Drying leaf tip from the Bojo Nature Reserve on December 17th

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Back to my roots on the Bojo River

Okay, so I don’t have family roots along the Bojo River in Aloguinsan on the island of Cebu in the Philippines, but I do have pictures of some wonderfully intricate tree roots from our December 17th boat tour of the river.

Did you notice the snail under the frontmost limb in the third picture?
Click below for more detail.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Spiraling leaf tip at the Bojo Nature Reserve on December 17th

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Brickellia flowering in January

Brickell-bush, Brickellia cylindracea, is a wildflower I don’t see as often as many others. One field guide describes it as having unbranched, upright stalks. I’ll go for unbranched, but in this case the two stalks I found were lying inconspicuously on the ground. Maybe I wouldn’t’ve have noticed them if I hadn’t stopped on January 18th to photograph the adjacent goldeneye and boneset that you’ve seen in recent posts. The profile above shows that even mature flower heads stay mostly closed. The view below gives you a better look at the disk flowers; there are no ray flowers in this genus. The brown in the background came from a bed of fallen leaves—this is January, after all—and adds to the mood (or moodiness) of the two portraits.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Sinuous leaf tip at the Bojo Nature Reserve on December 17th

A close view at f/4 makes for a shallow depth of field.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Fronds

Fronds caught my attention at the Bojo River Nature Reserve in Aloguinsan on December 17th.

The challenge was finding good ways to fill a rectangle.

In the last picture I took a different approach.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Bojo River

On our trip to the Philippines we visited the Bojo [pronounced Boho] River Nature Reserve in Aloguinsan on the west side of Cebu. Local residents of what was (and still is) a fishing village have been recruited to guide eco-tours of the Bojo River, and that’s how Eve and I found ourselves on December 17th in a slender outrigger being paddled down the quiet river on a leisurely ride. What botanical purpose the “partially overlapping pancakes” serve in the second picture, I have no idea.

We approached the farthest point on the tour as we neared the place where the Bojo River empties into the Tañon Strait. The rocks on the river banks get steeper there, as the next three pictures confirm.

The “bathtub rings” in the final two photos show how much the river rises and falls with the incoming tide.

Eventually the water got choppy, and it probably wouldn’t have been safe to go farther in such a small boat.
In the distance we could see the island of Negros.

Upcoming posts will bring you more pictures from the Bojo River Nature Reserve.

©2020 Steven Schwartzman

Another native species flowering in Austin in January

It’s not unusual to see the shrubby boneset plants (Ageratina havanensis) in northwest Austin flowering in January as a continuation of the bloom season that began in the fall. The bushes of that species along Floral Park Drive in my neighborhood were still putting out new buds and flowers on January 18th, as you see here.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Lambug Beach

After our December 16th visit to Kawasan Falls we drove north to Lambug Beach, which provides a view westward across the Tañon Strait to the island of Negros.

Mostly I took the opportunity to do closeups of small things that had washed up on the beach.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Kawasan Falls

On December 16th we crossed over to the west side of Cebu and went down to Kawasan Falls. It swarmed with tourists, the people who run it charge for every little thing, and the water has been partially diverted from the falls. Nevertheless, here are two views of the place, one vertical and the other horizontal, one full-length and the other truncated, one at a slow shutter speed and the other at a high shutter speed.

Here’s the area adjacent to the falls:

On the walk back I couldn’t help noticing a decaying palm frond in the river that flows out from the falls.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman