Look! Up in the Sky!

Most of the summer, my eyes are cast toward the earth, looking at all the new flowers that are blooming, noting which flowers seem to have finished blooming, inspecting the various bees, beetles, and other invertebrates hopping, buzzing, and crawling about. Watching my step to avoid basking snakes and briskly-trundling caterpillars crossing the trail.

But some days, when shapely clouds loom far overhead, my mind takes a maudlin turn and my gaze dims. I imagine people long ago looking up at the sky the same way, watching the clouds form and move and form again in different shapes, wondering where they came from and where they are going. Or the pale moon hanging in the sky, rising and setting day after day, month after month, as it is now and ever has been. Did those long-ago people think of me, hundreds of years later, looking at the same shapes in the sky?

I'd have to surmise probably not. I rarely spare a thought for the potential human hundreds of years from now, looking up at the moon, or whatever else may be up there by that time. They are too distant, too unimaginable. There are too many different paths the world can take to easily imagine if the clouds and constellations will be looked upon by the same sort of eyes, through the same atmosphere, with the same history and memory. The immeasurable set of options available to our species is no option at all to one small individual trying to guess what the future holds.

A hundred years ago, airplanes were just coming into their own as vehicles by which humans could conquer the air as we conquered land and sea. As were the mighty zeppelins, those temperamental and massive airships. Who would have predicted in those early years that the zeppelin would spectacularly fall out of favor after a few (dozen?) high-profile flaming tragedies, while the descendants of those early aeroplanes would grow faster, sleeker, and extraordinarily diverse in their design and use?

On days when the little airport a couple miles west of the Greenway hosts an event, sky-watchers are treated to a sample of the many ways humans have been able to co-opt the air. Is offers a glimpse of military history and aviation history, a world utterly alien to a person with feet firmly planted on the ground and eyes that prefer the perfectly adapted wings of birds and butterflies to the cold, brutish planes that force their way into the air. But these aircraft are not without charm and interest, and well worth a moment to ponder one of the myriad ways human ingenuity has expanded our place in the world beyond what our ancestors may have dreamed.

(I am not even going to attempt to identify these. Apologies to any enthusiasts for my utter ignorance! Except the one...I think that one's a cliff swallow that looked a lot like an airplane from the thumbnail!) 

 

A-Courting We Shall Go

Out of all insects, butterflies are favorites of humans for their sheer visibility and beauty. Although bees and other pollinators are getting more attention lately as parts of a healthy, functioning ecosystem, it is the colorful, scale-winged lepidopterans that have lit our imaginations for centuries.

What is not to love? They are utterly harmless to us; they are colorful and decorative, and they hang out on beautiful flowers sipping nectar and gently flapping their wings in the sun (we ignore or forgive the less-savory aspects of their behavior, including eating poop and "forced copulation" of females just emerging from their pupae).

The social lives of some butterflies can remind us of birds, with territorial males staking out prime real estate to defend from other males, while females may select mates based not on appearance or song but on their smell, territory, and courtship behavior.

Like a couple of scraps of lace dancing in a breeze, a pair of Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes) engage in a brief courtship flight, swirling around one another and turning up and down before disappearing from sight. A successful dance will result in the butterflies joining to mate for up to 45 minutes before the individuals go their separate ways. 

An Enchanting World

Sometimes the world can be a bit...overwhelming. So many huge problems, so much hustle and bustle, with a pinch of chaos on top of all the regular joy and suffering of daily life as a piece of humanity.

That's why it is good to take a calming moment and appreciate some of the other lives with which we share our world.

I have an uncomfortable fondness for many of our non-native plants--though I am aware on an intellectual level the ecological disaster they can be, I also admire their tenacity and their persistence, blooming where other plants dare not set root and producing prolific blooms throughout the hot, dry summers.

Birdsfoot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) is one of these rugged invaders, roundly reviled as invasive, a "pest" plant, and generally a noxious weed (though not technically classified as such in our state). Its low mounds of compound leaves with small clusters of buttery-yellow flowers are commonly seen along sidewalks and roadsides, sometimes cascading over curbs in decorative masses. Some plants have bright yellow flowers tinged with orange; they have the characteristic 5-petaled flower shape of their bean-family relatives, with their pollen- and nectar-producing organs enclosed in a pair of petals forming a sort of pocket (called the keel).

Because they are non-native, these plants don't participate in the healthy ecosystem as fully as native counterparts, which are usually swarming with bees, beetles, butterflies and other insects with which they have evolved for millennia. Birdsfoot Trefoil, in contrast, is a relatively recent arrival and seldom have I seen any insect visiting its abundant floral arrays.

So when I noticed a single bee diligently visiting one flower after another, I paused to watch. The little bee would alight on a flower, force its way into the enclosed flower with comical enthusiasm, sometimes appearing to rest its abdomen on the keel with hind legs dangling on either side, and then fly to the net flower seemingly at random--but always sticking with the Birdsfoot Trefoil instead of the tempting stands of Cup Plant or Gray-headed Coneflower--each teeming with pollinators--just a few meters away.

Why this bee with this plant? Why didn't other bees find their way to the spoils hidden within the pineapple-hued blossoms? And why did this one bee insist upon foraging on the Birdsfoot Trefoil rather than joining the pollinator party at the abundant native flowers nearby?

It turns out that the bee was an Alfalfa Leafcutter (Megachile rotundata), another non-native (though not as reviled as the aggressive Trefoil and in fact introduced to assist with pollination of crops). These bees specialize in Alfalfa, another non-native that has been grown as a forage crop and of which remnants can be found near the Sycamore Apartments. Alfalfa, as a member of the bean family, has similar flower shapes to the Birdsfoot Trefoil and it is easy to see why the Alfalfa Leafcutter bee might find success on related flowers.

How interesting to see the interaction of two European species, finding each other thousands of miles from their original range and going about their business. They are our kindred, brought to this land for our own selfish purposes. They thrive because they are adaptable and hardy--and we humans possess the same virtues.