Pollinators and Puddlers

Today was a good day for insect observation. Most obvious were the fritillaries found everywhere a patch of any sort of milkweed could be found,

but the skippers were also out in abundance.

I do find their little club antennae ridiculously cute. 

The rain garden at Mallard Lake in Oak Openings Metropark is becoming an insect magnet. Created  to capture runoff from a parking area, 

it is hardly pristine habitat, and yet habitat it definitely is. 

In just a few minutes of watching, I observed not only fritillaries and skippers but several kinds of bees and wasps, some of them new to me. The plants were nothing out of the ordinary, an assortment of the yellow daisies ubiquitous to Ohio summers and a swath of small-flowered thistle, all of the clumps working with pollinators going about their business. The takeaway: if you plant it, they will come.

This was also a good day for puddling pollinators, though the boys I saw were using an area where the gravelly sand appeared dry (and visibly-damper paths were nearby). Still, this battered fritillary (out of whom someone seems to have taken a bite)

and this sootywing were finding something to their liking.

In nature, there is evidently something for everyone.

Another reason to love milkweeds (as if we needed any)

I suspect that by now nearly everyone knows about milkweeds and monarchs, though far too many people still shy away from plants that have "weed" as part of their common name, and Aesclepias syriaca does indeed have a tendency to spread itself around. In my downtown yard, wandering monarchs have to make do with swamp and butterfly milkweeds, which thus far have exhibited no expansionist tendencies. But monarchs are not the only gorgeous insects with a fondness for these plants.

This morning, the common milkweeds along the multipurpose trail at Oak Openings Metropark were being mobbed by great spangled fritillaries, often several on a single bloom cluster.

I have learned that this behavior is common in this particular butterfly, which seems to enjoy sharing meals with friends, but the sight of gaggles of orange butterflies making use of swaths of pink poofy blossoms is an impressive one (not that my point-and-shoot has enough zoom to get details of the gaggles--you will need to do your own meadow-strolling for that). The larvae of this handsome butterfly eat violets, but the adults definitely like their milkweed nectar.

Male fritillaries are reputed to enjoy the occasional snack of dog poop, but none was on offer today.

Not your usual wildlife area

Last week found me back in Tampa for the 2018 Advanced Placement reading for English language: 1600 English teachers scoring around a million and a half essays--in eight days--in one room. Both the convention center and the hotels in which the readers were ensconced are on the Tampa Riverwalk, which is definitely not the downtown Tampa of the late seventies, when I was a student at USF and the city was in the midst of a wave of violent crimes. Today the Riverwalk is lined with high-rise hotels, office complexes, and expensive condos, with people still enjoying the view and the amenities most nights when I fell asleep, with other intrepid souls jogging even before sunrise. A lovely place, but not where one would expect particularly good wildlife-watching opportunities.

And yet, some of my fellow readers were blessed with porpoise and manatee sightings in the Hillsborough River, a shallow estuary that in my student days was seriously polluted but is returning to health, thanks to forward-thinking city governments and lots of citizen involvement. I did not get to see any aquatic mammals, but laughing gulls were the background track to every  walk, and my lunchtime view on the last day was of a pair of ospreys swooping about. Every evening at sunset, great blue herons glided overhead, returning to their nearby rookery, and a particular set of bridge supports became the roost for a diversity of area avians: not only the ubiquitous pelicans but white ibis, great egrets, and snowy egrets, along with several scruffy grayish birds with a wading-bird form, possibly some of the smaller herons.

Seeing places working on ways to coexist with wildlife makes me happy.