Dragonflyer Issue 96, Q2 2026
The DragonFlyer — Issue 96, Q2 2026
Spring has arrived on the Blackland Prairie, and the latest issue of The DragonFlyer leans fully into the season — celebrating limestone escarpments, trout lilies, and the surprising creatures (scaly and otherwise) that share our urban landscape. Download your copy today!
“Trout Lily: A Story” by Mary May opens the issue with a delightful tale of botanical confusion overheard on a school playground. Two second-graders, eavesdropping on their teachers’ conversation about trout lilies at White Rock Lake, become increasingly baffled by a “fish” with a purple flower and a lizard’s tongue. The story weaves in genuine natural history — spring ephemerals, myrmecochory, and the ecological significance of trout lily colonies as indicators of undisturbed land — and closes with a list of DFW sites where readers can still catch these ephemeral beauties before they disappear for the year.
“Our East Dallas Gem: Project Report from White Rock Prairie” by Brenda Catlett offers a seven-year retrospective on the three-acre restoration effort at White Rock Prairie (Unit 7). Catlett chronicles the ongoing battle against johnsongrass, King Ranch bluestem, and hedge parsley, and shares an update on a novel February intervention: a herd of 250 goats that grazed, tilled, and fertilized their way through the thatch — drawing new visitors and raising public awareness of this precious blackland prairie remnant in the process.
“A Recounting of Tales and Scales” by Caleb Hinojos takes readers inside the Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center at UT Arlington, where curator Greg Pandelis guided a group of Master Naturalists through one of the top ten largest herpetology collections in the world. With over 200,000 specimens — from caecilians and giant Asian salamanders to type specimens and rattlesnakes donated for venom gene research — the tour offered a vivid reminder of how natural history collections continue to drive scientific discovery.
“Herpetological Hitchhikers” by Laura Haynes introduces two non-native herps that have quietly joined the North Texas night chorus: the Mediterranean house gecko and the Rio Grande chirping frog. Both arrived as stowaways — via port traffic and the horticultural trade, respectively — and both have found a foothold in the human-modified habitats of our suburbs. Haynes reviews their remarkable adaptations, current range, and what monitoring research tells us about their impact on native species.
“Escarpments” by Charlie Marshall is the issue’s centerpiece — a wide-ranging, deeply researched meditation on the limestone escarpments of the urban Blackland Prairie. Marshall moves through three compelling sites: the escarpment at White Rock Lake that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater (and the ongoing tension between its preservation and development pressures); and the Piedmont Ridge escarpment in South Dallas, whose high points served as surveillance and signaling sites for the Penatuhkah band of the Comanche people. Linda Polen, an anthropologist and Comanche cultural expert, guides Marshall through the ridge’s sacred history — marker trees, a limestone Storytelling Place, and a landscape still holding traces of an Indigenous world. Friends of Piedmont Ridge, with Master Naturalist involvement, are working to restore the site and a nomination for National Historic Landmark status is underway.
Rounding out the issue: an iNat Species Feature on Star Jelly (Nostoc commune), a gelatinous nitrogen-fixing bacteria spotted near the Trinity Forest Trail; and Member Spotlights on Lois Diggs, Anne Edwards, Pamela DeAngelo, and Communications Co-Director Tim Gibson.
The DragonFlyer is published quarterly. Submissions and questions are welcome at dragonflyer@ntmn.org.