It's not about you

Wild things often just do not cooperate. Birds, for instance. They would be much easier to identify if they would just come closer, instead of lurking in overhead foliage. And how is it that really cool primates like lemurs live all the way over in Madasgascar, where those of us with limited cash on hand are unlikely ever to be able to see them? And don't get me started on insects. There is a serious mismatch between those we would like to see more of and those with which we are ready to be done.

Cicadas are everywhere during this brood emergence. Now I am one of those oddballs who rather enjoys the once-every-seventeen-years cicada chorus, but Facebook is filled with people seemingly traumatized by the current omnipresence of large red-eyed bugs.

Mosquitoes are no doubt of some use in the ecosystem, but no amount of citronella seems to keep them from swarming my favorite outdoor seating area. On a recent visit to a forest park, the little bloodsuckers were so plentiful (and my repellent so far away) that I had to abandon an interesting trail for fear that loss of blood would leave my pale corpse somewhere along the path, until it was found by someone who had remembered to pack Deep Woods Off.

Butterflies are particularly uncooperative. The one time I managed to get to an area known to host Karner blues at a time of year when they are known to be flying, not a Karner was to be found. Last week, wandering a favorite meadow, I saw an unusual blue-gray butterfly of some kind, but would it land on anything nearby long enough to be photographed? Of course not, so with my failing memory (and difficulty observing things like how many of which markings the insect had, and on which part of the wing), the lovely little flutterer will remain forever unidentified. Ditto a black swallowtail of some kind, which danced enticingly along the path but never held still long enough for me to determine whether it was an actual black swallowtail, a pipevine or spicebush swallowtail, or a dark-form tiger swallowtail. Most annoying.

Of course, these creatures do not exist for us.The Karner blues are under no obligation to place themselves where they can be seen. The butterflies that were the object of my recent quests had their own lives to live. They were after the nectar in the meadow banquet, and avoiding the large thing that might be a predator took energy that could have gone into feeding and mate-finding. Our noisy neighborhood cicadas have only a few weeks to find a mate and pass on their genes before they die; their love song is also their death song.

All around us, every day, thousands (millions?) of lives are happening, all with their own stories. Most of us notice them only when they impinge on our lives in some way, and then the story becomes some aspect of the human one. Most of us never get to know what these beings are for themselves.

A reminder to myself the next time some creature becomes frustrating: it's not about you.

Falling in love again

with northwest Ohio, that is. A recent visit revealed new treasures. Just as a for-instance, Sylvan Prairie, a just-outside-the-city park created from old farm fields, is home to stands of golden thermopsis,

lots of wild tradescantia, and this incredibly gorgeous grass (which, alas, I have learned, is an invasive),

not to mention this exquisite little lake that reminded me of last summer's visit to County Wicklow in Ireland.

But the real highlight of that morning's ramble was the Kitty Todd Preserve, home to the endangered Karner blue butterfly. While I am not sure that I saw any Karners, the lupines on which their caterpillars depend were still in glorious bloom.

But what I loved even the more than the lupines and the possibility of sighting a rare butterfly was the landscape itself. The oak openings ecosystem, which stretches from northwestern Ohio into southeastern Michigan, is itself rare and endangered, threatened by both agriculture and urban sprawl. Many parts are called "barrens," but there is nothing barren about a field of bracken fern backing onto tall old oaks and maples.

Definitely in love.

No Warblers, but....

I am no good at spotting warblers. Hordes of the little things fly through Ohio every spring, but I have spotted them exactly three times in my life, and one of those times was when they were drawn to a feeding station at a public park. They are just too good at hiding in the foliage, and my neck is just too bad at tilting backwards to allow me to look up with a pair of binoculars. So, even though I am in Northwest Ohio during the spring warbler migration, not a warbler did I see this weekend.

However, I did spot a few of my favorite things today. On a walk through what I call the Mayapple Woods,

a flash of white to my left turned out to be a patch of white violets, rather than the nasty garlic mustard that has invaded too many of our Eastern woodlands.

The largest hairy woodpecker I've ever seen kept swooping ahead of me along the path but would not allow a picture--of course. There were lots of unfamiliar birdcalls that could have come from warblers, but my ear for birdsong is not good. There were also lots of red-winged blackbirds and one handsome goldfinch winging his way over the Wildwood Metropark prairie.

The real treasures of the day, however, were found at the park's Window on Wildlife, one of my favorite places for hanging out and seeing who shows up. In this case, two Baltimore orioles darted in and out but refused to hold still for a picture. This blue jay and a couple of companions provided quite enough color, even though they are so common that we often fail to appreciate how handsome they are. (And okay, they're thugs, but the blackbirds and grackles were totally unintimidated by the trio of jays.)

The highlight of the afternoon, though, was a bird that I had seen in the flesh only once before and had been coveting (because it has seemed as if everyone else has had them this year....): a rose-breasted grosbeak. This handsome youngster (or so the knowledgeable birder in our impromptu group thought him) not only came to sample the offerings, he preened and posed for pictures.

So--no warblers, but today was fine.

Revisiting old friends

 I had the opportunity today to spend a little time in the Toledo Botanical Gardens, a favorite haunt that I had not visited for several years.The weather was less than ideal--fifty degrees with a damp wind, heavily overcast, occasionally drizzly--but the gardens were, as always, a joy. I of course had gone off without a camera as the stop was unplanned. (Someday I may have to get a phone with internet, but for now, I am hanging onto my beloved, nearly indestructible flip phone.)

  The rhododendron collection was in full bloom, and those pure whites and singing pinks work regardless of lack of sun. The floor of the woodland garden was a sea of blue and white scilla and spangled with trilliums and wild geranium. One patch of yellow lady's slipper (seen here in a 2012 photo) provided a memory of sunshine on a gray day.

On the same path, a large swath of shooting stars (also 2012 photos)  had definitely come down to earth.

My beloved European copper beech was as spectacular as ever.

 And then, in the herb garden, was a plant I had seen only in pictures (these courtesy of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center): camassia. I am not certain if the specimen next to my favorite bench was the eastern or western variety (I expect the latter, because the flowers were really blue),  but the utter gorgeousness of the flowers inspired serious plant lust.

Camassia quamash, a western species. Doesn't that center just pop?

I need to find more excuses to visit the garden.

Death of the Dancers

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a group of trees on the river trail that I have long thought of as "the dancers" because of their gracefulness.

The week after this photo was taken, an afternoon walk revealed city crews removing several of the trees.

It turns out the most graceful of our city trees were ash, and they had succumbed to the emerald ash borer, the nasty Asian insect that feeds on the inner bark of ash trees, and only ash trees. Our local population had evidently been having quite a feast. 

Every exposed inch of every dead tree looks like this.

The eastern US has lost millions of ash trees to this accidentally-introduced scourge since 2002.  There are now insecticides that can treat individual trees, but the outlook for the wild population is not good.

Our local trail, at least, is not devoted entirely to ash; Marietta learned its lesson when Dutch elm disease took out the more than 1900 elm trees that once lined the city streets. Our urban forest is now more diversified and, blessedly, less prone to vanishing all at once. Just a few yards past the dead dancers, an Ohio buckeye is in full bloom.

And the sweet gums are doing fine.

Good news (I guess.)

Still a mess

Final exams and Earth Day are behind us, so at last it is back to the blog. This was for some reason the busiest semester of my career (surely not a sign that I am slowing down).

Some things have not changed, and one of them is troubling. The pitiful-looking house finch subject of an earlier blog post looked just as pitiful on April 27 as he did in March, nearly six weeks on.

In these blurry shots, you can see how naked his neck is.

This little guy does not seem to be getting new feathers. This kind of feather loss is often associated with mites, but no other neighborhood birds seem to be affected. The mystery deepens.

It's alive!

When we moved from Chipmunk Ridge last year, I potted up some favorite plants to bring with us. One of those was clematis viorna, a native vine with sweet little bell-shaped flowers in an unreal-looking pink and yellow combination. (My photos of the plant are all on an external hard drive that I am too lazy to access at the moment, but you can access images and information here.) Not sure how a native vine would do in a container, but not having anyplace in the walled garden to plant it until the Final Battle With the Alien Invaders has been won, I purchased the largest container available at our local Lowe's (which coincidentally happened to be pink and on sale for $2.99), planted the clematis with burgundy and chartreuse heuchera, and stuck in a large tripod from our local ironworkers at Garden Forge for climbing.

The results were not good. The heuchera did fine, and for a good few months the clematis climbed slowly, twining its tiny tendrils around the metal supports and putting out some healthily-green leaves. Then--nothing. Sometime in September or thereabouts, viorna vanished. Not a wisp of anything vaguely resembling a vine.Evidently, the plant had departed this earthly plane.

The pot remained on the patio all winter, where the heuchera stayed in full leaf in front of the large bare spot. Then, making my morning toast, I glanced out the window to see--tendrils! Viorna has put out a good eight inches of growth already, and we had snow just a couple of hours ago.

This is a Sign of Good Things to Come.