Spring is coming. Nature is not locked down, but continues to come to life. We notice the buds expanding and the crocus blooming. Leaves emerging from the depths and plants all around us waking from their winter slumber. As spring unfolds around us, something extraordinary is about come our way again. The Monarchs are coming.
Monarch ovipositing on common milkweed. Photo by Brad GuhrA monarch caterpillar munching on a milkweed. Photo by Brad Guhr
Providing for pollinators
The monarch’s annual spring migration north from Mexico has begun. You can track their progress through Monarch Watch and Journey North. Each year we take note of when this incredible journey passes through our area. It is amazing to think that these delicate creatures can make this trek north and south every year.
Statistics show that the monarch butterfly population in
North America has declined by over 90% in just the last 20 years. This is disheartening. One of the biggest factors in monarch decline
is the increasing scarcity of its only caterpillar host plant: milkweeds.
Monarchs can’t successfully reproduce, or migrate without milkweeds, resulting
in the species decline.
Monarchs also need other blooming native wildflowers, trees, and shrubs that provide nectar for the adult butterflies to feed upon. This habitat, critical to the survival of the monarchs, continues to disappear at an alarming rate. This natural habitat decline is taking a steep toll on wildlife of all types.
Monarch on New England Aster in the fall. Photo by Janelle Flory Schrock
Plant more than milkweed
Many of us are planting milkweeds and native nectar plants in our gardens to help monarchs survive. Here is a list of plants from our Native Plant Guide that monarchs prefer:
Perennials
Aster ‘October Skies’
Aster ‘Raydon’s Favorite’
New England Aster (Aster novae-angliae sp.)
Blackeyed Susan (Rudbeckia)
Coneflowers (Echinacea sp.)
Coreopsis
Blazing Star (Liatris sp.)
Beebalm (Monarda sp.)
Milkweeds (Asclepias sp.)
Yarrow (Achillea sp.)
Eryngium yuccifolium
Goldenrod (Solidago sp.)
Zizia aurea
Vernonia ‘Iron Butterfly’
Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Lavender Towers’
Prairie clover (Dalea sp.)
Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium sp.)
Shrubs
Chokeberry (Aronia sp.)
Leadplant (Amorpha sp.)
ServiceBerry (Amelanchier sp.)
Buttonbush (Cephalanthus sp.)
American plum (Prunus sp.)
Elderberry (Sambucus sp.)
Viburnum (Viburnum sp.)
Buttonbush bloom
Trees
Buckeye (Aesculus sp.)
Redbud (Cercis sp.)
Persimmon (Diospyros sp.)
Linden (Tilia sp.)
Stretch the season
A greater variety of plants will attract a greater variety of wildlife, including monarchs. Try to plant several species of wildflowers with varying bloom times, providing nectar sources that stretch through the season. Different pollinator populations peak at various times through the warm months, so provide for them by having a long blooming garden. Early spring and late fall flowers can help sustain migrating species in the difficult stages of their journey. Research has shown that a lack of late season nectar sources is as crucial to migration success as milkweed. Help these insects get the energy they need all through the year!
If you plant even a few milkweeds in your own garden, you can help reverse the fortune of these beautiful insects. Support habitat and other food sources for monarch butterflies and other wildlife by planting native plants. It is always beneficial to reduce mowing, and limit or eliminate the spraying of herbicides and pesticides. You can be part of the ultimate solution, which is to provide the plants monarchs need for their life cycle. Watch for these incredible butterflies. They are coming.
One final thought I came across the other day:
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn
If you come to the Dyck Arboretum during these wet spring days, you will be greeted by a unified chorus. I’m not referring to the sound of people with spring fever, singing the praises of nature while walking the paths and enjoying the prairie gardens and native plant communities. You will hear the mating call of the boreal chorus frog (Pseudacris maculata).
This up to 1.5-inches in length amphibian exhibits various shades of brown, gray or green with three dark brown stripes running down its back and an especially noticeable one running the length of its side through the eye from nose to hind leg. If you are patient and observant, you will see one at our greenhouse rain garden.
The boreal chorus frog is one of the most widespread frogs in Kansas with distribution nearly throughout the state. They are commonly found in the daytime during the breeding season from late February through May. Outside of this time, they are seeking refuge under cover of wetland vegetation or soil. After rains or during humid nights, they emerge to forage for small invertebrates. According to the Kansas Herpetofaunal Atlas, in a 1906 article by F.A. Hartman, he reported finding algae and ants in the stomachs of young specimens and spiders in the stomachs of adults.
Follow our paths to the rain garden/small pond by our greenhouse or simply walk toward the unmistakable high-pitched shrill sound to find these critters. When you approach the pond edge, their calls will stop. If you stay quiet and still, one-by-one their clicking trill (like the sound of running a fingernail along the teeth of a comb for two to fives seconds with a slight rise in inflection) will return. At full strength, the volume of their collective chorus may make you want to hold your ears.
A boreal chorus frog on a pot in our plant nursery (photo by Dyck Arboretum grounds manager, Katie Schmidt)
As we humans avoid physical contact from each other during these anxious times of a worldwide pandemic, I find some comfort in knowing that cycles of the natural world are still carrying on around us. Amphibians may be facing other challenges as my colleague Katie Schmidt recently wrote about. But I’m glad these Arboretum chorus frogs are not practicing social distancing at the moment. Their mating call signals that their population will be alive and well here in the future.
Creating Frog Habitat
This interpretive signage next to our rain garden is located between buildings at Dyck Arboretum. The line drawings artwork is by Lorna Habegger Harder.
If you would like to create habitat for frogs, consider restoring wetland habitat in a low place on your property that collects water. I am in the process of holding a virtual rain gardening class through which I will send you a link to a presentation and then set up consultation time to discuss your project and the logistics of making it happen. At our upcoming spring FloraKansas event, you can get the plants that like their feet wet to make habitat for chorus frogs and all other sorts of water-loving creatures.
I’ll leave you with one more serenade from our local population of boreal chorus frogs.
If you have been walking through the Arboretum over the past few weeks, you probably noticed the deciduous holly. Ilex decidua gets so much attention because of its incredibly lustrous fruit of red, orange, and yellow. As the leaves fall away each year in November and December, the fruit magically appears and remains on the tree for most of the winter.
‘Sundance’ Deciduous Holly
Fruit
These colorful berries are not a preferred food of birds, but become more appetizing when snow covers the ground. Often trees are completely stripped of berries in a couple days after a heavy snow, because other food sources are not readily available. Many birds, including cedar waxwings, flock to these trees to feed on the fruit later in winter.
Deciduous holly requires male and female plants to produce fruit. Tiny white flowers appear before the leaves in March and April. We have several male selections planted in close proximity to the female plants to assure the development of the attractive fruit each year. It is best to keep the fruit producing female plants in the foreground and tuck the male forms out of sight. We have used the branches with fruit cluster as holiday decorations.
Holly berries as part of an evergreen wreath
Habit and Site Preferences
Deciduous holly, or Possumhaw as it is often called, is a small tree or large shrub that grows 15-20 feet tall. The smooth gray bark of the trunk and branches hold the fruit on the upper half of the plant. Here in the Arboretum, we have both tree forms and suckering shrubs. Either is attractive and the suckering shrubs making a nice screen. As their name indicates, they are deciduous, dropping the leaves in autumn to fully reveal the berries.
These deciduous trees grow best in full sun or partial shade. Trees are more vigorous and produce more berries in full sun. We have several along our creek channel and some around our parking lot. They are quite adaptable to wet or drier conditions.
A few selections at the Arboretum:
‘Council Fire’ – An upright, rounded form growing 15′ tall and 10′ wide, this plant is superior for its ample fruit production and retention in clusters along the stems.
‘Council Fire’
‘Red Escort’ – This is a male selection (pollinator) with glossy leaves and a habit to 20′ tall.
‘Warren’s Red’ – This cultivar grows on the eastern border of the Arboretum parking lot. It is very hardy and consistently produces fruit. It is more shrub-like and upright, ultimately reaching 15’ tall.
‘Warren’s Red’
‘Sundance’ – Nice tree form to 10’ tall and 8’ wide. It has the longest lasting fruit, which is orange-red.
‘Sundance’
We are planning to have several deciduous holly varieties at our spring FloraKansas Native Plant Festival. Check out our Native Plant Guide for these cultivars along with Ilex verticillata varieties. Each will give you great winter color and habitat for the landscape. We love their hardiness and toughness as well as the beautiful fruit. Why not give them a try?
Opportunities to conduct citizen science are all around us and doing so can add great value to our lives. You can refer to an earlier blog post (Get Rich and Happy with Phenology) to see how much I enjoy scientific pursuits in my spare time. These activities include various elements of plant conservation, and looking for/identifying butterflies and birds.
My data collection tools for the Harvey Count Butterfly Count
I discussed in this past post that phenology is the observance of cyclical and seasonal natural events. Citizen science is a method of observing and documenting phenology. The Oxford English Dictionary defines citizen science as “scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.”
Field data sheet from a past Harvey County Christmas Bird Count
Kansas is flush with great people and resources when it comes to conducting skillful citizen science. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the Kansas birding community. I know a number of committed folks who will spend entire weekends and even vacations focused on the pursuit of observing and identifying as many birds as possible. The especially skilled and driven birders identify more species in a day than most people will recognize in a lifetime. Some may consider these folks a bit wack-a-doodle-doo, but I consider them inspiring contributors to citizen science. I will strive to be more like them in my empty nest years (yes, pun intended), which are coming soon.
The drive for many birders to scientifically document nature around them then extends to the follow-up data sharing. This is where personal enjoyment in bird watching becomes important citizen science. And this is also where I get to the reference in my title for this blog about “plugging in”.
Electronic Reporting
With mobile devices making the Internet available almost anywhere and with ever more nature-based reporting platforms coming available, sharing findings about animals and plants has never been easier. Here are some online reporting options for you to check out:
A popular reporting platform is eBird, created by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2002. Through this platform, birders can report their findings and track data according to their life lists, county/state/country lists, etc. Ornithologists world-wide are using eBird data to better understand population ranges, changes in this data related to climate change, and so much more.
Birds are probably the most abundantly reported subject when it comes to citizen science of the natural world. Other Cornell Lab popular platforms and outlets for collecting bird data close to home include Project FeederWatch, NestWatch, and Great Backyard Bird Count. Breeding Bird Surveys, and Christmas Bird Counts (see a previous blog on this topic HERE) offer birding outlets for more adventurous birding in the region where you live.
Butterfly Tracking
Butterfly tracking is also gaining popularity. A good platform for reporting findings about monarch butterflies is through Monarch Watch. With their trending decline over the last couple of decades, monarchs are a popular focus for butterfly monitoring. Through Monarch Watch, citizen science data inputs for the public can include host plant emergence in the spring, and larvae and adult monarch sightings. They even detail how to tag monarchs for further tracking. Developing habitat for monarchs and improving available native nectar sources is also good for all butterfly species.
Check out a recent edition of On T.R.A.C.K.S. (V25:1), a publication produced by the good folks at Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism for more ideas about citizen science reporting. This information-packed issue provided the topic idea for this post. Tt goes into much greater depth on many of the resources I refer to. This issue also highlights and further describes additional electronic platforms related to documenting biodiversity in general, plant flowering and seeding, climate change, precipitation, frogs, ladybugs, and even litter.
Our first lecture of our 2020 Winter Lecture Series with Chuck Otte will focus on Kansas Bird Populations and Distributions. Chuck is a fantastic resource, a great advocate for citizen science, and an interesting speaker. Put it in your calendar Tuesday, February 11 at 6:30 and come join us.
Happy Kansas Day! I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than to spend more time studying and reporting on the natural world of Kansas. Now, get out there, plug-in for citizen science, and have fun in the process!
Winter is a great time to curl up on the couch and enjoy some cozy relaxation. But for wildlife, it is a three month battle for survival! There are many ways we can help wildlife get through these difficult months. Of course, the best way to attract and support biodiversity is to fill our landscapes with native plants, providing seeds, host plants, shelter, and an active soil biome. But if you missed the boat on planting this past year, there are still some things you can do today to attract furry and feathered friends.
Native plants add beauty and shape to the winter landscape (Photo by Brad Guhr).
Food
I am an avid birder, so I love to put out feeders in winter when food is scarce to witness a diverse set of species as they drop by. Make sure your feeders are hanging high, away from potential predators (read: neighborhood cats!) and that they offer high-value feed like sunflower seeds or suet cakes.
Besides birds, I like to see rabbits and other small mammals hanging around. Toss out food scraps like carrot skins or wilted salad greens, either in a compost pile or along a fence line to attract rabbits and opossums. (Opossums?!? Why would you want them around? Here’s why)
I used to live near a small field that is home to deer. Some people in our neighborhood scatter corn on the edge of their yard to draw them out of the woods. They come out just as the sun is going down, peacefully nibbling the grains.
Water
When the temperatures plummet, puddles and streams freeze over, becoming inaccessible to the animals that desperately need a drink. Heated birdbaths do the trick, but an inexpensive option is to frequently refill a cement birdbath, less likely to crack than porcelain ones. I dump a pitcher of water into my birdbath before I head to work, giving the birds at least a little bit of drinking time before it freezes over again. Easily make your own cement bird bath like this one, a similar process to what we do every year in the EPS summer institute for teachers. I keep my birdbath low to the ground so that it is accessible to birds, but also to other passing friends like rabbits and skunks.
Yes, rabbits can be a bit of a pest, but by providing them with a water source you fortify their place in the food chain, thereby supporting the foxes, owls, and other predators that depend on a healthy rabbit population. By Gidzy [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Shelter
A brush pile is a great and easy way to create high-quality shelter for birds and small mammals. Find a forgotten corner of the yard and collect sticks, limbs, leaves, and other brush into at least a 3 foot by 5-foot stack. Forget taking all that stuff to your local dump; save yourself the work and create habitat for neighborhood critters.
Additionally, planting a few evergreens in the landscape protects tree-dwelling animals from the icy winter winds. Though eastern red cedar is Kansas’s only native evergreen, I have a few other favorites that do well in our climate. Look for Taylor Junipers at our sale (a cedar selection) for a pencil-shaped evergreen good for limited space. Arizona cypress and Green Giant Arborvitae are good non-native options.
(Left) Arizona Cypress tree in the Northwest corner of the Arboretum. (Right) Cypress foliage
Plan Ahead
Spring is, remarkably, just around the corner. Start planning now for how you want to improve your landscape with native plants so you are ready when FloraKansas arrives! A garden with food, water, shelter, and a diverse set of native plants will attract wildlife season after season, year after year.
Life flies by for all of us and it is easy to miss or forget what happens in a given month. When reviewing recent photographs on my phone, I was pleasantly reminded of all the richness that happened over the last four weeks or so. October in Kansas is that great fall transition period between summer and winter, hot and cold, green and brown, and fast and slow when there is SO MUCH to see. For those that feel that they endure the extremes of Kansas to revel in the moderation that comes with fall, October is your time.
I was reminded from these photos of our Dyck Arboretum of the Plains mission – cultivating transformative relationships between people and the land. Let’s review in the following photos the richness that can be found in that interface between the plants/wildlife of Kansas and the people that enjoy this place in October.
Monarch fallout.
October 1 brought a monarch “fallout” when their migration was interrupted by strong south winds. They momentarily took a break from their journey and sought shelter in our Osage orange hedge row.
Tagged monarchs.
Local monarch enthusiast, Karen Fulk, took advantage of the fallout to capture and tag monarchs with identification numbers that help other monarch observers in Mexico or elsewhere to better understand the speed and location of their migration.
Middle school students measuring tree height with the “rough estimate” method.
Santa Fe Middle School students from Newton were able to witness the end of the monarch fallout on October 2 and also enjoyed various activities on the Dyck Arboretum campus that included insect collecting, plant sampling and measuring tree height. The Dyck Arboretum’s Kansas Earth Partnership for Schools (EPS) Program curriculum has a lesson that teaches students how to measure tree height with five different methods including estimation, shadows, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.
Measuring tree height.Lorna Harder teaching a 5th Grader about plant identification.
On October 6, former and current Dyck Arboretum board members hosted tours of their homes and land near Hesston for Arboretum Prairie Partners. Lorna and Bob Harder gave a tour of their solar photovoltaic-powered home and surrounding prairie landscape and LeAnn and Stan Clark hosted everyone for dinner on their patio surrounded by extensive native plant landscaping.
Lorna Harder leading a tour of the native prairie she is helping steward.Director, Scott Vogt, welcoming Arboretum Prairie Partners to a meal on LeAnn and Stan Clark’s patio.
Hesston Elementary students took a field trip to the Arboretum on October 10 to conduct a leaf scavenger hunt, learn about monarch migration, observe different seed dispersal mechanisms and study insect diversity in the prairie.
Hesston Elementary students search for insects in the Arboretum reconstructed prairie.Finding seeds, grasshoppers, beetles, flies, spiders, true bugs, and more.Insect sweeping.Students found a female striped wolf spider carrying its newborn young on its abdomen.Grasshoppers are plentiful in the prairie during October.Initial insect skittishness turned to fondness during the field trip.Beehives at Earhart.
Earhart Environmental Magnet Elementary in Wichita, a Kansas Earth Partnership for Schools participating school, engages their students in environmental education with hands-on activities such as beekeeping. Students tend the bees, grow and maintain native plant gardens as nectar sources, and regularly camp on their grounds to learn more about the natural world around them.
Earhart students check a birdfeeder while searching for insects in one of their courtyard native plant gardens.Earhart students found a ” burnt marshmallow” Chinese mantid egg casing or ootheca.
On October 17, Walton Elementary (another Kansas EPS School) students came to the Arboretum to collect seed and study how seeds disperse. They each had a target plant they were searching for and from which they were aiming to collect seed. They did the same last year, germinated the seed in their greenhouse over the winter, and had a successful native plant sale in the Walton community.
College students observing a garter snake.
Bethel College environmental science classes visited the Arboretum on October 24 to learn about the native plants and wildlife of Kansas, natural resource management, and ecological restoration. When students become interested in and well-versed about the natural world around them, they will turn into more informed and better-educated environmental decision-makers of the future.
Bethel students found a Pandorus sphinx moth caterpillar crossing an Arboretum sidewalk.‘Tiger Eyes’ sumac from an Arboretum plant sale was in autumn splendor on October 26 at my house.
Part of establishing a rich sense of place for people in any one location involves not only natural history connection cultural enrichment through the arts. The Dyck Arboretum’s Prairie Window Concert Series (PWCS) features eight live music performances each season. Our 2019-20 season was kicked off with October bookend performances featuring Mark Erelli on September 29 and recently The Steel Wheels on October 26.
Mark Erelli – the first show of the 2019-20 PWCS.The Steel Wheels – the second show of the 2019-20 PWCS.
On October 29, a stunning cold front rolled through Kansas and chilling temperatures caused delicately-held leaves on trees like ash, maple, Osage orange, and ginko to fall within hours. Social media posts were featuring leaves dropping quickly that day all over Kansas to make for a memorable fall day.
Ginko leaves and ‘iron butterfly’ ironweed.
The 2019 Eco-Meet Championships will be held at Dyck Arboretum in early November. In late October, organizers and high school teams from around the state were visiting the Arboretum to prepare for the big event. The competition will allow some of the brightest science students from around the state to showcase their knowledge on subjects including prairies, woodlands, entomology, and ornithology.
Students from Smoky Valley High visited the Arboretum on October 31 to prepare for Eco-Meet.
The cold nights and relatively warm days of late October have allowed the grass and tree leaves to show off their bright colors that have been hidden all growing season by the green pigments of chlorophyll. Seed heads are opening and dispersal mechanisms that catch the wind or lure animals are on full display. Good ground moisture and warm temperatures are still even allowing for a bit of late-season flowering from some species.
Sugar maple. Little bluestem.Seeds dispersing from a common milkweed pod.The fall prairie is loaded with seeds this season which is good for seed-eating mammals and birds.It has been a mast year for trees and the ground under this burr oak was covered with acorns.Late season flowering by Leavenworth eryngo.Aromatic aster ‘Raydon’s Favorite’.
I’ll leave you with a video (sorry for the terrible camera work) of one of my favorite sights of every October – when the aromatic asters are in full bloom and late-season pollinators belly up to the nectar bar on a warm fall day. Enjoy.
