwest of Austin. Although we had a normal amount of rain in central Texas last year, the pond at the former ranch had lost some of its water, and that drop in the water level exposed a ring of Chara algae around the pond. Green is the normal color of the algae, while white indicates that it has dried out.

If you’d like a straight-down and much closer look at some of this algae, I invite you to click the icon below. You’ll find that the stuff looks like noodles, but I don’t know if those would-be noodles are edible or palatable.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman