Yards in June

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There was a lot going on in yards in June.  I enjoyed documenting my own yard and that of my daughter’s too.

The native plants in my yard are doing quite well: fragrant sumac (the first one I planted),

American spikenard (one that is a few years old and another than I planted this year),

Missouri evening primrose with its big yellow flowers,

Common Primrose that is becoming well established in my wildflower garden, and

Mushrooms keep coming up in the area where a tree was cut down several years before we bought the house.

My daughter and son-in-law planted some native plants in an area near their driveway and the street recently; they are thriving along with the yucca that has been there for a long time.  

There are non-natives: daylilies in both yards,

Asian hydrangeas in her yard (that she generously cut for a bouquet now in my office window),

A very large Southern Magnolia in my daughter’s house,

Lambs ear – that bumblebees like when it is blooming at my house,

Roses and hostas at both houses!

I have arugula flowers since I didn’t start eating the leaves soon enough. Oh well – they attact some small pollinators. There are zinnia flowers nearby too.

We are both challenged with grass growing where we don’t want it…and some invasives like Asian bush and vine honeysuckles. I have a lot of tree seedlings to control too – particularly hackberry, mulberry, redbud, oak, and maple.

Fantastic Caverns

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Fantastic Caverns is a great place to visit in the summer since the cave is 60 degrees all year long. We arrived a little before 10 AM and got tickets for 10:30 since there was a large school group at 10. During the wait, I bought some goat milk soap in the gift shop and looked at the mineral, quilt, and other artifact displays in the visitor center.

At 10:30 we walked out of the visitor center, down a ramp, and got on the tram that would take use through the cave.

I managed to take more pictures of the entrance (man-made) as we started our tour than I did during my previous visits. There is a lot of Viriginia Creeper on the rock face.

I used the ‘night scene’ setting on my Canon Powershot SX730 HS (my oldest camera!) because it is easier to hold than my phone. The lighting in the cave is relatively good and the guide illustrated several ways lighting of the cave has changed over the years. This was my third visit, and this guide was probably less experienced that my previous visits. (click on any image below to see a larger version).

This was the first visit to the cave for my daughter and the second for my husband. We all agreed that it is an excellent option for visitors that are not physically able to do other caves. We are already planning a visit to a cave that offers ultraviolet light tours…but that requires being able to walk around on your own with a headlamp and googles!

Volunteering at the Library

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I helped set up the used book sale at one of our county libraries last Friday. It was different than last year because the room was in use until 5 PM so our set up was delayed until after that. In addition, it was raining all afternoon. I wondered if there were going to be a lot of wet boxes.

I got there about 10 minutes before the allotted time and there were indeed people in the room, so I worked on a jigsaw puzzle that the library had set up near a window while I waited. Other volunteers were arriving too – some with a load of book boxes in their cars (since it was raining – enclosed vehicles were required…the usual pickups could not be used).

After helping stack chairs and move tables to the periphery of the room, I got started on the children’s books like what I did last year. There was a table and a cart. The differences from last year were 1) more helpers and 2) less books (we estimated what we needed for the sale based on what happened last year). I had two helpers that loaded the bottom shelf of the cart, so I didn’t have any backache from this set up! We were done in less than an hour.

Schuette Prairie

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I visited my 4th prairie of the spring/early summer last week for a Missouri Prairie Foundation guided hike – Schuette Prairie. It was a late afternoon hike with occasional light rain and rainbows adding to the adventures. Some the of the prairie plants are beginning to look familiar to me! It’s good to see the progression of development over time and the differences in plant communities on each of the prairies.

Schuette’s Prairie has some woody plants that are kept at bay by periodic prescribed burns…but not actively eradicated. The woody plants we noticed were persimmon, winged sumac, button bush, and sassafras. The first two are pictured below. The button bush is an indicator that part of the prairie retains a lot of moisture.

There are also areas of the prairie that have very shallow soil over dolomite and there are stands of prairie dock that grow in those areas. The rest of the prairie has sandstone under the soil (and the soil layer is thicker).

Lead plant was a plant I remembered from precious prairie hikes. This time it was blooming and the contrasting colors popped in the late afternoon light.

I saw more bugs that I was able to photograph. While it was raining, they were not as noticeable, but we had enough times when it was not raining to see them more active.

The compass plants are not blooming yet but their sandpaper leaves are very recognizable. They are a reason to come back again later in the season.

There were two types of coneflowers in bloom: Pale Purple Coneflower and Yellow Coneflower.

Goat Rue was a new-to-me plant. Maybe I had seen it elsewhere, but this was the first time I had seen them in bloom.

My favorite plant of the hike was the bunchflower. The flowers are showy and are above most of the other vegetation.

There were two kinds of milkweed. Neither one had any holes in their leaves….yet.

The orchids were blooming…small and down in the vegetation…worth noticing.

Quite a few of the prairie blazing star plants had galls in the very tip of the stalk…so they are not going to bloom normally…but the gall looked interesting at this stage.

Rattlesnake master is another plant I remembered from previous prairie walks.

The shooting stars that I saw blooming on other prairies…were seeds on this one.

Near the parking area was a stand of poison hemlock….this is a plant I seem to be more aware of growing on roadsides this year.

And now for a slideshow of the rest of the pictures I took!

I even enjoyed the drive home after the hike was over; there were rainbows visible the whole way!

Previous blog posts about my recent prairie hikes:

Harold Prairie in late April

Noah Brown’s Prairie in early May

Linden’s Prairie in mid-May

Springfield Botanical Garden – June 2025

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I had a few minutes before I needed to head into a class at the Springfield Botanical Gardens last week; it had just rained, and the clouds were still thick. There was plenty of time to take a few pictures of plants on the way down to the Butterfly House…looping back to the Botanical Center where my class would be. I notice more when I am in ‘photo mode’ and am glad my iPhone 15 Pro Max does a reasonable job for this type of garden photography! The only challenge was the breeze moving the vegetation around.

There were water droplets on the new leaves of a redbud,

Clumps of spiderworts,

Seed pods on wild indigo,

Clusters of milkweed buds, and

Spirals of unfurling leaves.

There is always something new to notice in the garden!

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 14, 2025

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Millions of new solar system objects to be found and 'filmed in technicolor' -- studies predict – The era C. Rubin Observatory ‘first look’ event is June 23! It is located on Cerro Pachon ridge in northern Chile. I found myself wondering how the deep funding cuts in the US will impact the facility and the scientists involved.

How electric scooters are driving China's salt battery push - Even as the rest of the world tries to close its gap with China in the race to make cheap, safe and efficient lithium-ion batteries, Chinese companies have already taken a head-start towards mass producing sodium-ion batteries, an alternative that could help the industry reduce its dependence on key raw minerals. A bigger market for sodium-ion batteries may be energy storage stations, which absorb power produced at one time so it can be used later.

Dead End: Nine Highways Ready for Retirement - This year’s nominees include Austin’s Interstate 35, which exacerbated segregation in the urban core when it was built in 1962, replacing a once-vibrant boulevard that served as a community gathering space.

The Overlooked Biodiversity of Appalachian Caves – Many of these creatures would be on the list for Missouri caves as well!

A Bauhaus-Trained Artist Wove Tapestries in the Woods for Decades. Now, Her Legacy Comes into Focus – I enjoyed the art and the biography of the artist!

Unique Silla Kingdom Crown Was Decorated with Insect Wings – Found in South Korea in a 1,400-year-old grave…a gilt-bronze crown decorated with a series of heart-shaped indentations that had been delicately inlaid with the colorful wings of the jewel beetle, some of which remained in situ after almost a millennium and a half.

Tea, berries, dark chocolate and apples could lead to a longer life span - Increasing the diversity of flavonoids within your diet could help prevent the development of health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer and neurological disease.

Experts Think the Hagia Sophia Is in Danger. They’ve Got a Plan to Protect It from Earthquakes - In light of recent earthquakes in Turkey, experts fear the 1,500-year-old mosque is structurally vulnerable, and the Turkish government has ordered a renovation. A team of government-appointed engineers, architects and art historians will begin by stripping a layer of lead that covers the main dome and looking for ways to strengthen the connections between it and the semi-domes. They’ll also look for ways to improve the main pillars and subterranean supports. Experts are also hoping that the work may reveal older murals from previous periods in the Hagia Sophia’s layered history.

Secrets of the Gobi Wall Revealed - Snaking for 200 miles across the inhospitable terrain of southern Mongolia, the so-called Gobi Wall is the least studied section of a system of medieval fortifications that once extended from China into Mongolia. The wall was primarily constructed from rammed earth, stone, and wood during the Xi Xia period (AD 1038-1227), a dynasty ruled by the Tungut tribes of western China and southern Mongolia. It was much more than a purely defensive mechanism built to repel invasions, but that it also served to regulate trade and manage frontier movements.

Why climbing the stairs can be good for your body and brain - Climbing stairs has been found to improve balance and reduce the risk of falling for older people and improve their lower body strength. Other studies also find that climbing a couple of flights of stairs can positively affect our cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, memory, and potentially creative thinking. As a "low impact" form of exercise, even short bursts of stair climbing can help improve cardiorespiratory fitness and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Ed Clark Museum of Missouri Geology

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My daughter and it did a day trip to Rolla MO to see the Ed Clark Museum of Missouri Geology last week. The forecast was for rain but it paused just as I got to my daughter’s so I took some pictures of the buds on the yuccas near her driveway.

There was another pause when we got to Rolla and stopped for lunch. It was beginning to sprinkle as we walked into the Missouri Department of Natural Resources that houses the museum. We discovered that they keep the front door locked – the receptionist must come out to let people in. We were the only visitors! The museum is not large, but the contents is almost all from Missouri and the labels are good. As usual – I took pictures.

Some of my favorites were things that I recognized: blue chert, galena, crinoid fossils, imprints of ferns, trilobites. stomatolightes

There was a glacial erratic from a banded iron formation found near Moberly, Missouri…hadn’t expected to see something like that.

I thought there would be a store associated with the museum…didn’t see any indication that it existed. They did have copies of the most recent Missouri Resources publication. It appears that the previous issues are available online, but the most recent one is part of a new blog feature (Missouri Resources Online) that they are working on; it wasn’t visible yet. I had been thinking of buying some Missouri geology maps to hang on my basement wall and I’m not sure where they can be purchased since the store was not there. Maybe printed maps are too much a ‘thing of the past.’

It rained for almost the whole drive home (almost 2 hours). We didn’t have any accidents on our side although we did see a lot of emergency vehicles on a side road we could see from Interstate. My daughter looked since I was driving. Evidently there was water covering a lot of the side road (and she said it looked deep). A little further along there was an accident on the opposite side of the Interstate that closed one of the two lanes on that side. I was glad when we made it back to Springfield.

Clover Cushions

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One of the experiments in my backyard is not mowing areas that seem to have more clover growing in them. They look like ‘cushions’ in the otherwise mowed yard….an artsy look that doesn’t challenge the neighborhood yard police (as long as it is in the backyard…I’m not trying it in the front).

The idea is to let the plants grow, bloom, and produce seed…only mowing them infrequently…or maybe not at all.

Clover is a nitrogen fixing plant and its roots are generally deeper than grasses in the lawn – both positives from my perspective. It is a good way to improve the soil and stabilize the slope. Maybe eventually the whole west side of the backyard will be clover with some prairie plants mixed in.

Moths at Busiek (vicarious)

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My son-in-law took some of his students to Busiek State Fores and Wildlife Area after dark earlier this month and sent pictures of moths (and other insects) they found there. It was a great vicarious experience!

It was an opportunity for me to check the bug identification powers of my iPhone Photos app as well. It provided an id for most of them: Waved Sphinx, Elephant Beetle (obviously not correct…it should have left this one as ‘bug’, the app might have been confused with having two insects in close proximity in the image), Darapsa Myron (Virginia creeper sphinx or Green grapevine sphinx).

Prionoxystus robinae (Carpenterworm moth or Locust borer), Haploa, Cicindela (tiger beetle).

Conchylodes ovulalis (zebra conchylodes moth), Hypagyrtis unipunctata, mating Malacosoma americana (eastern tent caterpillar).

There were a couple of Luna Moths – these are ones I am familiar with and can identify without help!

The comments in parentheses above are from my attempt to verify the id made by my iPhone Photos app. It made a reasonable id except for the one image where there were two insects which the app couldn’t separate well.

There were three that the app identified as ‘bug.’ I used the SEEK app and a little more research to tentatively identify: grape leaffholder moth and two Anna tiger moths.

Our Missouri Neighborhood – June 2025

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I walked around our neighborhood in early June and noticed juvenile robins and territorial male red-winged blackbirds. The grackles were making the most noise; there seem to be more of them around this year.

The moss on the side of the channel down to our storm water ponds is thicker than I remembered; May was much wetter than average this year and the moss is probably responding to that increase in moisture.

The turtles were sunning on the edge of the pond. I photographed them from across the water. By the time I was on the same side, there was only one left on the shore. They are very quick to slip into the water at the slightest disturbance.

I didn’t see any ducks or geese or herons. There were quite a few people out already, so perhaps they had left for more remote ponds if they had been around earlier.  

Moving to Missouri Anniversary

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We moved to Missouri in June of 2022, so this is our third anniversary of being in the state and our house. I’m thinking about how much I have settled in.

There are boxes that were not unpacked in the first 6 months after we moved that are still unpacked. They are obviously things we shouldn’t have moved from Maryland. It’s not a lot but I am now thinking more seriously about how to convince my husband that we can get rid of them!

The yard is trending toward more native vegetation and less grass. It is slow going but I enjoy the process. It seems like the changes are beginning to snowball in terms of more birds visiting out yard in recent months. ‘Leaving the leaves,’ ‘no mow’ areas, and no fertilizers/herbicides/insecticides in combination is better than each one alone! I let Virginia creeper become the ground cover in my front flowerbeds, and they look very lush; the vines extend toward the front porch and have covered a bit of the steps up to our front porch making the entry look inviting rather than sterile concrete/brick.

Over the past year I have taken classes at the local university – something I hadn’t done in Maryland – and become a Missouri Master Naturalist so that I could do the type of volunteering that I did in Maryland. I am on track to volunteer at about the same level as pre-Covid this year. I am not as confident yet that I know as much about Missouri as I did Maryland – but I know enough to be comfortable with the naturalist activities I am choosing.

I’ve seen quite a bit more of the state with either my husband or daughter over the past year as well but am realizing there is a lot more to see. It easier to learn the physical aspects of the state than the social nuances, but maybe that was true occasionally in Maryland too. Over the course of this past year, the classes and volunteer gigs have provided opportunities for me to interact with more people…and that’s a good thing.

Our motivation for moving to Missouri was to be closer to where our daughter lives…and it is a nice bonus that we like our house and Missouri too!

My Missouri Yard – May 2025

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There is always something happening in my yard this time of year. I often notice the mushrooms when I mow. There are several different kinds…most often near the place in our front yard where a tree was cut down sometime before we bought the house. There is still a lot underground that the fungi are decomposing.

I noticed a crane fly in the white pine as I was mowing….right at eye level.

The common saxifrage (Saxifraga stolonifera) was growing in a protected corner flowerbed on the east side of our house when we bought it. The plant has overflowed the bed and bloomed profusely this spring….a benefit of not mowing an area that is very shady and was beginning to be mossy. It is not a native plant, but it has deeper roots….will hold the soil on the slope better than moss…and better than grass too!

The rose bushes are blooming…recovered again from dying back during the winter. The wildflower patch I planted the first year is doing well…although I am realizing that not all the flowers are natives. I am letting it continue this year but will have to begin taking out the non-natives next year.

The mock strawberry (Potentilla indica) seems to be in several places in my yard. It is invasive but I am not doing anything to get rid of it at this point.

I have a hummingbird feeder on my office window for the first time this year….we don’t have a lot of ruby throated hummingbirds, but enough of them come by to make it worthwhile to keep it clean and full of sugar water!

Linden’s Prairie

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Linden’s Prairie was my 4th field trip this spring and 3rd prairie (post about the first three: Harold Prairie, Geology field trip nature center and road cuts, Noah Brown’s Prairie). The prairie walk was sponsored by the Missouri Prairie Foundation. We had been cautioned about ticks, so I wore my bug repellent gators and shirt…sprayed my jeans with OFF! above the gators. I decided to use my point and shoot camera (Canon Powershot SX730 HS) rather than my phone (iPhone 15 Pro Max) for most of the photos. The first picture I took was of the sign near the mowed area where some of us were able to park.

The hike was in the late afternoon – sunny, warm but not too hot, a little breeze. There was a lot more grass on Linden’s Prairie than Noah Brown’s prairie last week. There might have been some armadillo holes, but they were harder to see!

Our guide talked about two things that are not around anymore on the prairie: passenger pigeons and elk. There is good documentation that both were plentiful originally. There were enough passenger pigeons that there were market hunters for them; it’s hard to imagine that pigeons were food…until they were hunted to extinction.

The swaths of red color from the Royal catchfly won’t be for a few more weeks across this prairie but there were plenty of flowers to see among the grasses…some almost hidden until they were close at hand. We saw corn salad, yarrow, delphiniums/lockspur, coreopsis, golden alexander, phlox, hoary puccoon, wood betony/lousewort, goat’s rue/hoary pea, lead plant, and wild indigo. The grasses were too hard to photograph…I concentrated on the flowers.

There was some prairie vocabulary too: mima mounds (small mounds in an otherwise gently rolling prairie landscape) and motts (clumps of woody plants in a prairie).

My favorite flowers on this walk were the prairie roses…small plants, lots of buds, grasses waving higher over the pink flowers. One had to be almost stepping on them to see them!

Springfield Botanical Garden – May 2025

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My daughter and I got to the gardens well before the native plant sale started so that we could walk around beforehand. Once we bought plants, we would have to leave so they would not get overheated in the car. We were very glad we did.

The peonies were the standout flower. I took lots of pictures and noticed the different shape and texture of the flower centers. Many of the plants had wire frames under/around them to support the flowers that are sometimes too heavy for the plant!

Of course there were other plants in bloom: alliums, passionflower, tulip poplar, and wild indigo were the ones I photographed.

The water feature in the hosta garden is one of my favorite places; the benches and chairs were not wet this time…we sat for a few minutes to enjoy the sights and sounds of the garden.

The varieties of hens and chicks near the Botanical Center are also a favorite place in the garden.

A blue bird eyed us as we made the final part of our walk…to the plant sale. I bought an American Spikenard, 2 columbines, and a red buckeye. More about them later.

At my daughters, she called my attention to the tiny roses near her driveway; I like their colors; they seem to get pinker as they age!

She had another plant that was blooming; we’d decided that it was a legume in previous years; this year we used the plant look up feature on our iPhones and realized that it was a yellow wild indigo. She will be adding an American Spikenard to her yard under a crabapple tree.

It was a good spring morning to be out and about!

Noah Brown’s Prairie

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I signed up for a guided tour offered by the Missouri Prairie Foundation of Noah Brown’s Prairie which is just to the east of Joplin MO. It is a prairie remnant with a reconstructed prairie adjacent to it. There were plenty of wildflowers to see in the hour and half we were there. Everything was wet from showers before we got there and for the first 15 minutes we were walking. Originally, I thought about writing this post as a wildflower id post…but when I looked at all my pictures I changed my mind….decided to just do a slideshow to give an idea of the ambiance of the prairie in May.

Of course, you can use the slideshow as an id challenge. Look for spiderwort, false dandelion, wood betony, Indian paintbrush (red, orange, and yellow), wild indigo (blue and yellow), prairie phlox, wild parsley, bastard toadflax, violets, rose, milkweed, shooting start (white and pink/purple), red sorrel….and of course lots of different kinds of grass.

There were 3 distinct areas that we walked through: the recently (last fall) burned area of the remnant prairie, the area that is due to be burned next fall, and the reconstructed area. The recently burned area was the easiest to walk through and had the most wildflowers. The area due to be burned next fall had a lot of thatch which made walking more challenging and not as many flowers. The reconstructed area is a work in progress. It had some non-native grasses and the only thing blooming was the red sorrel (non-native); it was somewhat difficult to walk through because it had dense clumps and then almost bare areas. The remnant prairie had micro-communities: some low areas that had standing water (vernal pools) and some mounds that had different plants than the surrounding areas.

I was very pleased to see the Indian paintbrushes up close since I noticed them blooming as I drove through Oklahoma last month….but didn’t find a convenient place to stop to see them better while I was driving.

Irises!

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When we bought our house in Missouri there were already some irises. They didn’t bloom prolifically because the rhizomes were too crowded. I dug some of them up and planted them in the area where we had a pine tree fall (and was removed). This is their second year in that location, and they are blooming wonderfully. They seem to survive wind and rain without blowing over better than in the original bed…which is blooming better now too.

I cut ones that had blown over to enjoy inside…..and did a round of macro images of the flowers while they still had rain drops on them.

The iris rhizomes I dug up at my parents’ house before they moved in January 2024 did not bloom at all last year. There are not many of them yet, but they seem larger (both the flower and the stem) that the others. They are a burgundy/mauve color too! Hopefully they will proliferate and make the whole area along the fence an iris bed!

Training and Volunteering in Lebanon MO

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I had responded to a request from a fellow Missouri Master Naturalist for a program last weekend – a little bit of training and volunteering about an hour from where I live. There was heavy rain for the drive there – but it was weekend and the traffic was not as heavy as usual on the interstate. Fortunately, the first part was training so I could destress after the drive. I wandered around the Route 66 museum that is housed in the same building with the library. It was interesting – lots of items specific to Lebanon and then more broadly to Route 66. Much was before my memories began so I would have appreciated a few more dates for the pictures and newspaper articles. I enjoyed seeing the displays….glad I don’t have to drive over any ‘bone-jarring Ozark rock roads’!

I do vaguely remember one of my grandmothers having a wringer washing machine in the barn in the early 60s so that was something in the museum that looked familiar.

Then I had a brief training on the nature touch tables set up in the foyer of the library/museum. There were skulls and rocks and pelts and snake models/skins/id puzzles and pictures of caves and wildlife there – a bat preserved in acrylic. Handouts for each topic from Missouri Department of Conservation were available and many people took at least one. The snake booklets were probably the most popular.

I’m learning a lot about different parts of Missouri through Missouri Master Naturalist volunteering…I like feeling more familiar with the state where I now live and interacting with people!

Dogwoods

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The flowering dogwood flowers are beginning to wane…but they have put on a good show this month.

I took the pictures for this post on the Missouri State University campus on the way to the Student Union for lunch with my daughter. There was a grouping of the natives (white) and a hybrid (pink). Their branches were low enough to get macro pictures.

Later in the week, my daughter and I visited Onondaga and Bennett Spring State Parks and I enjoyed the winding roads in and near the parks with Flowering Dogwood (the native) in the understory. I’m glad Missouri chose the dogwood for its state tree!

Dogwoods were a tree I remember from east Texas earlier in my life….and then seeing a lot more of them in Virginia and Maryland when I moved to that area in the early 80s. Then Dogwood Anthracnose killed or damaged many of the trees there; they vanished from the understory in some areas. So – I was happy to observe healthy Flowering Dogwoods in the wild again.

Onondaga Cave (1)

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My daughter and I visited Onondaga Cave State Park last week. I had made reservations for the 10 AM cave tour. The park is a bit over 2 hours from Springfield – almost all on I-44. We made good time and had time to look around outside before going in to join the tour. There were emerging plants in the pollinator garden (I only spotted one milkweed…hope there are more nearby) and a display about the Gemstone and Fossil Panning activity (we were focused on the cave but it would be a fun activity with children).

I used my small Canon PowerShot SX730 HS on the ‘night scene’ setting. It worked relatively well although the guide was using as flashlight and sometimes the light from the flashlight was needed!

The walk is about a mile….made easier by ramped walkways (i.e. no stairs). It is slippery in some places but there are handrails. There are a few low ceilings that could be hazardous for tall people, but the guide is very proactive about pointing them out.

Learning about Missouri Geology – April 2025

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In late March – after the monthly Missouri Geology post, my daughter and I visited Cedar Gap Conservation Area. I posted about the vegetation (spring wildflowers) and the tail itself here and saved the ‘rock’ pictures for this post. Most of the pictures are from along the trail.

The most interesting rock of the trip was found down near the stream by my daughter; I’m not sure how she found it in the jumble of rocks!

The geology lab for Missouri Master Naturalists that was a follow up to the geology program I’d arranged for last February focused on minerals. There were 8 sets of trays with a total of 24 minerals and we practiced the process to identify them! It was a learning experience. I realized that there might have been a better class for learning to id rocks and minerals than the geology course I am taking….and it is for educators (not sure that non-degree seeking students can take it).

Last week my daughter and I visited Onondaga Cave and Bennett Springs State Park….I’ll be posting about that trip soon. Both had a geology component too.