Journal for August 31, 2026

This month has been a good one for outside projects. Mornings have mostly been cooler, even when the afternoons are hot. It’s still very dry – it would be nice to get more rain – but the hills are still green.

Western Prairie is our largest planted prairie. This path is the way to Big View Prairie – one of our remnant bluff prairies.

Big View Prairie is at the far south end of Western Prairie, on one of our highest south facing bluffs. In the last few years the sumac around the edges has been invading the open prairie in the middle. Mike just got a new lopping tool and wanted to try it out, so we decided to cut and treat the sumac.

Mike mowed the top – the flat part. The rest was too steep to mow so Mike cut the sumac with his lopper, and I followed behind and treated the stumps.

Mike with his long handled lopper.

Here I am – treating cut stems on the hillside

View from below when it was about half done

After we finished, Mike took a drone photo so we could see the full effect. The lightest part at the top is the mowed area. We cut and treated almost to the bottom of the steepest part. The last bits, along the bottom, are thick tangles of mixed brush that we left for another time.

Another way to control sumac is to cut it (without treating) twice in one summer for several years in a row. We’re trying this method on our smaller, more accessible prairie remnants.

Indian Grass Point with no sumac – after Mike cut it twice.

It’s been a good summer for Swallowtails. This is a male Tiger Swallowtail on Field Thistle – one of our native thistles. Native thistles have beautiful showy flowers, and are favorite butterfly nectaring plants right now.

Female Tiger Swallowtail – yellow form

Female Tiger Swallowtail – black form – showing the faint black tiger stripes

Giant Swallowtail on Prairie Blazing Star

Northern Pearly-eye on the front of my EV

Viceroy

Great Spangled Fritillaries mate in early summer, but wait to lay eggs until late summer or fall. So by this time of the summer, the adults are often worn and with tattered wings.

Mated pair of Eastern Tailed-blues

After finding Leadplant Flower Moths last month, I searched to see if I could find any of their caterpillars. I found just one – they’re very well camouflaged. Hopefully there are more.

Pat’s Prairie – one of the very first prairies we planted, in the winter of 2000/2001.

Prairie Wild Onion in Pat’s Prairie. I’d forgotten that we’d included these seeds in the mix. I found a patch of about a dozen blooms.

The wet end of East Center Valley Prairie is full of flowers right now, and the flowers are full of bees and butterflies.

More East Center Valley flowers – Joe Pye Weed, Sneezeweed, Boneset and Blue Lobelia

We stood here this morning and looked and listened, and there was a loud, constant buzzing of bees – all the ones I could see were Bumble Bees. Joe Pye Weed, Boneset and Blue Lobelia.

A few more wetland flowers…

Swamp Thistle

Slender False Foxglove

I was able to get a few of these orchid plants a few years ago from a neighboring farm where the crop field was expanding very close to the wet spot where they were growing. They grew and bloomed here for a few years, and then I didn’t see them again until this year. It’s nice to know that they’re still surviving.

Ghost Pipes – formerly called Indian Pipes. They’re small and hard to see – I almost always miss seeing them until they’re finished flowering and starting to dry up.

Hedge Bindweed – a lovely large native morning glory.

Fireweed

Yellow Garden Spider – a very large showy spider

After walking and driving up and down one of our trails numerous times this summer, I finally noticed this Bald-faced Hornets’ nest. It was nice to have a nest far away enough to be safe from stings, but close enough to be able to watch the hornets.

Here’s a video of some of the activity. I think the hornet on the left was adding to the structure.

I went by a few days later and discovered this. We’re guessing it was destroyed either by a bear reaching up from below, or a raccoon reaching down from a higher branch. The hornets were busy at the bottom – maybe salvaging what they could. The next day there were no hornets and the structure was nearly gone.

Tricolored Bumble Bee on Purple Prairie Clover

A deer died near our bird watching bench in the Glen. It’s very stinky, so we’ve been avoiding it on our walks. The vultures worked on the carcass for several days – 4 or 5 would fly up out of the Glen when we got close. And one day a Bald Eagle flew up with them.

Cedar Waxwings

This is the leaf mine of a tiny moth larva in an aspen leaf. I’ve tried to rear one for a long time and finally succeeded in getting an adult. The mine starts near the petiole of the leaf, and ends at the tip where the caterpillar folded over the edge of the leaf and made a tiny cocoon. The dark line down the center of the mine is frass (poop) from the caterpillar.

Here’s the adult – one of the smallest moths I’ve ever photographed – 2-3 mm long. It’s called a Common Aspen Leaf Miner.

We’ve started our annual count of migrating monarchs – the number we see on our afternoon walk. We start counting in mid-August, which is between generations, so we don’t see many at first. Things usually start to pick up toward the end of August. Now we’re seeing a lot of Monarchs – much higher numbers than last year at this time. Our best day so far was yesterday – August 30 – when we counted 141.

Mike made a new page that shows numbers from all the monarch counting we’ve done – starting in 2017. Here’s the chart that shows the cumulative numbers based on our daily counts. Click on the photo to see the full page with all his charts.