Journal for October 28, 2018

It feels like fall has come and gone already.  We’ve had a lot of windy, cool days, so the colors are muted and most of the leaves are down. 

Center Valley a few weeks ago,  when there was still green in the trees.

 

Misty morning in Center Valley

 

Sugar Maples on Maple Ridge.  The colors only lasted a few days.

 

Only a few days later

 

Hidden Oaks Savanna

 

We had our first snowstorm on October 14.  It snowed hard all that day.

 

The next day – morning sun on the ridge

 

and in Center Valley

 

Brown-eyed Susans

 

Sumac Prairie later that day – with melting snow

 

Mike and I both finished our late summer/early fall projects.

Mike finished mowing aspen sprouts in the Narrows Prairie.

 

and I cut and treated most of the woody brush on Hidden Oaks Hillside.

 

So we started our first big fall project.  Our old path out to Indian Grass Point was steeply sloped – hard for the EV to navigate, and slippery for the tractor in wet weather.  And we wanted to do more savanna clearing there, anyway.    So we made a new path through the woods.   Now we’re working on clearing along it, and between the new and the old paths, so it has savanna on both sides.

Here’s the very beginning, before we started cutting, with the old path leading off to the right.

 

Here’s the new path, on the left.

 

This is Mike mowing the path, after we’d cleared trees and large bushes out of the way.

 

Part way through

We made it through!  This is looking at the old path (on the left), and the new one (on the right) from the other end.

 

Most of the rain we’ve had recently has come in small storms.  We had one larger storm with 4 inches of rain.  Fortunately it flooded the creek, but not our driveway.

 

 

A calmer day, looking upstream

The weather has been too cold and windy to see many moths, but I did find one interesting creature I’d never seen before.

Several species of moths have wingless females, but since the females don’t move around much, and are small and inconspicuous, I’d never found one.  Then I found this adult female Fall Cankerworm on top of one of our trail cameras.  It’s tiny – about 10 mm long – and doesn’t even look like a moth.

 

This is what a male looks like – an adult male Fall Cankerworm – a photo from last year.

 

Most of the photos on the trail cameras these days are deer – sometimes just their antlers.

 

 

Fall colors at the bench on Hidden Oaks Savanna

 

Buffalo Ridge Prairie – it’s nearly winter now.