Journal for July 31, 2026

July has been very hot, and flowers are blooming everywhere.

Buffalo Ridge Prairie

The third year of Maze Meadow – one of our wetland plantings.

Monarda, Oxeye and Yellow Coneflower

Center Valley from the top of Indian Grass Point – on a clear day.

Center Valley view on a day when we were getting smoke from the Canadian and Minnesota wildfires.

Some days brought very dense smoke and a wood smoke smell – we wore masks outside.

Wetland smoke

Maze Meadow with smoke

My project all month has been pulling Wild Parsnip. It’s been nice to be near – and sometimes in – the creek, especially in the hot weather.

This is one of the big beaver dams along the creek. I think the pile of willow sticks in the middle of the pond is a food cache. The sticks have been there so long that they’re starting to sprout green leaves.

This section of the creek had Wild Parsnip all along the edge. Now I’ve pulled it all, and hopefully, in a year or two, there will be much less to pull.

My best insect find this month was several Leadplant Flower Moths. Considered ‘special concern’ in Wisconsin, their caterpillars eat Leadplant flowers and seeds. They’re small, uncommon, and very well camouflaged. I’d looked for them before but never found any. This month I found 3, on two different bluff prairies.

I’ve been looking for the Leadplant Flower Moth caterpillars, and haven’t found any yet. But in searching Leadplants, I’ve found a few other interesting caterpillars. I thought at first that these might be Leadplant flower caterpillars, but they’re actually in a different family. I’m pretty sure this is a Common Tan Wave caterpillar.

And another Common Tan Wave..

We did our annual Butterfly Count this month – on July 11. As usual, it was a very hot day, and by the end we were exhausted. 4 of us counted, and we saw 35 species – click here to see the list. Here are a few of the butterflies.

Common Buckeye

Eyed Brown

Northern Broken Dash

These are Japanese Beetles with eggs of Winsome Flies. Winsome Flies were introduced into the US many years ago as a biological control for Japanese Beetles. I’ve been seeing a few of the eggs here in the last few years, but not often, and not usually this many on one beetle. When the flies hatch the larvae burrow into the beetles’ bodies, and eat them.

Little Yellow butterfly – a migrant from the south.

These are nests built by young Baltimore Checkerspot caterpillars. Their eggs are laid in large groups on Turtlehead plants, and when the caterpillars hatch, they build a communal nest out of webbing where they live and eat for the rest of the summer.

Here are some of the caterpillars on top of a nest. They’ll overwinter closer to the ground. In the spring they become less gregarious, and also less picky about food plants. I’ve found them on Swamp Betony and Plantain as well as Turtlehead. The adults emerge in early summer.

This is the flower of Fringed Loosestrife – fairly common on our cool wetland hillside. These flowers offer oil instead of nectar to visiting bees. The photo shows the hundreds of tiny oil droplets. There are specialist bees (Macropis sp.) that visit Loosestrife flowers to collect the oil and mix it with pollen to line their nest cells and feed their young.