Let the gardening commence

Calvin and I were sick all week with a terrible cold that knocked us flat. Lots of reading, lots of couch time, and we skipped out on all our outside activities, but summer had come again (still early this time, though not as early as when it was here two months ago) and the sunshine called us outside on Friday. The periodic unseasonal warmth has brought blooms much earlier, and weeds as well. Mostly gigantic weeds, in fact, but the chilly, gray weather, more characteristic of these months, and then this abhorrent cold, have kept me from keeping them under control. The gardens in the back were a sight to behold by this weekend, so that's where we spent the last three days, with sprinklers, shovels, gloves, and every ounce of energy we could muster. Calvin included. And the garden spent the weekend thanking us in the form of emerging blooms and returning creatures.

Iris in the front yard (after the sprinkler)

Toad in the front garden.

Poppy bud in the front garden.

Lazy hummingbird is sitting on the feeder to eat.

Blue flag iris in the back garden.

Bumble in the false indigo.

Fleabane? In the butterfly garden.

The first monarch ever in our butterfly garden!

Summer yarrow (which shouldn't be blooming yet) in the butterfly garden.

Oriole on the feeder out front (he's shy, so that's the best picture I've gotten yet)

And because I like before and after shots, here is a shot of the butterfly garden on Friday before the weeekend weeding, and then on Sunday when we were all done. It is still a work in progress, and there is a lot of space to fill in with beautiful Michigan wild-type flowers, but taking it one year at a time, we've come a long way.

Autumn splendor hike

After days upon days of chilly rain we woke this morning to a thin layer of white frost sparkling in bright sunlight. One couldn't ask for better fall hiking weather, there just isn't any better to have. We had breakfast, we layered on the clothing and donned hats and mittens, then we joined in another county park naturalist guided hike. The find of the day was a multitude of fungi—here there and everywhere—but my favorite moment was spending time with a little spring peeper. He may sing his best in the spring, but he is one beautiful frog in the fall when his color is in style. The rest of the day was less exciting, filled with winterizing the yard and gardens and getting started on a Halloween costume (which may seem late, but it's still earlier than last year).

Bracket or shelf fungus

Puffball fungus

Bracket or shelf fungus

Northern Spring Peeper (Pseudacris crucifer)

Hiking for paw paws

I had no idea what a wild paw paw was before today, but it was a hike to look for exactly those crazy fruits that was led by our county parks naturalists this morning. The weather was fabulous, the colors were just starting to come out, so we decided to drive the half hour south to join in the looking.

We'd never been to this particular wildlife preserve before today. Being a preserve, as opposed to a park, it is very wonderfully wild, and there was something very Jungle-Book-esque fabulous about hiking through undergrowth and mud and shaking trees while protecting your head in case of dropping paw paws. We actually didn't find any on the trees. Our guide said it was likely someone had already come through and harvested them, seeing as that it's public land, but we weren't entirely disappointed because, after shaking tree after tree, we were still rewarded with a taste of a nearby farmer's paw paws, and some Zingerman's Creamery Paw Paw Gelato brought by our wonderful guide.

Plus it's hard to be disappointed by a hike that, although not productive as far as fruit goes, produced much in the way of wildlife. We saw lots of animal houses—crayfish, woodchuck, snake, raccoon?—plus several wood frogs, a flicker, two praying mantises, a snail, and skippers, butterflies, bees, yadda yadda. We tried wild berries and roots, and identified a variety of native plants and trees, some of which had been stumping me for a while.

These programs are mainly designed for adults: a few miles, lots of climbing in and out of scrubby and wet areas, lots of quiet listening, looking, appreciating, and discussing. The children's programs are shorter and less physically demanding, plus they usually come with stickers and coloring pages, but Calvin enjoys both equally as well. We've been taking him on the adult hikes for about two years now, carrying him when he was still too small, but making sure that he was part of the event. To us nature is interesting for itself, not for the coloring pages, and we've wanted to share that wonder and awe with our son from day one and have included him accordingly. I will never get tired of the looks we get from some adult hikers when we show up for these events with our pint-sized hiker, and then their utter amazement when they realize that not only is he up to the challenge, he usually knows almost as much as they do about the natural world around him.

In his words:

Nature Thursdays—hiking Dolph Park

The county parks Nature Thursdays program is over, but we did nature today, and it's Thursday, so...

Beautiful weather called us outside. We did the usual first, like vacuuming, laundry, straightening, some math, lots of reading, and a little piano, but the afternoon was meant to be spent outside, and that's where we went.

There are several parks in the area that we intended to explore this summer, but heat and other activities got in our way, so we are exploring them this fall instead. We stuck relatively close to home today, stopping by after running errands and only an hour or so before time to get dinner going, and spent an hour exploring trails right in the city. The last time I hiked this location was when Calvin was only a year or so old; he was riding in the backpack, and we found a fawn hidden by his mother in the dappled sunlight under the trees. Magical. Today we saw swans, dragonflies, and plenty of mosquitoes that made me glad for the long clothing and bug spray. Calvin's nature eyes are getting more practiced and he found two snakes and several patches of fungus all by himself. Our only disappointment was a lack of frogs, but two snakes just about make up for it.

The pet on our porch

When Jon and I let the dogs out before bedtime last night (that being our bedtime, hours after Calvin's), we found a new inhabitant on our front porch. It was cold last night, and I think most people would have gotten a laugh out of the two of us standing on the front porch in our pajamas, moving this way and that in order to see the mantis move his head to follow us. Hopefully at one o-clock in the morning most of our neighbors were in bed.

This morning the same guy was in the same place. Strange, because mantids are supposed to be masters of disguise, and this one was certainly not hard to spot. He spent most of the day with us, too, disappearing for an hour in the afternoon and returning before dinner (our dinner, that is). I haven't checked on him since but my guess is that he won't stay. There's only so much door opening and staring that one bug can take, after all.

What was cool about him being there morning, noon and night (aside from Calvin getting to see him since we obviously didn't wake him in those chilly wee hours) was getting to see the change in his eyes. Woah! That's a night and day difference! We did a little digging and found very little information, but we did learn that some insects with low light adaptations have a light-absorbing, protective pigment covering for their eyes that they engage in bright light situations. If that's the case, then the pigment takes time to engage, because he didn't respond to the porch light at all in the ten minutes we spent antagonizing him, but during the day he clearly changed something! We also learned that he is mostly a diurnal hunter and was likely just spending the night at our hotel. I wonder if he made reservations for tonight, too.