Here's a field of trees at the top of trail 4.
I believe they are all wafer ashes, and here's their "bloom" which the adults have right now. They're a flat, round paper-like disc the size of a quarter, and they bear more than a passing resemblance to communion wafers.
I don't know how they taste, but I hear it's also known as the hop tree, and that Germans who came to Texas, and found they couldn't grow the hops they were used to, found these to be a substitute. I wonder if any of our local brewers have tried it, or have plans to. I'd try it!
Some of them, however, may not be communion wafers, but a variant with long, thin wafers. This one is right at the creek crossing.
I also declare this particular hike as the Day I Discovered the Hand Lens.
This little beauty had been gathering dust in my backpack for a year.
But I took it out to see if I could take a picture of star moss through it for the newsletter article -and I could!
So I took it out again to see if the knobs on the mimosa tree were buds, or spent blooms. I could tell they were buds - and discovered two tiny irridescent green flies were on the leaves as well.
This caterpillar on the mimosa I could see with my naked eye:
But when I put the hand lens to it, I noticed some leaves folded over -not up, like a venus flytrap, but over and down. And there were more yellow that the normal looking leaves. Looking even closer, I think I saw tiny creatures had folded the leaves around themselves (gads, my thumb looks huge under the lens!).
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