Nature | February 2026

 My favorite picture of this month's collection is the first picture of the Yucca seeds pod. 

This time of year is pretty brown outside. I found some oak galls on an oak sapling. My sons had fun opening them and finding a little wasp pupa (I missed my chance to get a picture of the pupa.)

There are a lot of dried Yucca stalks around our lot. I thought the seed pods looked interesting from these angles.

There are a variety of birds that are active now. I hear woodpeckers in the mornings again. One morning I went outside to jump on our trampoline and found it riddled with these seeds and bird droppings. I deduced that the birds must sit in the branches above and snack and poop out these seeds. I admit the seeds were quite annoying underfoot while they looked pretty interesting. After I had some pictures I looked up some references to find out that these are Hackberry tree seeds.

The explanation for what happened with January's nature pictures is that I was able to capture some beautiful pictures of a gorgeous sunrise when we were in Canada. The morning was so memorable that I wanted to commemorate it with a few verses of poetry. I worked for a whole week on the poem to go with the pictures. After dedicating so much time to the poem I wanted a little recognition so I found a few literary magazines to submit my poem. The catch is that they don't want the poem to be published anywhere else before submission. I didn't want to publish the pictures on my blog without the poem and I can't include the poem until I hear back from the magazines. I don't really expect to get published but I can hope.