Favoritos de jcochran706

For a few years in the mid- to late 1990s, a number of Texas Hill Country ranchers got into "Emu farming". It was a short-lived fad, but in the interim, a number of Emu's escaped from captivity and wandered around to new locations. This particular Emu spent a few days on the Refuge's Eckhardt Tract near the Shin Oak Observation Deck. It's eventual fate is unknown but there were a few instances in the region where road-killed Emu's were encountered.
First photo is cropped from the larger scanned image shown in the 2nd photo. Ph. by William Reiner Jr.

Apparently a first iNat observation for Texas. Two images of the same moth, photographed on two different substrates about 35 minutes apart. The species is listed on the 2018 edition of Knudson & Bordelon's Checklist of Texas Lepidoptera, but I'm finding no Texas reports on MPG, BG, iNat, or SCAN. The ID is suggested by the rather straight speckled AM line and the way the inner end of the PM line sweeps basally to nearly meet the AM line.
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/species.php?hodges=7119
https://bugguide.net/node/view/769606
http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Taxbrowser_Taxonpage?taxid=305753

This species has a curious distribution in the Austin area. It is normally quite uncommon in most habitats and found only very locally around the few native stands of ceniza (Texas purple sage) which grow in the area, but it is gradually colonizing more urban areas where cultivated varieties of ceniza have been planted abundantly. This was the first documented record of the species at Balcones Canyonlands NWR.