I celebrated Earth Day today by taking a desperately needed time-out from working on my landscape ecology term project and get some practice identifying various plants for my plant quiz in my ecosystems of Florida class. As I drove into Gator Bowmen, there was a good-sized tortoise in the road. Instinct #1: stand back and take a good shot at it to test my skill #2: go pick it up and look at it closely #3: wait for it cross. I decided against shooting it because I had the Equalizer and it would take me far too long to draw, anchor, aim, and fire with my back-tension release. I caught the tortoise closely and looked at it how it was assembled. It's really neat seeing how it's constructed and how a turtle is actually a single piece unlike a lot of these shell-fish. There's something inherently fascinating about the critters in the order Squamata and how they're assembled. I was expecting more serious armor on the tortoise's legs when I was checking it out, but it was nice and soft, very much like those alligators I handled. Reptiles are fascinating!
The Liquidambar trees at the range are also fascinating. I like the smell of mango when I bruise the Acer-like leaves. I still need to work on identifying the individual Quercus species. My gut instinct tells me that most of the Quercus are hemispherica, virginiana, and possibly either nigra or glabra. I really like Quercus virginiana. There's also plenty of Prunus caroliana, which has an interesting almond-like smell when I bruise the leaves. Oh, Carya glabra is also fun to work with. One of these days, I'm going to have to learn how to cook Carya glabra nuts.
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