Switchgrass head-high in July

The switchgrass was already tall, reaching deep moisture from last winter’s rains, but the July rains gave it a huge boost, and by July 27 it was easily a couple of feet taller than its maximum height last year (second year of drought; the rains of fall came too late last year.     We introduced switchgrass (and other interventions) along a natural drainage line route suffering lots of erosion.  Not any more.

I’ve been stuck inside with book deadline looming, so have made only brief forays outside, usually limited to 15 minutes around the house.  Earlier this week managed a whole hour out in the near meadow and as far as the Bowl to take pictures.   I was curious what would be blooming after a dry spring and then drenching rain in midsummer.

“Wild Petunia” is actually Ruellia nudiflora

The near meadow had little clumps of Ruellia near the mowed maintenance path.   Farther out in the near meadow, near the drainage across it, I found scattered green-antelope-horns milkweed in bloom, less than knee-high:

Asclepias viridis

In dry years, this milkweed blooms only in spring, right after Antelope-horns, A. asperula (which blooms only in spring, period), but with summer rain it will pop up again, though buried in grass.    In wet years, it may grow a foot higher.  The only monarch larvae I’ve seen here are on this species.  We see monarchs mostly spring and fall, on migration.

Our summer/fall milkweed, even in dry years, is Zizotes Milkweed, which one of the summer butterflies, the Queen, really seems to like.

Asclepias oenotheroides with Queen butterfly ovipositing

This is a small plant, always low to the ground, with flowers on the main stem, between the layers of leaves.  The leaves are wavy-edged.

Queen butterflies–abundant from midsummer into fall here–are also attracted by Frogfruit (or Fogfruit), Phyla incisa, which flowers even in midsummer heat if there’s been rain:

In the main grass beyond the secondary drainage, I found several flowers that had obviously given up in the dry…and then could not resist trying again after the heavy rains.

Lemon Horsemint, Monarda citriodora

The Lemon Horsemint had finished its spring flowering in the dry, and the plants looked almost dead, but rain brought them back…a little.

Stiff-stem Prairie Flax, Linum rigidum–which is usually a spring-only bloomer–showed up again on the mowed trails.

Gaillardia pulchella

Gaillardia, or Firewheel, is a drought-tolerant bloomer from late spring, but quits by mid-June if it’s dry, blooming through mid-to late July if it’s wet.  Even in a dry year,  it will flower again if there’s a big thunderstorm.

Most of  the tallgrasses won’t display their flowers for another month, but Eastern Gama flowers earlier (to the delight of deer, which love the “popcorn” seeds.)   It has an unusual and very beautiful floral display:

Eastern Gama, Tripsacum dactyloides

Here, this tallgrass grows only on damp sites and is rarely more than four feet tall even there, more often a little lower.   It’s another of the natives we’ve restored to the place and it’s now spreading.   (Behind it is a young cedar elm, Ulmus crassifolia.)

Midsummer rain also helped along the annual wild grape supply:

Wildlife start on the grapes before they’re even ripe, but in a good year some grapes will be on the vines for a couple of months.   All are thick-skinned; some individual vines have better flavor (to humans) than others, but all are eaten by wildlife.

Roughleaf Dogwood berries are still green, but already they’re being taken by wildlife:

Roughleaf Dogwood, Cornus drummondii

This shrub-to-small-tree is a common understory in riparian woods and a component of fencerows and edges; it’s disappearing with development because it’s not recognized as valuable, yet it’s a resource for the fall bird migration (and we start seeing songbird migrants in August.)

We start noticing the big black-and-yellow orb weavers in June, and they grow steadily bigger…in July, they’re the dominant large spider, with webs strung everywhere they can find a support.

Argiope aurantia

This one’s web is over three feet in diameter.   A spider this size can easily take a big dragonfly (I’ve seen one with a Common Green Darner.)     Right after a thunderstorm, you can find the spider hiding under leaves or the undersides of branches it’s used for support, but soon they’re back out on the web,  ready for prey.

Also responding to sudden heavy rain–some of the seedling oaks we’ve planted.

After a couple of weeks, the young red oak (from a local tree’s acorn) had put out new leaves and lengthened twigs, the “spring green” contrasting with the other, older leaves’ dark green.

]]> http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1161 12 http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?p=1156 http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?p=1156#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:39:33 +0000 elizabeth http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?p=1156 Today when hanging up the wash, I spotted something small on the end of a clothespin that was hanging upside down from the line.   It was the same mottled dull gray-brown as the clothespin itself, and it was between the V of the angled ends.  I carefully removed the clothespin from the line and put it on the table, then went to get my camera.   After a fruitless search for the macro lens (I put it somewhere safe.  Very safe.   Too safe)  I had to use the zoom lens, which is a sort of zoom macro but won’t focus closer than about 18 inches. 

The insect is facing left, under the clothespin arm, clinging with its little striped legs to the clothespin.   It is perfectly camouflaged against the weathered, aged wood of the clothespin.  On rough bark, I would not have spotted it.   It stayed on the clothespin all day, resisting gentle attempts to get it to move to another surface where photography would be easier.  (Between the “arms” of a clothespin is not an easy place to shoot!)

Later, I was able to place it in the slanting light of afternoon sun and got a better picture of the dorsal surface:

In this image you can easily see the pattern on the “back, and the little bumps–they also show in the insect’s shadow, to the right.   I believe I can see antennae trailing back over the dorsum…and some moths have antennae like that, but they don’t have legs like this (I don’t think.)   On the other hand, leaf-hoppers usually have antenna angled forward (if those things on the back are antennae and not more camouflage.)

If this is a leafhopper (no, I haven’t sent the photos to BugGuide yet…I’ll be doing a more thorough hunt for the macro lens in hopes of finding it, and the insect, tomorrow) then it’s a distant cousin to this much more familiar critter:

Tibicen superba on window screen

The cicadas are making the yard far less peaceful than it was a few weeks ago.  East and north of here, Mississippi kites harvest cicadas, but here we have to wait for the arrival of “Cicada Killer” wasps–big scary looking wasps that are large and strong enough to carry off a struggling cicada and stuff it in a burrow to feed their young.

At the top (for the moment) is a Roseate Skimmer, Orthemis ferruginea, and below it a Neon Skimmer, Libellula croceipennis.   Lowest is a Widow Skimmer, Libellula luctuosa.   Smaller dragonflies buzzed the stick and sometimes drove off the larger ones–the Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis,  seemed to be celebrating having the top spot:

At least four male Blue Dashers were zipping around the pond.   A lone Eastern Pondhawk male, Erythemis simplicicollis,  chose to perch lower down on this stick.

When a female Eastern Pondhawk came to oviposit in the pond, this male and several Blue Dashers skirmished overhead.

The female stayed low to the water, dipping and scooping just like the Neon Skimmer female in a previous post.  The female has the same green face as the male.  This is the first time I’ve documented this species ovipositing in the water garden, though it shows up almost every year.

Ignoring all the excitement overhead,  Desert Firetail damselflies, Telebasis salva, oviposited around the margin of a lily pad:

The males grip the females by the head; the females curl their abdomens under to lay eggs along the edge of the leaf, in the water.   Sometimes in summer a lily pad will have a “fringe” of Firetails around it,  the pairs all mating and then ovipositing.

I put up a second perching stick, and that gave more dragonflies a chance to land, but there were still more dragonflies than perching room.    However, I got some solo portraits:

Widow Skimmer:

Neon Skimmer:

Roseate Skimmer:

Finally, another view of Dragonflies On a Stick:

The year we built the lily pond, we put in three waterlilies: a pink, a white, and a yellow.   Last year, when we cleaned out the overgrowth (of iris and lilies both) they weren’t in bloom, and I was afraid we might have discarded the pinks…but here they are.  We also have some yellows, but the whites are gone.    We still have too many lilies (too much mass of lilies, so they can’t spread their pads on the water) but no time this summer to get into the pond and separate and replant.

Yesterday’s finds included an ovipositing Widow Skimmer, Libellula luctuosa–the first time I’ve observed this species ovipositing.   The female Widow Skimmers are handsome–black and gold–but I was unable to get a good picture.   This dragonfly  had a very different style than the Neon Skimmer.   She hovered higher off the water, went in fast and dip-splashed only once before immediately rising to her hover/search altitude (about a foot).   Then typically moved at least a foot away to drop for another dip-splash…and formed no pattern I could discern as she worked the west end of the lily pond and some overflow (from the recent rains) shallow puddles beyond it.

Two male Widow Skimmers were around the pond, though, and I did get pictures of them:

The dark and white wings are especially beautiful as they seem to “flicker” over the water.   This one was patrolling the lily pond, and successfully defended the perching stick against a Neon Skimmer male–unusual, as I’ve seen in other years that the Neon Skimmer usually gets the high spot on the stick and the Widow Skimmer is lower.   There was a tiny Blue Dasher perched below the Widow Skimmer.

The other male Widow Skimmer patrolled upstream of the lily pond and had a favorite perch much lower than this, near Round Pool: 

Perching right on Round Pool, on emergent vegetation, was a male Blue Dasher:

Round Pool itself had become totally choked with irises, so last year we cleaned it out completely, replanting only a few clumps around the edges, a few other plants as well, and leaving most of the surface open.   It wasn’t open for long, as water striders  are all over it:

Upstream of Round Pool, the stream section is at least partly shady.   Neon Skimmers and Blue Dashers are the dominant dragonflies here, but we also see damselflies perching on the ground or on rocks, like this Kiowa Dancer, Argia immunda:

Odonates are predators in both their immature and mature forms, but they’re also prey for other predators.    Besides the fishing spiders, other spiders may attack them, including the big orbweaver Argiope aurantia.

This spider spins large, beautifully constructed webs in the water iris when it’s tall enough (it also spans openings between bushes out on the land, where I’ve witnessed it capturing and killing a Common Green Darner, quite a large dragonfly.)    With so many insects–not just odonates–in and around water, this is a good spot for a spider to try for dinner.

Both these spiders had spun webs in the water  irises of Round Pool; I’m sure there are more in the larger iris bed in the lily pond.

As the day wanes,  waterlily flowers begin to close up for the night:

Neon Skimmer females “splash-deliver” their eggs onto mats of algae or waterside vegetation.    They hover over the water,  then dip down and use the tip of the abdomen as a sort of scoop to splash the water forward,  instantly rising again.   The droplets of water contain the eggs.   This female oviposited constantly over a several minute period, moving from one area of the pond to another.

But along with odonates, this pond contains a variety of pond life–water striders,  giant water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, and usually one of the small water snakes.    And fishing spiders, which in summer grow to be quite large.

Six-spotted Fishing Spider, Dolomedes triton

Fishing spiders spend much of their time in the water lilies, under the leaves that extend above the water.   This one, I noticed, was attracted by the water movement of the ovipositing female as she splash-deposited her eggs.

At this point, I thought “What if she gets too close–will the spider attack?”   The spider waited.

Then:

She came too close; the spider jumped (alas, no picture of that leap) and grabbed; its weight bore the dragonfly down and it quickly scrambled into position to bite.   The dragonfly fluttered strongly, trying to break free, but in addition to the bite the spider had legs on the dragonfly’s wings.

Gradually, the dragonfly’s struggles ceased, the wing movements coming farther and farther apart.

When I moved around the end of the pond to get a vertical view of what the spider was doing (besides killing a large dragonfly) the spider retreated to the cover of the lily pads, leaving the paralyzed dragonfly glowing in the slanting sun:

I’m sure the spider came back after I left.   Meanwhile the other creatures of the pond went on about their business.

One of the Blue Dasher males took a breather from harrassing other small dragonflies, and below, a Hackberry Emperor butterfly suns on a water iris leaf.

It’s unusual that I get to witness predation on this scale–I really like Neon Skimmers and hoped this one wouldn’t be caught–or would get away–but if it had to be, I’m glad I was there to document it.

I  remember the public contributions to saving the whooping crane back when I was a kid living in extreme South Texas.   We had little cards (like those in some coin collectors’ books) that we filled with pennies, and sent in to help establish a refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast.  Every year we heard how many whoopers were left–the number dwindled…then bottomed out…then began to climb, one by one.    Those cranes–which most of us never saw, as they didn’t fly over us, but to the coastal marshes–were in a sense our cranes.  As the numbers climbed, we knew our contributions had helped.

Putting my pennies in those cardboard forms–collecting milk bottle tops and other items to earn money for the cranes–was my first awareness of citizen involvement in conservation, preservation, wildlife issues.

We don’t see the cranes fly over us here in Central Texas until late October through mid-November, most years.  Mostly it’s sandhills, great long skeins of them, filling the air with their calls.  Once (when I had no camera with me, of course) a sandhill flock had eight whooping cranes flying in a cluster on its margin.   Larger than the others, wheeling in their own tight little group when the larger flock wheeled to find and rise on a thermal…the first whoopers I had ever actually seen.  And one spring migration, a single whooper decided that a stock pond only a few miles away was a good place to rest and clean out the frog population.  I saw that one, too, driving back from a visit to my husband’s mother–saw it gleaming white in the dusk, huge and rare.

Sandhills and whoopers winter along the coast, feeding in marshes and farmland that used to be marshes.  In a good year (the last two years have not been good)  they feed on invertebrates–crabs, for instance–with high nutritional value and face the spring migration to their breeding grounds in good shape.  In a year that’s bad for young blue crabs, they eat whatever they can find–often not enough.    Besides cranes, geese and ducks and shorebirds and songbirds and raptors all flow south, funneling into Texas from any northern point east of the Rockies (some who “should” take the eastern flyway take the central instead) and concentrate along the Gulf Coast–some to winter there, some to make their way farther south.

For some people,  fall begins with leaves falling from the trees.  For me, it begins with the first southward migrants, no matter that it’s still summer here (and will be for two months more.)   I’ve photographed songbird migrants in August.    Fall just began this year, before summer even arrived.   A radio-transmitter-marked long-billed curlew left its breeding grounds in Nebraska June 13 and as of the 13th was in Gray County, Texas.    Now.  Before the summer solstice.

Last winter, “Bailey” wintered just across the border into Mexico, utilizing coastal marshes and feeding at the edge of the Gulf at low tide.   The Nebraska Long-billed Curlew Satellite Tracking Project attached transmitters to two female curlews, but “Sandy” disappeared from the trace last October.   Why is Bailey back so early?   Did she breed?   (Did the antenna sticking out of her back act like a pocket protector full of technical pens–did the male curlews think she was nerdy?)  Did she lay?  Were the eggs fertile?  Are there young curlews?   We don’t know that.  We don’t know nearly enough about the lives of migratory birds.

But one thing we do know is that Bailey and other long-billed curlews will be returning to the Gulf Coast.  Behind them, one species after another and several together, will come the hundreds of species and tens of thousands of birds that have been flying that route for millenia.   The shorebirds and the waterbirds, the songbirds and the raptors.  And the shorebirds and waterbirds will come to the beaches, the long sandy stretches where they can find the little shellfish they pluck from the waves…and to the salt and brackish and freshwater marshes.

Year after year they’ve come, and year after year humans have destroyed their habitat with construction and diversion and draining and filling and damming of rivers that used to flush the estuaries and bays with fresh water.   Our human trash–our sewage, our agricultural runoff, our fishing lines and nets and old tires and 50 gallon drums with residues of everything toxic, our boxes and newspapers and dirty diapers and medical waste and on and on now litters every beach, is caught here and there in the marsh vegetation every high tide.   It comes down the rivers…it floats ashore from ships and drilling platforms.

But the birds always come.    Too high to see, often, over our place, but easy to hear if you’re outdoors.    Going back and forth to college on the bus, I saw them twice a year, the huge flocks rising off the coastal prairies, prairies now become housing developments and industrial complexes.   They come back, they forage for whatever they can find whether it’s healthy food for them or not, and they fly away in early spring.    They’re only birds, after all.  They can fly only a few hundred miles a day, not an hour.    They don’t understand that some humans care about their survival and others say “Let evolution take its course” when what they mean is “It would cost too much to save them and they’re in our way.”

The thing about bird migrations that have been in place for ten thousand or more years is that you can’t explain anything to the birds.     You can’t say to the blue geese, the snow geese “The Gulf’s not safe this year–go somewhere else. “   You can’t say “Stay way from the coast and the marshes and we’ll give you some corn over here instead.”   You can’t tell the last stubborn survivors of the once vast flocks of whooping cranes that they must not go to the coast…that they must not eat what lives in those marshes because even if the crabs and snails are alive…they’re toxic.

So the cranes will come, and the cranes–at least some of them and quite possibly all the remainder–will die.   It’s certainly not the first species we’ve killed off, and it certainly won’t be the last.    And some people will say “At least we’ve got pictures” or “People are more important than any damned bird.”   People who have given up reality to live through their television sets.   But.   But I have seen whooping cranes in the air, and sandhill cranes, and the clouds of snow geese rising from the ground.  I’ve heard them.

In A Man for All Seasons, a play about Sir Thomas More,  he is betrayed by a man he had known a long time–a grasping climber–and the man does it to gain political advantage and personal wealth, an appointment in Wales.  More quotes the Bible “What will it profit a man to give up his immortal soul for the whole world” and then says “But for Wales, Richard!?”    This came into my head when I read that the long-billed curlew is already back in Texas and remembered the abundance of coastal wildlife–not just those that breed here,  but the great crowd of migrants and winter residents.    And the whooping cranes.

We may lose it all–the fish in the sea, the crabs and the shrimp and the oysters once so abundant, the birds on the shores and in the bays and estuaries and marshes.    “And for oil, people!”

Well, no, maybe not just for the oil.  For convenience, for comfort, for all the new materials made of petrochemicals…but most of all, for money.    When the clouds and skeins of wings are gone from the spring and autumn winds, and the calls of the wild geese and the cranes no longer lift eyes to see them against the blue which is far less blue…we’re left with paper…which an artist can fold into paper cranes that do not fly, and do not call.

Why is this of interest in wildlife management or prairie restoration?    The obvious reason is climate change caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels.    Carbon sequestration by changes in management of both public and private lands is one way to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere  and into plant materials.    Many of the things a land manager might do to promote wildlife or restore an original ecosystem (forest or grassland)  will have multiple benefits…including carbon sequestration.

Everything we consider wildlife is on the wrong side of the carbon cycle, as we are…from the snail to the white-tail deer, they all inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.  Only plants work the other half of the cycle.   Looking out on a piece of land, plants are what we notice–how much plant cover and what kind:  grass, forbs, shrubs, trees, etc.

The carbon sequestration potential of different types of habitat has only recently been considered, and have not been well-researched.   It’s known that long-lived trees sequester a lot of carbon throughout their lives–and using wood products from cut trees removes that carbon from the atmosphere as long as that wood is protected from decomposition (by its use in construction, for instance.)   However,  it’s also known that when cut or otherwise killed, there’s an immediate burst of carbon dioxide release due to decomposition of the tree’s underground portions.   Forest and scrub fires are worse,  converting the above-ground stored carbon to carbon dioxide by burning, as well as killing the trees and shrubs so that soil deposits are also lost.  It’s known that wet soil (having less or no oxygen) stores carbon better than dry soils (especially if they’re opened to oxygen by cultivation.

Wrede’s 2005 book, Trees, Shrubs, and Vines of the Texas Hill Country, published by Texas A&M Press, said that one acre of  “thicket” in the Texas hill country would sequester all the carbon produced by driving a car 26,000 miles.    But I haven’t seen any figures on central Texas riparian woods, or on the southern prairies in restoration projects.   Still, comparisons of old prairie (where it exists) indicates that native prairie does indeed sequester more carbon than shallower-rooted non-native pasture grasses (and far more than lawn grass, which is not useful at all as a carbon sink.

Initially, when we started on this project, one of my goals was to have the grassland entirely empty of woody plants.    However,  with the information about the value of woody plants for carbon sequestration,  I’ve been considering whether increasing the fraction of the 80 acres that  has some woody plants might not be a better idea.  Not in solid forest or even “thicket,” and certainly not in a takeover of Ashe juniper, but in clumps here and there–which (where we have them) do add habitat for nesting birds.    A sort of savannah effect,  in those areas where the cedar elm (in particular) keeps sprouting back up.

We’ve also been looking at trees adapted to a hotter, dryer climate–trees from southwest of here–especially for long-lived ones of a size to store significant amounts of carbon–as replacement trees to plant into the riparian woods.    We had long considered encouraging some trees in the southwest meadow,  especially along the margins of the existing west woods, to “thicken” that habitat for wildlife,  and in the northwest meadow to fill in an angle between the west woods and the main creek woods with more desirable trees than the juniper.   (Not that the juniper deserves its bad reputation, but we have plenty of them.)

I see several possibilities for land managers in the future.

First, fire is a less desirable management tool when carbon sequestration becomes a goal.  For all the good that fire can do in some circumstances, it quickly changes stored carbon to atmospheric carbon dioxide (besides contributing to already poor air quality and thus to human disease.)

Second, carbon sequestration benefits wildlife and also restoration projects, as the methods of sequestration fall in line with other management activities.  Increasing coverage of native plants (either woody plants or native grasses) improves habitat for wildlife and tends to create soil conditions that trap more carbon in the soil…while at the same time improving the soil’s water holding ability and thus water quality downslope.   Erosion control projects using native plants  and natural pond protection/development (including seasonal wetlands of shallow water)  produce damper soils that slow decomposition of organic materials.

Third, carbon-sequestering is already providing an new income stream for landowners in the right environments, if they can gain certification as a carbon sequestration project…carbon credits are marketable.

Fourth, the carbon sequestration potential of well-managed small acreages will increase as more and more land is built over and paved.    And thus the managers of smaller and smaller plots will need to consider carbon sequestration in their management practices.

There are always tradeoffs.    Each project has a unique set of conditions.  What is right for our 80 acres certainly won’t be right for every 80 acres (let alone 40, or 20, or 10, or 5 acres.    Each landowner/manager will need to consider carefully what the tradeoffs are for each individual piece of property.  But we all need to do that.

Variegated Fritillary, Euptoita claudia, on Gaillardia

The gaillardia were already past peak on May 30, and are even less obvious this week, though not all the seeds are ripe.

Ladybird beetle on Maximilian sunflower leaves

The Maximilian sunflower mounds are already knee high–this large multi-flowered sunflower won’t bloom until August or September, when it’ll send up multiple stalks, each covered with flowers.  But I love the architectural leaf patterns, and this time a little red “ladybug” showed up against the green.

Shortly before sundown on May 30, I was walking back along a mowed path through the prairie, accompanied by abundant little white moths.  This one let me get close enough for a picture–love the plumy antennae:

Lychnosea intermicata

A few more yards, and I came upon a coreopsis plant that had plain yellow ray flowers, rather than marked with mahogany near the disk, and quickly took a picture.  Too quickly–I failed to notice the three different tiny insects on it until I got the image into the computer.  You can’t ID what you don’t have in focus!

Missed opportunities, on all-yellow Coreopsis

This weekend’s expedition started out with a saving throw–a little moth fluttered down from the back door just as I started out.   It landed on the back step and I knew right away it was a species not yet on our list.

Catocala connubialis

This is a “Connubial Underwing” and I must say that the scientist(s) who named moths  in this genus had a fixation on women and marriage.    Take a look at the list of species names. Though the ID was confirmed by a member of the Texas Lepidoptera Survey, I’m pleased that I was able to narrow down the many-many possibilities to the right one.  And not only is it new to our list, but it’s not been reported before in this county.   On his recommendation, I’ve shipped the images off to the national database at Butterflies and Moths of North America as an addition to the county checklist.

After that, almost anything I saw out in the field was gravy.   We still have a lot of basketflowers (more than last year, thanks to the winter rains, and in more places than they used to exist on this property–thank you,  seed-eating birds!) and lemon horsemint; gaillardias are mostly gone but not entirely.  What really caught my eye were the number of Brown-eyed Susans,  Rudbeckia hirta.  The first years we owned the place, I was delighted to see a few clumps here and there.    Some years there’ve been hardly any.  But now they’re in the Entrance Meadow, a few in the West Grass, more in the Northwest Meadow, and in the Southwest Meadow:

Rudbeckia hirta in NW meadow

This long drift along the edge of the west woods is on the line of an overflow channel with the creek floods, but the meadow itself was full of them as well.

In the lower picture, a different view across the meadow with Lemon Horsemint (purplish stalks),  Gaillardia (bits of red/orange, center) and Brown-eyed Susan–the meadow in full bloom, shimmering under a hot (upper 90sF) midday sun.

Where the plants form particularly dense drifts along the edges of the meadow, tiny butterflies were flitting quickly along from one to another.

Pearl Crescent on Brown-eyed Susan

I was lucky to spot this one and get a half-decent grab shot of it.    Brown-eyed Susan is also a favorite of other insects, such as grasshopper instars:

Another important native-plant increaser on the place are the gentian-family “pinks”.    I didn’t find Meadow Pink (Sabatia campestris) this year–probably due to the dry spring–but the dryland pink-flowered gentians have continued to increase.  I think we have both local species–Lady Bird’s Centaury, Centaurium texense,  and Rosita, Centaurium calycosum, but I’m not sure–to me, the pictures at the Wildflower Center’s plant database site look very much alike.  The plants do have two forms, one I think looks like a nosegay, with a very rounded head of rosy pink flowers:

The other has a more open, “loose” or “straggly” flower arrangement that doesn’t form dense little mounds of pink, but the flowers are the same color, same size, same form:

Both grow in the lower sparser grass of thin-soiled areas,  and when in full bloom, make a most attractive haze of pink.  These are small plants, not nearly as big as Coreopsis or Brown-eyed Susan,  but you can’t miss them when they’re in bloom.

Forbs (non-grass, non-woody plants in grasslands) are an important part of the prairie ecosystem and we’re lucky that so many of the native forbs have survived on our place and are coming back.

]]> http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1093 4 http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?p=1079 http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?p=1079#comments Sat, 29 May 2010 15:28:32 +0000 elizabeth http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/?p=1079 Near Meadow: Claspleaf Coneflower and Lemon Horsemint

Our prairie restoration project, though small, still encompasses several micro-habitats–deeper and shallower soils, moister and dryer areas,  different uses of the land before we got it that changed what remnant seeds were there, what could come back.   The Near Meadow has several just in a couple of acres, and the plants show it.  Claspleaf Coneflower makes a golden streak down the wetter soil of the secondary drainage.  It will grow out of shallow water.

Dracopis amplexicaulis (formerly Rudbeckia amplexicaulis)

In a wet spring/summer, it continues blooming longer, but this year–with no significant rain in over two months–it’s about done.   The other dominant blooming in the Near Meadow at the moment is Lemon Horsemint, which prefers dryer soils and is found even in dryer soils than this:

Monarda citriodora

Along the far edge of the Near Meadow,  a few plants of Goldenwave, Coreopsis tinctoria, grow next to paler specimens of Lemon Horsemint:

Intensely yellow Goldenwave forms masses along railway embankments and roadsides and is found in less abundance where temporary water has dried but left the soil a little wetter and there’s good drainage.

We have it in the dry woods swale most years. This year it’s already fading up there, as it’s too dry.

Gaillardia (Firewheel, Indian Blanket) tolerates dry soils of several types and handles heat well.   In wetter summers, it flowers through the summer, but this year it’s already overhalfway to seed.  Still, there’s plenty of color:

Gaillardia pulchella and Monarda citriodora

Gaillardia can form a solid blanket of its own, but looks particularly good with other late-spring/early summer forbs are mixed in–like the purple/lavender Lemon Horsemint, but also (which we don’t have) Mealy Blue Sage,  the various coneflowers, etc.

Also drought-tolerant, the coneflowers–we have two, the Mexican Hat, Ratibida columnifera (bicolored) and Ratibida peduncularis (yellow)–grow on the dryer soils, both thin and deep.   Both are rather leggy, open plants topped with their flowers:

Ratibida columnifera

Ratibida peduncularis

Nearer ground level than any of these is the Prairie Bluet, which forms low mounds of tiny pale-lavender-pink four-petaled flowers.

Stenaria nigricans var. nigricans (formerly Hedyotis nigricans)

These tiny flowers are a favorite nectar source for small butterflies such as Gray Hairstreak, Reakirt’s Blue, and others.    Larger butterflies prefer the larger flowers such as Lemon Horsemint and Basketflower.

Beetle flying toward Basketflower already occupied by Black Swallowtail

Basketflowers require fall and winter moisture to flower; even though it’s now dry (cracks in the prairie over an inch wide and invisibly deep) , the rains of last fall and winter produced an abundant crop in the Entrance Meadow,  with many plants four feet high.

A mix of basketflowers and brown-eyed Susans over little bluestem

Although many butterflies, beetles, bugs, and other insects enjoy basketflowers,  I was able to photograph only a few today:

American Lady, Vanessa virginiensis, on basketflower

Hackberry Emperor, Asterocampa celtis, on basketflower

Black Swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes, on basketflower

In addition to butterflies,  beetles are attracted to these flowers.   A new species for our list today was this flower longhorn beetle:

Strangalia virilis on basketflower

The beetle in the first picture is almost certainly not this species, but another of the four Strangalia spp to be found in Texas.   I didn’t see the beetle while photographing the butterfly, so it’s no wonder the image isn’t clear enough to ID for sure.  Either S. luteicornis or S. sexnotata is possible from what I can see of the original image (much larger than seen here.)

Here’s one I didn’t get a good photo of before it dove deep into that mass of petals:

It might be another Strangalia or it might be something else entirely.    I also saw much smaller insects in these flowers, but the flowers were swaying in the wind and I couldn’t ever get focused on the little ones before they were out of sight.

Basketflower is a forb of the prairie, preferring damper areas but not really wet ones–the last wet year, we had a patch of it behind an old terrace, where water collected for awhile.   Originally, it grew only on one end of the Entrance Meadow (a pocket of original prairie plants that survived here) but has since spread to some other sites on the place as well as filling the Entrance Meadow when there’s enough cool-season moisture.    I hope eventually to establish it on the east end of the place, though the soil is different there and may not be right for it.

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