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.