February is for Wildlife Lovers: Wildlife Wednesday, February 2020

Posted on February 5, 2020 by Tina

Virginia is for Lovers is a long-time advertising slogan used to appeal to tourists interested in visiting Virginia and it’s apparently been a successful one. My riff on that slogan is February is for Wildlife Lovers in celebration of Wildlife Wednesday during this month where love and pairdom is paramount: a month of hearts and chocolates–and the birds and the bees–though for our purposes here, it’s the birds and the butterflies.

February is the month when human couples send flowers, share candy and/or make reservations at absurdly expensive and noisy restaurants. But some of my backyard birds are also busy in the art of love, or at least, in the art of settling down to the business of wooing, mating, and preparing for a family of winged things.

I typically see either the male or the female Red-bellied Woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus, but I rarely see both partners on the same day. A couple of weekends ago, that paradigm changed, the female visiting first, in the tree.

It’s not a classically well-framed shot, but I love the stink-eye that she looks like she’s giving me. Red-bellied eye-rolling is about to commence!

After moving up along a main branch of my Red oak tree, she fluttered down to the black-oiled sunflower feeder for a quick snack. The female Red-bellies have little-to-no blush of red on their bellies and their splash of head red starts toward the back of their heads, extending down the nape of their necks.

A short while later, a handsome woodpecker chap visited the same tree and feeder.

“Did ya get a good shot of my rosy, woodpeckier chest?”

With more red on his face, head, and belly, he’s a brightly patterned catch. I assume these two comprise the same couple who raised two clutches of junior woodpeckers last year. Red-bellied woodpeckers are monogamous and each share in nest building and chick raising. The males choose the nesting site, starting the pecking work on the hole; if the female accepts the offer and the site, she and her partner finish the construction together: the couple that builds together, stays together! Red-bellies are known to use the same tree for their nests, but build a new nesting hole for each new set of eggs.

At about the time that the Red-bellied couple visited, I enjoyed a similar sighting of both a female, then male Downy Woodpecker, Dryobates pubescens, again on the same day. The female has no red on her cute little head, but she’s adorned in snazzy black and white on her head, wings and back, with a lovely white tummy.

The male Downy has a dab of red atop his head, accompanied by similar-to-his mate black and white patterned feathers. Like the Red-bellies, the Downies are monogamous and both partners parent offspring. Last spring I enjoyed the privilege of watching Daddy Downy teach his little one how to flit from tree-to-feeder, then back again. Daddy birds rock!

I look forward to a new set of woodpecker kids in the neighborhood. The Red-bellied Woodpeckers nested in my neighbor’s tree–the one that my SIL now owns–and I’m certain that my SIL will enjoy watching these charmers as they build the nesting hole(s) and once again, become parents.

I don’t know where the Downy Woodpeckers nest. They fly in a northwesterly direction from my back garden, but I don’t know what tree, or trees, they’ve chosen to secure their little ones in past breeding seasons.

More pairing is underway with the mating of Gulf Fritillary butterflies, Agraulis vanillae. Butterfly wooing is quieter than bird wooing and mostly involves undulating flight patterns between the partners, who then rest somewhere as they seal the deal.

Due to our mild winter, there are active butterflies and not only Gulf Fritillaries, though they’re clearly in breeding mode with egg laying to follow. While I’d like to have some hard freezes (this month–NOT in March!), I haven’t at all objected to butterflies during this typically drab time of year. There are still some flowers for nectaring and my passion vine–the nursery for Gulf Fritillary caterpillars–is green and able to provide sustenance for the larvae, given that a hard freeze hasn’t yet killed it to the ground.

The breeding season for birds, butterflies, bees–and heck, everything else–is about to begin. It’s a time that gardeners can provide food, in the form of seeds and fruits, and with diverse choices of plants, as well as water and cover. If your garden is welcoming to wildlife, you can sit back and observe remarkable events in your garden: you’ll enjoy watching the wildlife lovers and their offspring and you’ll become a wildlife lover.

Please leave a link to your post when you comment here and happy wildlife gardening!

A Fab Fritillary

Posted on January 29, 2020 by Tina

Standing tall and proud, this Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae, is a butterfly master and commander.

At a different angle, this wings-up wanderer rested early one chilly morning, taking a rare break in its constant search for food and a mate. Breezy north gusts rendered tricky, this capturing of the butterfly’s calm.

Nevertheless, it posed, still and quiet, for the shot.

The bloom has-beens in the photos are those of Plateau goldeneye, Viguiera dentata, a member of the Aster, Asteraceae, family of plants, a favorite nectar source for adult Gulf Fritillaries.

I didn’t witness this particular butterfly nectaring that particular morning, but there are plenty of adult Gulf Fritillaries in my garden right now, resting on plants, and also flying and nectaring. On warm afternoons this one and its kin are working the remaining blooms of Plateau goldeneye, Tropical sage, Salvia coccinea, and occasionally, Forsythia sage, Salvia madrensis.

This past season there was a dearth of these dearies. Eventually, I figured out that the juvenile stage of the butterfly (caterpillars or larvae) were being parasitized by the local wasps, a common butterfly predator. At some point, the cycle shifted: too few of the larvae, in turn, decreased the population of the wasps. Without the interference of the wasps, the butterfly larvae completed their cycle: they morphed, mated, and once again, adults are in the garden.

I’m not complaining. It’s lovely to see the orange beauties decorating the garden in January.

My Blue Passionflower vine, Passiflora caerulea, currently looks a mess because there are, or recently have been, larvae munching on the leaves. The adults which have emerged will likely remain active until we get a hard freeze, if that happens. And even if that happens, it’s a guarantee that some, if not most, of the butterflies will weather the freeze in fine form, ready to rebound in spring.

Butterflies are, or should be, part of a garden’s vignette, so today, I’m joining with Anna and her Wednesday Vignette. Pop over to Flutter and Hum for other garden vignette and musings of various sorts.

Sleepy Bee

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Tina

Recently, after a spate of warmer temperatures and before the onslaught of a dry cold front, I was out in my back garden playing catch-up with some of my garden’s needed tasks. My main goal was to clean and refill the bird baths, which I had recently neglected. Sheesh, they were nastier than I would have suspected, it being January and cool-ish.

As I started to scrub-a-dub-dub the one concrete bath in the garden (which is a bird favorite) I noticed a small, metallic sweat bee in the bowl, crawling just along the water line, upwards, in search of dry concrete. I’m confident that the bee is a member of the Halictidae family of bees, but was surprised to see him in mid-January. While my honeybees are active throughout winter on the warmer, sunnier days, the native bees are scarce, with the exception of the Blue orchard bees, which don’t emerge until February. This little fella sported a shiny blue-green coat and was smaller than the Blue orchards, so I’m sure it was one of the gorgeous sweat bees common during the growing season.

I’m glad I chose that particular time to clean out the bird baths.

I let him crawl on my hand, eventually transferring the cold, wee, wet bee to a blowsy leaf of Drummond’s wild ruellia.

He immediately crawled down into the center of the shrub, latched and snuggled onto empty sepals.

I watched the bee for a bit, thinking he would move somewhere else, but he didn’t; I moved on to my next chore. Several times as the afternoon proceeded, I popped by to check on the bee, but he never moved from his napping spot. I think after his brush with drowning, he was exhausted.

Sleepy bee.

I remembered the bee in late morning of the following day and there he was, snoozing away. By afternoon though, the bee was gone, presumably having moved along, by wings or legs, I don’t know. I didn’t see him again.

Sweat bees are ground nesters, so I wonder: did this guy crawl under some decaying garden detritus until spring light and warmth awakes him to feeding and mating? Or, was his life toward its end, rescue from the bird bath notwithstanding?

Either way, there will be more of his kind soon enough and the flowers in my garden will be ready.