Here we all are - except Mike, who was taking the pictures. From left to right: Barb, Harold, Jan, Burt, Emily, John, Marcie

This was taken in Buffalo Ridge Prairie -Burt, Jan, Barb, Harold, John, Marcie.

This was an Eyed Brown that we found on the driveway.

The planted prairies are just beginning their end of the summer blooming.  The Black-eyed Susans, Oxeye and Butterflyweed come first; Monarda and Yellow Coneflower are just starting to bloom.

Black-eyed Susans in Western Prairie

Butterfly Weed behind the house

Western Prairie

Oxeye in Buffalo Ridge Prairie

Buffalo Ridge

Last week I spent a few days pulling Yellow and White Sweet Clover from Indian Grass Prairie.  The sumac had just started blooming, and the flowers were buzzing with bees and fluttering with Hairstreaks.

Hairstreaks on Sumac

I saw three different species of Hairstreaks.

Banded Hairstreak on Sumac flowers

These two were also nectaring on the White Sweet Clover

Edwards' Hairstreak

Coral Hairstreak

We saw an Iris blooming in the wetland for the first time!  I've planted lots of Iris from seed I collected along the Buffalo River, but I've never found it growing here before.

Another nice wetland plant that's been increasing in the last few years is Turks Cap Lily.  I've found numerous small clumps in our wet planted prairies in the last few days.

Prometheas are smaller than Cecropias and Polyphemus moths - their wingspans are about 4 inches.  And they are sexually dimorphic - the males and females look different.  Females are red and brown - they look a little like small Cecropias.  Males are velvety black, with broad patterned borders.

A female Promethea

Male Promethea

Prometheas mate during the day - usually in the late afternoon.  The first female I had called in three males at about 3:30 pm.  I was expecting the second female to have the same pattern, but by 4:30, no males had shown up.  I gave up and went off to do other things.  Then at 6:30 I noticed 3 males banging against the screens on the porch.  I brought the female outside, and one of the males flew in to mate.

Now I have eggs for the next generation.

Here are some more recent moth finds.

The Herald

The Beggar

I love these moth names!  I think they're old names, but I can't find out much about where they came from.

Here's another moth that hatched from a larva that I raised - with a link to the full life cycle. It's called The Neighbor.

This is a Plume Moth - I don't know the species.  Plume moths all have this distinctive shape - like tiny airplanes.

And here are some of my Polyphemus moth caterpillars - eating oak.  I tried some of the caterpillars on birch leaves this year, but they much prefer oak.  If I put both kinds of leaves in the cage, all the caterpillars end up on the oak leaves.

Here are a few butterflies.

A Monarch caterpillar on milkweed in the wetland

A very friendly Hackberry Emperor

Tawny Emperor

Baltimore Checkerspot - one of the most spectacularly colored butterflies

Spiderwort is still blooming in the prairies.  It's had a long blooming season this year - maybe because of the cool weather.

Pat's Prairie

The weather has been hot and humid, with plenty of short, wet storms.  It feels like the tropics, and the insects love it.

The beautiful anglewing caterpillars that I collected on elm leaves a few weeks ago pupated, and one hatched - into a Compton Tortoiseshell Butterfly.  (The other was parasitized and it hatched into a fly.)

Here are a few photos of the caterpillar, with its dramatic color changes:

The pupa (chrysalis) - with its shiny gold spots.

And this is the adult butterfly - newly hatched.

It wasn't interested in holding its wings open, so I didn't get a good photo of the colorful upper sides.  Here's an old photo (July 2008) that shows the tops of a Compton Tortoiseshell's wings.

The underside helps it blend in to its surroundings.  It seems to use the bright upper side to startle predators - it opened and closed its wings quickly when I got too close, showing a flash of bright orange.

I had a wonderful moth experience last week.  I walked up a steep path through the woods, and under a Black Cherry tree that was leaning across the path.

As I walked up to the tree, dozens of small white moths fluttered away.  I looked more closely at the bark of the tree, and found that some moths were still there - although they were so well camouflaged that it was hard to find them.

I checked some of the other trees, but none of them had many moths.  It may be that cherry bark is better for camouflage.

Spiderworts are blooming now - there are more this year than there have ever been before.  They make beautiful blue pools of color in the prairies.

Every once in a while I see a white one.

False Dandelions are blooming in Starflower Opening again.  In pictures they don't look very different from dandelions, but they have sea green foliage, and oriole colored flowers - a wonderful combination.

Red Spotted Purples and Viceroys are both flying right now.  Clouds of them fly up when we walk on the driveway.  They're very closely related even though they don't look much alike.  Their eggs, caterpillars and chrysalises look almost alike, and it's only when they emerge that I can be sure which species it is.

Red Spotted Purple

Viceroy

This is an Agreeable Tiger Moth - a white moth similar to the Pink-legged Tiger Moth I found last week.

The main difference is that this one has yellow legs (underneath) rather than pink.

My Eastern Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar is changing.  Its new skins are making it look less like a bird dropping and more like a snake.

This is another cool moth caterpillar - some kind of Tussock Moth.

And its cocoon - it incorporated some of its long black hairs into the silk.

Dave Linderud and Bill Hogseth from West Wisconsin Land Trust came for their yearly visit.  They visit our easement once a year to be sure all is well.  We did a nice tour of the farm - in the gator because it was so hot and there was a lot to see.

MJ (the owner of the land) had arranged a tour led by Tom Rosburg, a botanist and ecologist, and a professor at Drake University.

Tom made a list of the interesting plants we saw, taught us all some new ones, and gave MJ ideas of how to best restore some of her problem areas.

Here we all are, getting oriented.

Terri, Rusty, MJ, Tom, Tim

MJ and Tom

This is the oak woods.  The understory (mostly buckthorn) has been removed, and savanna plants are beginning to return.

This shows how steep the woods is - it's on a very steep south-facing slope.

Looking down through the woods to the river - the boundary of MJ's property.

MJ photographing a stand of Poke Milkweed

We scrambled down in to a deep ravine.

Rock walls at the north end of the ravine

Botanizing in the ravine

The air in the ravine was cool, so the dark trunks of the trees steamed when the hot sun hit them.

We saw some interesting fungi growing on dead logs in the bottom of the ravine.

While we were exploring the ravine, we noticed an interesting plant about half way up the rock walls - completely out of reach.  Tom and I both decided to try to get a specimen - MJ took pictures.

We got one scraggly specimen, but Tom got a better one later on.  I don't know yet what it turned out to be.

Looking south out toward the bottom of the ravine

After exploring the ravine, we walked back up through the fields and had a picnic lunch next to the windmill.

Here's a slide show MJ did to showcase the prairies that she planted. She calls it "Faux Prairie" because it's been planted - an attempt to reconstruct what would have been there before it was farmed.  She used local Iowa seeds - to make the reconstruction as accurate as possible - and the birds and bugs seem to be very happy there.

A blue Damselfly - one of the Bluets.

I've been finding some great caterpillars.

This is a Linden Looper - a beautiful little caterpillar.  Sometimes I see them on the surface of leaves, sometimes hanging by a silk thread from a leaf.  They eat many different kinds of leaves - I've found them on oak, walnut, and elm as well as Linden.  They don't do well in captivity - I've tried raising them several times, and none have survived.

Red-spotted Purples have come out this week - dozens of them along our driveway.  I'm starting to look for their eggs - laid singly on the very tips of willow leaves (as well as many other tree leaves).

This Eight Spotted Forester (moth) had just emerged so its wings weren't pumped up yet.  It was very calm and willing to sit on my finger while it got used to the world.

This beautiful pair of white moths was mating in the short grass of one of our mowed paths.  They split apart as I watched, so I was able to get photos of both of them.  They're Pink-legged Tiger Moths, not very common, and probably at the northwest edge of their range.

Here's the male - with his feathery antennae

And the female with thin antennae

This is a Yellow Slant-line moth.  It's so easy to find moths I've never seen before, but often hard to identify them, and even harder to be sure I've identified them correctly.  This one is distinctive enough that I'm sure of the id.

This is a Pinion moth caterpillar that I found on a birch trunk.  There are several species of Pinions; they eat leaves of many plants but they also sometimes attack and eat other caterpillars.  This one was hiding between the dried curls of birch bark - possibly hunting for prey.  The white seed-like thing attached to the caterpillar is from a parasite - probably a wasp cocoon.

These are Tree Hoppers - probably Smilia camelus - on a small oak tree.  Tree hoppers are also called "Thorn Bugs" because of their odd shape.  They often associate with ants - and that may be what's going on here.

The males and females of this species look quite different.  The one with the bright stripe is a male, the greener one is a female.

Here's a better photo of a female.  They are less than 1/2" long.

Here's a beautiful dragonfly that I saw on our driveway.   It's a Midland Clubtail (thanks to Karl Legler for confirming the id).

Long Dash - a skipper butterfly in our wetland

Silver-bordered Fritillary - another butterfly found in our wetland

Some botany friends from the University at Stevens Point came to visit last week.  Jeff is interested in sedges, so we walked the remnants and found quite a few for him to figure out.  He's going to send me a list when he gets them all identified.  Alvin found the most interesting sedge of all.

Jeff

Alvin

It's a good year for rusts, as well as insects.  Rusts are fungi - a group with a huge number of species.  Each rust is a parasite on two different host plants, used at different points in the rust's life cycle.  Rust spores are yellow or reddish brown - similar to the color of rust that forms on metal - thus their name.  This year I'm seeing rust spores on Rubus sp. (blackberries and raspberries), Prickly Ash, and Buckthorn.

This is a rust on Prickly Ash.

This is Crown Rust (Puccinia coronata var. avenae) on Buckthorn.  The alternate host of this rust is Oats, so farmers are as concerned about the presence of non-native buckthorn as conservationists. Oat crop yields can be dramatically reduced when infected with Crown Rust.

Here are a few of the flowers blooming at the farm right now.

This is Large-flowered Penstemon - a flower that I planted in all our prairies, but I've never seen it growing before.  It's so exciting to find these beautiful things that I've planted!

A close up view

Balsam Ragwort

Balsam Ragwort with Northern Crescent butterfly

Forest Pea - growing in the woods

Low Bindweed - a low, not climbing, native morning glory.  It grows in savannas, and I see it in the open woods behind the house which used to be a savanna.

Here's the Snapping Turtle from our neighbor's pond - strolling along our mowed trail. It looks like it's a female looking for a place to lay her eggs.  I wonder where she found a male to fertilize them - the pond is a long way from anywhere - certainly a long way from any other turtles.  She's had mud on her shell for weeks - maybe it's left over from her winter hibernation.  When she saw us approaching her along the trail she raised her hind end, and lowered her head and glared at us.  We stayed far away from those snapping jaws.

A question that I'm often asked is why we don't raise honeybees at our farm.  I thought I would write a post to answer that question.

Pollination is important for most flowering plants.  In order for them to produce seeds, plants need to get the male gametes of the flower - the pollen - to the female gametes.  90 percent of flowering plants depend on animals to provide this service.  Bats, birds, and insects are all part of plants' pollination strategies.

Hobomok Skipper Butterfly on Wild Geranium

Agricultural crops are very dependent on pollinators.   30 percent or more of crop plants are dependent on some kind of animal pollinator, and when food crops for animals are included, the percentage is closer to 60 percent.

Honeybees are non-native bees which, because of their habit of living together in large colonies, can be used effectively for pollinating agricultural crops.  The hives can be managed by people, and moved around to places where crops need pollinating. Bumblebees are also used for pollinating crops - they also tend to live in groups, which makes them good candidates for being managed for agricultural use.

In the last few years, both honeybees and bumblebees have been having health problems - their numbers are decreasing, and people are beginning to realize that they need to have alternatives.  There are many native pollinators, but their numbers have also been decreasing as more land is cleared for agriculture and development, and as more pesticides are used on agricultural crops and gardens.

There are several initiatives by the US Government and private groups to try to improve awareness of the role native pollinators can play in agriculture, and to try to learn more about them, and improve their habitat.  The most recent farm bill is the first one that includes financial incentives for improving habitat for pollinators, and funding for research on native pollinators.    In 2006 an organization called Native Pollinators in Agriculture was formed to explore how native pollinators could be used to supplement the services of managed pollinators like honeybees.

We have hundreds of native pollinators on our farm.  Since we're raising prairie, not agricultural crops, it makes sense for us to concentrate on providing habitat for these native pollinators.  Here are examples of some of the pollinators that I see around the farm.

Butterflies

Giant Swallowtail on Field Thistle

Common Wood Nymph on Monarda

Cabbage White Butterfly on Dandelion

Common Ringlet on Clover

Moths

Hummingbird Moth on Thistle

Bees

Sweat Bee on Brown-eyed Susan

Bees on Oxeye

Bumblebee and beetle on New England Aster

Often there are several pollinators on one flower at the same time.

Bees and Fly on Pasqueflower

Monarch and bees on New England Aster

Bumblebee, Soldier Beetles, and unknown beetle on Field Thistle

Flies

Syrphid Fly with Tickseed Trefoil

Birds

Ruby-throated Hummingbird with Indian Paintbrush

Further reading about the importance of native pollinators - an insects in general.

Fruitlesss Fall by Rowan Jacobsen  (the last few chapters are about native pollinators)

Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy

Here are a few related links - updated as I find new, interesting ones:

A list, with lots of info, of crop plants that require insect pollination

Wild flowers and their relationship to crop pollination