{"id":151,"date":"2009-02-26T13:08:48","date_gmt":"2009-02-26T19:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2009-02-26T13:08:48","modified_gmt":"2009-02-26T19:08:48","slug":"wild-plum-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Wild Plum Season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mexican plum, the tree-sized wild plum around here, blooms even in drought years.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only is it snowy white and beautiful, it has that amazing wild-plum fragrance…and as it’s an early bloomer, it attracts everything that’s hungry for nectar.<\/p>\n

\"Mexican

Mexican Plum in full bloom<\/p><\/div>\n

It doesn’t look like this long–especially in a drought year–and the tiny white petals are already blowing off it in today’s stiff warm breeze.<\/p>\n

This tree is covered with honeybees, but they’re not the only nectar-seekers.\u00a0\u00a0 The pretty little Grapevine Epimenis moth<\/a> was there, but between the wind and the moth’s bouncing from flower to flowe, we’re stuck with last year’s image of it.\u00a0\u00a0 Among the butterflies, Red Admirals,\u00a0 Common Buckeyes, Variegated Fritillaries, and various Sulphurs (including Lyside Sulphur) are also common visitors to wild plum.<\/p>\n

Less common in the middle of the day is the White-lined Sphinx Moth, Hyles lineata<\/em>, but today one was busily working the flowers while I was trying (unsuccessfully) to get a good shot of the others.<\/p>\n

\"Which

Which flower to plunder?<\/p><\/div>\n

Once it’s committed, the moth spends but a second or two at each of the tiny plum flowers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You can see they’re not good pollinators for these flowers, as they hover well above the stamens.\u00a0\u00a0 Some flowers have longer stamens and hide their nectar deeper in the flower.<\/p>\n

\"Sphinx

Sphinx moth sipping nectar<\/p><\/div>\n

These moths are often mistaken for hummingbirds from a distance–they’re big and they hover, hummingbird-like.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve also seen and photographed the Snowberry Clearwing Moth working plum flowers, but those were the thicketing plums, that bloom a few weeks later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mexican plum, the tree-sized wild plum around here, blooms even in drought years.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only is it snowy white and beautiful, it has that amazing wild-plum fragrance…and as it’s an early bloomer, it attracts everything that’s hungry for nectar. It doesn’t look like this long–especially in a drought year–and the tiny white petals are already […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,7,4],"tags":[17,13,32,70],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-plantlife","category-wildlife","tag-animal-behavior","tag-beauty","tag-native-plants","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}