Online Show & Tell for the week of August 20-24, 2022 | Nature Ramblers: Seeking What We Find

Online Show & Tell for the week of Aug 20 – 24, 2022

Reminder: there is no Ramble on August 25. We will resume meeting at the Children’s Garden Arbor on September 1 at 9:00am, as usual.

Many
thanks to the ramblers who sent in photos and stories for this week’s
Online Show & Tell! Keep sending your stories to LCHAFIN@UGA.EDU and
put “Show & Tell” in the subject line so I can keep track of them. The last Online Show & Tell will be posted August 31.

Gary Crider offered this week’s reading as a perfect follow-up to the Great Georgia Pollinator Census last weekend.

Valediction

by Charles W. Pratt

Now the bumbling bees that hover

Over loveliness in flower

Important with their store of pollen

Have had their hour;

Time has come for you to shed your

Silken petals and declare

Whether you are apple, cherry,

Plum or pear,

And all summer take your pleasure

Nourishing the ripening fruit

With the sun and rain you welcome

Through leaf, through root.

Rosemary Woodel sent a wonderful video she made at Wesley Woods Athens in July 2022, entitled “Flight — Birds, Flies, Bees, Wasps, Butterflies and Moths.” Rosemary and her compatriots at WWA created a Connect to Protect Garden, planting
native plants and pollinator-friendly flowers. The results are stunning! Click here to watch the 12 minute video. Here’s a still snipped from her video of a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth visiting a verbena flower cluster.

Thank you, Rosemary!

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This week just happened to include the Great Georgia Pollinator Census. Nature Ramblers were there!

Don Hunter sent in these photos and accompanying narrative about his GGPC adventures…

2022
Great Georgia Pollinator Census, My Madison County Adventures

I
had been really looking forward to this year’s Great Georgia Pollinator Census
so I was quite happy when the weather turned out more favorable than
expected. I was able to go out right after lunch on Friday and do two
counts in the Wild Quinine in a power line right-of-way at the end of our
street. On Saturday, I headed over to the large Georgia Power
right-of-way I have “adopted” to count the pollinators at five different flowering native
plants.

DAY
ONE – GGPC

Wild Quinine (Parthenium integrifolium) with Carpenter Bee

I
chose to count insects on Wild Quinine because it is a reliable pollinator magnet, drawing in a variety of flies, wasps, bees, and other insects and
bugs. I stopped by to check it out on the 17th and there was a lot of
activity, so I was confident it would be a good location for the count. As
it turned out, at the two locations where I counted, I counted a single
carpenter bee, quite a few small bees, mainly halictid bees, and several
species of wasps. Here are a few pics from the Wild Quinine:

Noble
Scoliid Wasp, center, and a furrow/halictid bee, upper left, on Wild Quinine

Norton’s
Alkalai Bee/Norton’s Nomia, a large sweat bee, on Wild Quinine

DAY TWO – GGPC

On
day two, I drove over to the miracle acre beneath the big Georgia Power power
line in southern Madison County. This is proving to be, perhaps, a relic prairie from the earlier
days when prairies were more commonplace in our neck of the woods. Linda
and I have identified over 60 species of native plants here, excluding the trees
and grasses. There’s a lot of blooming going on now so it was a natural
for a counting location. I counted at five different plant species,
Southern Mountain Mint (X2), Greater Tickseed, Roundleaf Boneset, Woodland
Sunflower, and Kidneyleaf Rosinweed. I saw mostly wasps, small bees, and
butterflies, with a few flies and other critters. Here are a few photos
from day two, with a story or two.

Great Golden Digger Wasp on Southern Mountain Mint
(Pycnanthemum pycnanthemoides)

My first census location was at a large, bushy Southern Mountain Mint. I found a
place and sat down to lower my profile, and enjoyed a very pleasant 15 minutes of counting, starting off with this Great Golden Digger Wasp. How lucky I was! As I stood up to move on, I looked at
where I was just sitting and saw fire ants boiling all over the place. I
looked around on my legs and pants and only found a few of the ants and started
waiting for the biting to begin. I never got the first bite. All I
can figure is that one of my butt cheeks must have been planted directly over
the mound entrance, blocking their exit. On a related note, two years
ago, during the 2020 census, I had just gotten five minutes into one of my counts
when I noticed the unmistakable sensation of fire ants biting my ankles and
shins. Not one wanting to waste a count, I stood my ground, enduring the
bites, which probably numbered in the twenties or thirties, until the fifteen
minutes were up. I then bailed off to a safe locations to pull of my
shoes and socks and remove any remaining ants.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Southern Mountain Mint

My
original intentions were to count and photograph the swallowtails at a large
patch of Joe-Pye Weed across the road from the “miracle acre,” but this
was not to be. When I was at the location just a day earlier, the
swallowtails were swarming a ditch full of Joe Pye Weed. When I arrived today, I
was met with this sight:

Former Joe-Pye Weed patch, now a mown right-of-way

A bee fly showdown was underway when I arrived at this Greater Tickseed (Coreopsis major) flower head (below). I’ve been seeing the Geron sp.
flies for the past several years, but the Exoprosopa is a new species for
me. Katherine has also seen this larger species in her yard in the past
several days.

Small bee fly (Geron sp.) on the tip of upper ray flower, and a larger bee
fly, Exoprosopa brevirostris, nectaring on disk flowers.

A lovely Horace’s Duskywing on Greater Tickseed.
There were quite a few of these around.

Beautiful Golden-reined Digger Wasp on Southern Mountain Mint

Looking
forward to my fifth year of counting in 2023!

Thank you, Don!

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From Roger and Betsey Collins who have rambled Alaska the
past three weeks:

We have enjoyed being in a Maritime Rainforest ecology. High temperature
is usually 55. Just want to share a couple of items.

I was wearing my blue Ramblers t-shirt the day I climbed
Flat
Top Mountain (3,510 feet elevation) near Anchorage.

I made this photo of Roundleaf Sundew (Drosera rotundaflora) on a nature trail
near Homer, Alaska. This is the same species as the sundew, 3000 miles away in the
pine woods of South Georgia, of my childhood. Despite its sparkly dew
appearance, it can be inconspicuous on a forest floor. I learned that a major
part of their diet is mosquitoes.

One morning a pair of Sand Hill Cranes came by our front door. While related to
the cranes that migrate over Georgia, these guys will be flying back to
California and Mexico.

Thank you, Roger and Betsey!

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From Cynthia Beane

My
sweet dog Henry has a nose for finding box turtles in our woods. Look
closely under the leaves and you can see her shell. So far we have
located a male and a female living in our small forest.

I found this Carolina Lily, Lilium michauxii, on the Blue Ridge Parkway growing on a slope above a roadside ditch. Carolina Lily has fewer flowers per plant than Turk’s Cap Lily, and its leaves are widest above the middle.

Not too far away from the Carolina Lily, I found a small field of Yellow Fringed Orchid, Platanthera ciliaris. There is also a smaller population of these fringed orchids in North Carolina’s Stone Mountain State Park. The Stone Mountain orchids were found growing in an open power line field.

Note from Linda: It is a mystery to me why this species is named Yellow Fringed Orchid when it is clearly orange. By whatever name, it is a highlight of the mountains in August.

Thanks, Cynthia!

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Emily recommends this article from the Washington Post: “Want to see how climate change is stressing bees? Look at their wings.” Thanks, Emily!

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Dale recommends this “In Defense of
Plants” podcast about native azalea pollination by way of swallowtail wings. Look for episode 376, featuring the researcher Mary Jane Epps who discovered the phenomena of wing pollination in Flame Azalea pollination.
Almost all of the hundreds of podcasts “In Defense of
Plants” are interesting.

Further recommendation by Dale: a PBS Nature video (Season 36, episode 12) with remarkable footage
of butterflies: “Sex, Lies, and Butterflies.” The story of the wing-pollinated azalea begins at minute 16 and lasts about 4 minutes, but the whole video is fascinating with gorgeous photography. If you were about skeptical wing-pollination, seeing the strands
of sticky pollen being pulled from anthers may convince you. You can also view the program here.

Thank you, Dale!

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Gary Crider
is spending the dog days of August roaming the woods at the Botanical
Garden and other public lands in Clarke County and killing invasive
plants, especially Perilla, aka Beefsteak Plant (Perilla frutescens).

Identifying Perilla can be tricky. Perilla will always have the typical mint family traits of a
square stem, opposite leaves, and aromatic leaves, in this case a
distinctive, basil-like
smell. But there’s
a lot of variation in the height of
mature plants, anywhere from 5 inches to 5 feet. And the leaf margins can vary
from
merely toothed to almost frilly and may be purple-ish or just plain
green.

Perilla patch along the new ADA Trail in the powerline right-of-way at the
Botanical Garden. These plants were 4 feet tall before treatment.

Perilla patch after treatment with a mix of hand-pulling and herbicide


Patch of Perilla seedlings surrounded by mature plants, showing how densely this species can occur.The good news is that the species is an annual; if you kill a plant before it sets seed, that plant will not be back.

Perilla patch soon after spraying with a low concentration of Triclopyr. This herbicide is specific to broad-leaf plants and does not affect grasses or needle-leaved conifers. A few minutes of spraying wiped out thousands of these plants. Triclopyr is not harmful to animals and does not persist in the environment.

Thanks, Gary!

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Note from Linda: there’s been a lot of talk on my neighborhood listserve lately about what to do with rescued wild animals. Here’s a suggestion from a neighbor that might be of interest: “The
Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort (AWARE) is a wonderful organization at Arabia
Mountain (near Atlanta). They will take injured or abandoned wildlife and try
to save and restore the animal to good health to be released back into its
natural habitat.”

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Linda has been doing some late summer botanizing around the county. Here are a few mostly terrible photos to prove it.

Sparkleberry (Vaccinium arboreum) leaves with a fungal gall called Fly-speck Leaf Spot, Ophiodothella vaccinii. I identified this gall using Gallformers.org,
thanks to Bill Sheehan’s class a few weeks ago.

Mockernut Hickory (Carya tomentosa) fruits

Chalk Maple (Acer leucoderme) fruits

Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida) fruits – and leaves that seem
to have given their all to support biodiversity

Hop Hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana) has already produced next year’s staminate (pollen) catkins at the tips of twigs. They will overwinter and expand early next spring, releasing pollen. Pistillate (fruiting) catkins develop in the spring.