We have had leopard frogs in the water garden for years now...even before we put in the lily pond, we had leopard frogs. This one, on a dark, cloudy, winter's day, looks as if it had chosen its color to match the mottled rock at the lily pond's margin.	Across the pond from the leopard frog was a different frog...a new kind of frog...one we haven't had in the pond before. It's a little larger, and much chunkier-looking than the leopard frog. I think it's a young bullfrog, but I'm not sure. If it survives to adulthood, I'm sure we'll *hear* which one it is...
I knew that cedar waxwings ate juniper berries, and chinaberries, and hackberries...but I didn't know until I saw a group of them descend on a mistletoe clump that they also ate mistletoe berries. This one posed elegantly with a mistletoe "pearl" in its beak.
First signs of spring are everywhere now, but the beautiful red twigs of roughleaf dogwood just did not show up right in the pictures I took. And the sprouts of wild garlic, down in the creek woods, would have shown up better in a colder winter, when other leaves weren't still green right beside them. But these buds were photogenic, and in the right place...they will be the flowers of aromatic sumac...at least, I'm *fairly* sure that's what they are.	This young Mexican plum was becoming buried by the Ashe junipers that originally protected its infancy...Richard cleared around it, and now it's over head-high and on its way to being another beautiful (and valuable for wildlife ) tree, as the slanting winter light picks out every spur that will soon be a mass of fragrant white flowers.
Where Richard cut down some of the Ashe juniper (cedar) trees in the northwest meadow, he planted little bluestem and native forbs where the cedars had been. The orange/russet grass here is little bluestem in winter; the gray heaps are dead cedars, which provide cover for wildlife and some protection for the emerging vegetation. That line of trees is the north extension of the creek woods, at Gravel Ford, seen from the west.
I've been talking about all the lichens...and I can't resist showing you two of them.
This orange and gold lichen is living on a small rock in the trail up to Fox Pavilion...it's one of more than a dozen different lichens on the same rock. It's tiny--smaller than a dime--barely visible when you're walking past--but so beautiful when you do look at it.	Hackberry tree trunks are patched with shades of gray, from white to medium...or so you'd think. This is one of dozens of pictures I took of the bark of one hackberry tree...and only that part of it in the sun, and at a convenient height. From a distance, this looked like part of a white patch...but close in, there are fruiting bodies in brown and mustard arising from a pale, ice-green background.

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