Nature is Never Spent

If you keep an eye on North American nature media at all, you've probably heard about the decline of the monarch butterfly and the call for a "milkweed corridor" to help replace lost habitat and food sources along the monarch's migration routes.

( In case you haven't... )


So... there's an effort to get as many people to plant as much milkweed in as many places as possible along the migration routes. I've tried sowing wildflower seed before, but haven't been very successful: I chose a steep site where the seeds either washed away in heavy rains, or germinated and then succumbed to a spring drought. But this year, I have ordered milkweed and other wildflower seeds and I'm determined to make it work. If you're interested too, here are some resources I'm using:

Milkweed Seed Finder - The Xerxes Society (a great resource for all kinds of invertebrates) has a tool to help you find milkweed seeds from vendors in your local area. There's also a link to species maps so you can find out which milkweeds are native to your region. Most seed companies I looked at will take orders online and ship to you.

Native American Seed Company - a source for native plant seeds. Their website and catalog also have a lot of educational material and other resources. (I read the catalog cover-to-cover like a book! Because I'm that kind of nerd. :)

How to Get Texas Native Milkweed Seeds to Germinate - not just for Texans! This expert has developed what he feels is the most successful way to germinate the seeds. It's a very fussy process, but when each little seed is valuable, I'm sure it's worth it.

Growing Milkweeds - This guide gives more options for propagating milkweed, including growing them from cuttings.

Asclepias database - The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center's database listing of Milkweeds. It includes photos and common names and is pretty good for identifying species you may find in the wild. (Aside: how awesome would it be to have a respected wildflower center named after you? Go Ladybird!)

Since this seed propagation business is likely to be a multi-year project (especially since it's already effectively summer here) the other thing I'm doing is trying to protect any established milkweeds I find. In our pasture, there are a couple of butterfly milkweed plants my dad and I discovered years ago. My dad likes photography and I like both photography and insects, so he drove posts into the ground next to the plants to protect them from being mowed down during haying. This year I located a green milkweed plant and staked it out as well. (The same plant, I believe, that was being eaten by a monarch larvae in September 2012!) I'm putting a reminder in my calendar so that, hopefully, later in the year I can collect some seeds myself.



Asclepias viridis

At the farm this weekend, I went out in the early morning and smelled sweetness on the air. It was the black locust trees in bloom, caught in a breeze. I went out in the afternoon in the sunny driveway and immediately could feel a thrumming above my head. A busy drone. When I looked up, bumblebees. So many, so busy and happy.



( Bumblebee bum )

I'm traveling in the northern Midwest right now and it's been very insect-y! When it's swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, that's not so nice for us humans, but the bumblebees and beetles are lovely. My most exciting sighting was a bumblebee hawkmoth!



Here you can see the "bumblebee" coloration better.

( Also a nice cluster of beetles huddled together for the night. )

Hello, nature journal! I didn't mean to leave you for so long. Last year almost beat the light out of me, but I didn't stop observing. Here are my Springwatch dates for 2013.

January
12 - very warm weather, then tornadoes
15 - 1/2" sleet, schools closed
16 - spotted my first blooming daffodil of the year
25 - cedar waxwings migrating through
28 - spotted first Spring Beauty blooming
29 - tornado warnings
30 - lots of bluets blooming
31 - alder trees blooming (male catkins)

February
2 - pruned the fruit trees at the farm
12 - first noticed morning birdsong
14 - heard spring peepers (frogs) singing in a river bottom
23 - spotted a flock of pelicans in the river (migrating -- they don't live here)
23 - saw a plum tree in full bloom
24 - spotted a butterfly during a hike in the woods

March
14 - field of daffodils at local flower festival in full bloom
15 - tree pollen noticeable on outdoor surfaces
16 - peach & pear trees in orchard blooming
18 - bees humming in flowering quince bush

I don't have photos of everything, but here's an album with some representative ones.

( Catkins, moss and blossoms )

I think one of my favorite things was the bee. I was lying on the ground to photograph the quince bush with the pear tree in the background, and I heard the telltale drone. They were everywhere, buzzing around so happily, legs encrusted with pollen. They know spring has been upon us for awhile.

Saturday I traveled from the city to the farm, and it was an excellent day for wildlife sightings. I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to give this handsome monarch caterpillar its own post.



My dad, who grew up on farms in Kansas where milkweed was a considerable enemy, would like to see more monarchs, I'm sure. Down here, neither milkweed nor monarchs are common or uncommon. I assume the fellow I met on Saturday was a fourth generation monarch and will be migrating to Mexico after he pupates and emerges with his wings.

Good luck, fellow!

The drought and heat are worse this year than last. My state is categorized as suffering from severe drought (and in some counties it's "extreme," which is apparently worse). The fire danger is also much worse. Last year I wasn't really worried, but with the grass withered and brown so much earlier in the summer, the shrubs and vines dying, and even the trees that are succumbing to the stress of two years drought, for the first time in my memory we are dealing with a lot of wildfires. Double the usual number of fires in June, and they burned four times the number of acres that burned last year. It's nothing like the scale of the fires out West, but there have been evacuations. I'm worried about the forest. Driving from farm to city, I pass patches of charred grass, the branches of the nearby trees brown and dead from the heat of the flames.



This weekend I went on a brief roadtrip one state to the north, and it's clear this situation is regional, not local. (In fact, at least where the heat is concerned, it's been a record-breaking year continent-wide.) After driving 600 miles, we came to an area where there were some tall weeds that looked a lot like grass, and they were GREEN. I was surprised at what a shock it was to see a green hillside after so many miles of brown. With the dark green trees dotting the yellow-brown fields and hills, it looks almost like California out there. We also saw one pasture that actually had green grass when everything around was dead, so clearly this one farmer had found a way to water his field.



Grasshoppers are abundant and are eating things they normally leave alone. We found piles of droppings on our front porch where they had a convention chomping on a schefflera. Other animals change their behavior to get access to water or food, including poisonous snakes like the large copperhead my dad killed right outside the back door. I've been afraid to go down and look at the pond, but I'll report on that eventually.

It's nice returning to places at different times of the year. You might think it would be boring, say, hiking the same trail several times, but there are always new things to notice. Today I returned to a trail I discovered in April.

It's an urban hiking trail, but except for one end of the park where you can hear traffic on a busy road, you'd think you were in the middle of wilderness. It's just a narrow path through the forest, winding down a ridge, crossing a stream several times and running along a small gorge. Quiet, birds calling, lots of wild plant diversity, evidence of wildlife. Most prominently, today I heard chipmunks giving warning calls as I passed, several places along the trail. If I didn't know better I'd say they had some sort of Midnight Bark network! I also saw a couple of big, gorgeous millipedes, one dead and one decidedly alive--when it realized it had been discovered, it started flipping and twisting itself up into a curl. I see lots of centipedes, but millipedes, not so often, and they're always larger than I remember.

The biggest difference on the trail, last month to this month, is that the creek is almost dry now. It was flowing along happily in early April, but now it's not flowing at all in most places. There's really only water left in the deepest pools. I don't know if it's always seasonal, or if last year's drought and this month's relative lack of rain is affecting it. This spring hasn't been nearly as wet as last, when we had an unusual number of tornadoes and floods.


Millipede | Raccoon jawbones in a creek bed


Dogwood bent by a fallen tree

Saw my first dragonfly of the year today! It was a lovely green one perched on a bridge railing.

*

Last year, I let my basil flower and go to seed because it was pretty and the insects seemed to like it. I left the brown flower stalks up all winter to give the small birds a place to perch, and this spring I discovered another benefit. When I was clearing out a pot so I could plant a little tomato seedling, I discovered some tiny sprouts I suspected were basil. I transferred them to another pot and in time, I've determined that they are indeed little volunteer basils from last year's plant. Sweet!

However the trees and other creatures were affected by this year's drought, the oaks in the city have managed to produce a bumper crop of acorns. Some places, it's hard to walk without becoming a cartoon-style slipping-on-marbles casualty.



Every spring, I see crowds of adorable little oaks coming up beneath the white oak trees across the road from my apartment, and I think about trying to dig up a couple and raise them. But it never works out. So this fall, I thought I'd start from the beginning, with the acorns. I chose a few of the large, solid-feeling warm brown nuts and carried them home in my pocket. I put them on a table until I could decide what to do with them for the winter. Put them under some leaves in a pot of dirt, I figured. But a day or so later, my dog started barking at what turned out to be a tiny, white worm on the carpet. It looked like a beetle larva, but I didn't find out for sure until the next day when I discovered some suspicious holes bored in a few of the acorns...



...and two more escapees crawling away from them. One of the larvae actually turned around again, inched its way back to its nut, and started burrowing against it like it could roll its old home away to safety. I'm impressed with the ability of such a tiny, soft-looking thing to bore through a hard nut shell! And amazed that the mother hid her entry so well; I hadn't seen any indication that the acorn wasn't entirely whole before the larva came out. I deposited them all outside where they belong, but I'm still going to try with the remaining acorns. I've now learned that I should have done a "float test" right after bringing the acorns home, and discarded the ones that didn't sink in the water.

Speaking of insects, I'm sitting outside right now watching a few. We're in our autumn weather cycle: a few crisp days then several more warm, muggy ones. We've had two frosts, but nothing hard enough to really kill plants or send bugs hiding for good. This morning, there's a ladybug crawling on the balcony rail and a large, beautiful red wasp floating from the roof line to the nearest sweet gum tree and back. Wasps love warm autumn days. To be more accurate, they're probably hungry and they need to find sugar. There's not much nectar around anymore and they're going to die soon. (Only the next year's fertilized queen survives the winter.) I'm not sure if this is true of Polistes perplexus, the larger of the red wasps, but some adult paper wasps eat a nectar secreted by the larvae after the adults feed the larvae masticated animal protein. It's a nice arrangement, until there are no more larvae left in the nest.