The magical meadow morning

I love lots of places, but one special favorite is a spot on the meadow loop trail at Toledo's Wildwood Metropark, just beyond its intersection with the floodplain trail and near the paved bike path. This small section of a very busy park is not wilderness, but I have spent as long as half an hour there without encountering another human. 

One of the attractions of my favorite bench is the view of this white oak, which I always think of as the Prairie Sentinel (even though this meadow is technically not prairie). When I first encountered the tree in 2010, a man was seated on one of its spreading branches making notes about something below, but the discovery of nesting bobolinks led to the closure of that trail.

This little patch of restored grassland was a lively place this morning, filled with the hum of cicadas and the hovering of meadowhawks, those lovely-to-us dragonflies that are no doubt the terror of other insects. Hawks of the avian variety occasionally rode the thermals overhead, though their presence did not seem to make the smaller birds particularly nervous.

A pair of hummingbirds rested briefly on a dead limb just a few feet from my bench; as is the way of hummingbirds, they didn't stay long in one place. The stars of today's show, however, were the goldfinches, which were everywhere, swooping above the meadow in their unmistakeable flight pattern. It has always intrigued me that a bird this showy can very nearly disappear when feeding, but the males' breeding plumage is the color of many of our summer flowers, and the females' olive drab blends right into flower stalks, allowing them to forage unseen. (Let's hear it for evolution!) Of course, this trait makes photographing the little lovelies impossible with the limited zoom on my pocket-sized point-and-shoot.

Particularly amusing were what seemed to be Goldfinch Wars over a particular patch of thistle. The meadow has been invaded by quite a bit of Cirsium, but today everyone seemed to want this specific group of plants; none of the others would do, so much diving, chasing, and twittering ensued.

The decision of the human to walk over to see what all the fuss was about led the quarreling finches to explore other parts of the meadow, but the thistle patch was most satisfactory, anyway. Thistle bloom is quite lovely, despite the weediness of so many plants in the genus,

and today, after the goldfinches left, the pollinators took over the patch.

Not a bad way to spend part of one's morning.