Fall Favorites

Monarch

There are miles of trails to walk at Sandy Creek Nature Center, a wonderful nature park in Athens, Georgia, where I like to spend a lot of time, and where I also volunteer. I find that each trail there is special for different reasons. Some are just peaceful and beautiful. Others are good for finding certain birds, or flowers or fungi, or to hear the whack of a beaver tail at dusk. Some trails have good logs to roll and look for salamanders, some trails lead to the creek, and others have good loops to walk with school kids. I like them all. But in the fall, my favorite trail is also the shortest, the loop that runs through the restored Piedmont Prairie--a small and sunny, open space, filled with wildflowers and tall grasses. A haven for insects and spiders, birds, snakes, frogs, rabbits and rodents. This trail can take you two minutes or two hours, depending on how much time you want to spend looking and listening. I find that it is a perfect element to include in a hike with 4th Grade classes who have come to learn about the solar system and see a planetarium program. On our trail hike, I like to talk to the kids about the changing seasons and how the living things are preparing for winter. The leaves on the trees are changing color. Fruit on the trees and vines and grasses and flowers are ripening. Birds are feeding on the flowers and grass seeds as they prepare for migration. Spiders that hatched in the spring are now reaching maturity, their webs stretched across paths and loaded with insects. Their egg sacs will appear as the weather cools. There's always a lot to see. I think that the kids have a good time, and hopefully they learn a lot. I try to share my enthusiasm, too, because I love it all. But I also have a special love for butterflies, so I hype that up a lot. And, the Prairie in the fall also happens to be a great place for seeing butterflies, which makes it one of my favorite places to visit and share. 

Leaf footed bugs and nymphs on Passion Vine

Poke Berries

Empty Cicada shell

Green Lynx Spider

Robber Fly

The loop through the Prairie is a different experience every year. One year you will find Praying Mantises hiding in the tops of the tall plants. In another, Bird Grasshoppers pop every which way across the trail and over the tall grasses. Or the Orbweaver Spiders may have staked out stations along the entire trail, hiding behind the zigzags in their webs. This year, Passion Vines grew in profusion, attracting Gulf Fritillary butterflies in large numbers, and growing so robustly that they covered the path. Passion Vine is the host plant for the Gulf Fritillary butterfly, and they come to lay their eggs on this particular plant. The park naturalists closed the loop for a few weeks to give the tiny Fritillary caterpillars a chance to eat and grow and go through their metamorphosis. Left undisturbed, butterflies of all kinds busily fed on the Passion Flowers, Frostflowers, Milkweed, Thistles, and other nectar plants. 

Gulf Fritillary, drinking nectar

Gulf Fritillary caterpillar on Passion Vine tendril

Passion Flower

Mating Fritillaries next to empty Chrysalis

Fruit from Passion Vine

Last week I took 2 groups of energetic 4th graders on a larger loop through the woods that ended with a walk through the Prairie. As we cleared the shady forest and entered into the sunny and grassy area with its tall flowers, I prepped the kids by telling them how that they were about to experience something spectacular. And both times, as we came near, I knew that they were suitably impressed. I could tell by all the squeals and wows! I get it, because I feel the same way, every time. There is something magical about walking into a butterfly meadow.  We saw dozens of yellow and black Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, (the state butterfly of Georgia, by the way) and many, many Gulf Fritillaries, as well as a Monarch, a Viceroy, various Skippers, Satyrs, Azures, Hairstreaks, and a Red Spotted Purple. It was a great show and gave me a chance to fit in my standard message about how important it is to have green spaces--sanctuaries for nature, as well as for people. This is an important lesson for preparing the way for the next generation of environmental stewards. You protect the things you know. And who wouldn't want to protect a magical place like this? 

Silver Spotted Skipper

American Painted Lady and Ailanthus Web Worm Moth

Clouded Skipper

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (female, dark form)

Red-spotted Purple

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (male)

The Long Hot Summer (Yeehaw!)

Every July about this time I find myself thankful for the heat of summer. Steam and heat aside, this is a great time to be in the yard. Our wildlife garden is almost at full peak, producing flowers and leafy shelter that attract the pollinators and the rest of the food web that I garden to provide habitat for. The swamp sunflowers in the front yard have grown tall, giving a quiet place for a baby deer to sleep while mom is out looking for food. The bushy Muhly grass, Mountain Mint and Black-eyed Susans are a refuge for fireflies that emerge in the evening. Tiny spiderlings set up their webs, hidden in the thickening greenery, where they hunt for prey that increases in size as they do. Caterpillars silently munch on plant parts, leaving specks of frass and chewed up leaves in their wake. Thrashers and Towhees scurry through the flower beds, grabbing caterpillars and spiders as they forage for spilled seed from the feeders. Mature vines and tube-shaped flowers are food for the hummingbirds. By July, at least one brood of newbies are out foraging for themselves. They visit the sugar water feeders, but they also spend a lot of time sucking out of flowers, especially the ones with long stems that they can sit on and rest between hovering and being chased off by older birds. Hovering is tiring.

This time of year, my glasses and camera lenses that are cool from the indoor A/C fog up immediately upon stepping out of the house or from a cool car. I can wipe the glasses, but have to wait for the camera to warm up because merely wiping the external glass is not enough. The camera will keep fogging up until the temperature has equalized. I've learned to keep my camera case in the back of the car, away from the A/C when I'm driving somewhere to take photos. I also take the camera out of its case right away when I get outside so it can start warming up, and sometimes face the glass into the sun to quick-start the process. 

Today I went out into the back yard just as it started to get hot, around 10am. The plan was to photograph some bees. My camera was cold, so I needed to give it time to acclimate, and so I walked over to one of the Black-eyed Susan patches in the yard to see what insects might be flying around. Before I knew it, an hour had passed and I had taken dozens of photos just with my phone. It's quickly becoming my go-to camera. They say that the best camera is the one you have with you. This one takes decent enough photos, and doesn't fog up! I never did pull out the other camera.

But the reason I spent an hour in the flower patch was that there was so much going on just on this single species of flower that I couldn't stop searching for more. As the morning warmed and the sun moved higher and brighter, the insects became more active, and new ones showed up. Butterflies, for example, were late arrivals. It was great fun and I had forgotten from last year just how much I love spending time crawling around in the flowers. I couldn't help but think that if there is this much life in a small flower patch, just imagine a prairie or a forest or a jungle. And this was just what I could see with my naked eye. So exciting--hello summer! 

Here are some images from my morning in the Rudbeckia as I waited for my other camera to thaw. 

Ant

Caterpillar

Sleepy Scoliid Wasp

Sleepy Leaf-cutter Bee

Leafhopper

Tiny Wasps

Planthopper Nymph

Some sort of Nectar Feeding Fly

Lacewing Egg (circled)

Ladybeetle

Carpenter-mimic Leafcutter Bee

Assassin Bug

Crab Spider

Stink Bug Nymphs

Red Cocklebur Weevil. They feed  "primarily on Asteraceae species, including sunflowers, ragweed, thistle, cocklebur, joe-pye weed, ironweed, and rosinweed"

Green Lynx Spider

Honey Bee

Not sure!

Small Leaf Cutter Bee

Fiery Skipper

Dailyappreciation

 

I recently got my copy of Patti Smith's "A Book of Days". It is a collection of a year of her photos and thoughts, memories and celebrations from her Instagram page, most of them created during the pandemic. There is a page for every day of the year. I've really enjoyed it so far and decided to read it one day at a time to fully appreciate the images and messages. Reading her introduction, it dawned on me that I had been doing something similar this past year with my photos and my life. I would never dream of comparing myself to Patti Smith, except in recognizing an intentional practice that we both seemed to have turned to in what she called, "deeply uncertain times". She has been in the habit of taking a photo and writing every day for years. I am a newcomer.

I have really been struggling for a while, and especially so in the last 2 years. My optimistic goals to power through the early part of the pandemic with nature walks and writing only worked so long. But then Covid and its variants stayed around and kept coming, and our activities took so long to return to normal, in addition to unbelievable political craziness, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, fire, drought, war, shootings, riots, and ecological disasters, including the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake in my home state, I just couldn't keep it up. I tried. I composed dozens of "inspired" essays in my head when I took walks or gardened or went birding, but by the time I got home, I found that most of what I wanted to say felt unimportant and trite along side of the huge issues all around me and I'd let it go. As a result, I rarely posted in my blog. Eventually, I didn't really feel like going on those hikes, or even leaving home unless I had to. I was tired, and didn't see the point. I'm pretty sure I was depressed. 

On New Year's Day 2022 I decided that I needed to do something to pull myself out of the funk. I recognized that I always feel good when I am photographing nature, especially, the tiny things. I felt that a good way to start would be by making myself get out and find at least one thing that caught my attention or made me feel good every day, take a photo, and post it on Instagram with the hashtag #dailyappreciation. Posting made me accountable to other people and it would make it harder for me to ditch my personal goal, and Instagram doesn't necessarily require any text. Brevity is good. Some days I didn't go much further than my back yard, posting photos of a bug on the window, birds at the feeder, or lichen on twigs that fell from the big water oak. But the project forced me to look for something outside of the news, and that felt good. Most of the time I took pictures just with my phone. As the year progressed, and our activities returned to the new normal, we traveled and started visiting with family and friends, attending concerts and festivals again. I flew to visit my mom for the first time in 2 years. Sometimes out of cell phone contact, or traveling in the car cross country, there were days that I scrambled to find a picture and post it. But I was determined. There were a few days that the weather was bad or the day got away from me because I was too busy (a good thing!), and I dug into my photo archives for something memorable from that day sometime in the past, but I tried not to lean too much on that option. 

I started to hear comments from people who thanked me for my posts and that they looked forward to them as something beautiful or interesting each day. Their feedback buoyed me. I had a mission now and did not want to let my followers down. My meditative practice was spreading good energy, not just to me but to my friends. And so I posted every day, sometimes twice, for one year. The resulting body of work made me feel good and looks like a beautiful patchwork quilt in the Instagram layout. If I can ever figure out how to print the year, I will. It would be a cool poster. 

So here I am, a year later, still working on tuning out the noise. It's still not easy, and I'm afraid the uncertain times will be with us for a long time--maybe forever. But I'll keep looking for those things to appreciate and to steer myself out of the malaise, and I'll work at getting my deep thoughts out of my head and onto the page. Maybe not every day--that gets to be a grind! But I'll keep working and looking for the little things. And I'll keep sharing with my friends, because their feedback makes me feel good, and we all need a little beauty and love in our lives.