quick3beers's Favorites

Worked on this area about four years ago. All of the yellow in the understory is spicebush. It has filled in nicely after honeysuckle removal. Ohio Buckeye and Paw Paw are common members of the understory in other areas of the same property but spicebush is the dominant understory species. It helps that the deer don’t like it.

I was visited by a frog today.

I noticed it while I was having lunch along a creek near where I had been clearing honeysuckle all morning. When I saw it, it swam into the center of the creek from the far side. I thought this was odd because it was swimming closer to me, although also into deeper water.

I took the first picture when it was floating in the center of the creek after swimming there from the far bank opposite me. I took a few pictures and it got spooked and swam back under an overhanging rock. I tried to get a picture of it floating underneath the overhanging rock by dipping part of my iphone in the creek. You can see the lower half of the frog dangling below the surface of the water in the second picture. The picture of the dangling frog turned out really blurry so I dried off my phone and went back to eating my lunch.

While I was eating my sandwich (chicken salad), the frog swam out from under the overhanging rock, right up to where I was sitting and got out of the creek onto the rock right in front of me. I asked the frog in a full throated voice, "what the heck"? He said nothing. I took the third pic after I sat up onto my knees to pet the frog. Yah, I know, a grown man petting a frog on the side of a creek. But what was I supposed to do, just finish the sandwich? I took a couple pictures to make sure I got at least one good one. It just sat there looking at me when I stood up to leave.

I am open to any explanation of this behavior, scientific or theological. I'm somewhat agnostic and willing to entertain any theories. And also to be visited by all types of frog, bullfrog or otherwise.

I don't see bald-faced hornets visiting many flowers, but they love Late Figwort. There were two of them visiting three figwort plants at the bottom of the hill. I just noticed these plants growing there this year. I think it's the first time I've seen this type of hornet visiting a flower on my lot.

Decided to collect seeds from the Solomon’s plume this year. They require double stratification but what the heck, I’m very comfortable with failure.

What I like about this plant is that I found it in much smaller numbers, limping along 15 years ago when I first started clearing invasives like honeysuckle. The seed bank under invasives has never gotten better in southwest Ohio, only worse. This means that the natives that have managed to persist amidst this flood are particularly important. The reason for their persistence must be either geography or genetics.

If the reason is genetics, it might be more important to propagate natives from the exact places where invasives are the worst.

4th pic - what the seeds looked like after being removed from the pulp and just before the first stratification.

This was observed on a somewhat unhealthy black locust. I'm pointing out that it's somewhat unhealthy because bugguide says that larvae of this insect can be "found in tree holes among sawdust and in burrows of the Gopher Tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus".

There are box turtles in the Five Mile Creek corridor. They don't exactly burrow like a gopher tortoise but they do excavate areas for their nests. I'm still betting on the tree holes as the likely source of this individual.

I resisted the urge to stick my arm down the tree hole and sift through sawdust looking for larvae.

We've been hearing lots of sounds just after dark and just before sunrise.
It sounds like fox cubs calling. Hard to know. Haven't seen the cubs. Only this adult. This is in the same spot where we've seen a fox the past few years...

here & here

Hoping to get pics of the cubs if there are cubs. Would love to think that removal of honeysuckle and garlic mustard over the past 10 years have lead to an increase in rabbits which resulted in this fox family living in the back. There's no way to know. It could just be that I'm able to SEE the fox because there's no honeysuckle obstructing the view into the woods.

Update: January of 2022 saw two together.

I happened upon this potter's wasp pot that was actively being provisioned. I watched the female stuff a caterpillar in and then I left for an hour. Upon my return the pot had been sealed. I removed the branch and took it home, about 5 miles away. After 25 days a new adult wasp emerged. I released the new wasp."

Colony gets bigger every year. This colony has expanded from a handful of individual plants that existed under honeysuckle that was removed several years ago. It's really gratifying to see this local native colony expand following the removal of an invasive honeysuckle over-story.

This is a colony I'm continuing to track as part of my backyard restoration project.