Last week, I talked about how great late summer is for photography and promised more photos from the last week or two of August. Here they are. All these were shot close to home, either at our family prairie (15 minute drive) or in Lincoln Creek Prairie (a mile from my house).

There’s almost a frantic energy to pollinators this time of year, it seems. Many bees, wasps and flies are nearing the end their lives. They have limited time to lay more eggs, provision them with food, or do whatever else they need to do before their time comes to a close.

Some butterflies are either migrating through or preparing to push south. Monarchs are well-known for that, of course, but the painted lady butterfly pictured above is another species that takes long-distance flights. In North America, I think they push out of the desert southwest each year into other parts of the continent and then return in the fall. Back in 2017, which was a spectacular year for that species, their return flight was picked up by National Weather Service radar in Denver!

I really enjoy seeing, hearing, and photographing prairie cicadas. I don’t know the species very well yet, but have become familiar with a few of the ones I see most commonly. When I spotted a pair of them at our family prairie a few weeks ago, I hoped to get a quick photo before they flew off. Instead, they were sufficiently occupied with each other that I spent about five minutes with them before leaving them to finish what they were working on.

I don’t see wild petunia blooming at our family prairie every year. In fact, I went years before even knowing it was in the prairie at all. This year, though, there is a patch bigger than the footprint of my house that contains hundreds of blooming individuals (you all know how big my house is, right?). It’s in a part of the prairie that was mostly rested from grazing for a couple years but then got some heavy grazing during July and August.

Did the plants flower prolifically because of this year’s drought? The rest from grazing? This year’s intense grazing? Or for some other reason altogether? I have no idea. The grazing certainly didn’t seem to have any negative impact on them since they were going strong in late August. It’s sure fun to see them.

The big black and yellow garden spiders are always a great addition to late summer prairies. They also make great ambassadors for spider kind when I can talk to people about them and show how harmless they are to people. When I get the chance, I’ll try to entice one onto my hand and let it crawl around while I’m talking to a group of people. Seeing that the spider isn’t attacking me is a revelation for many people, and opens up a conversation about how things that seem creepy or scary often aren’t.

That doesn’t mean everyone leaves those encounters and goes home to find and hug their own spiders. That’s a future step. I do hope, though, that people might not immediately flee the premises when they see one, and might even spend a little time admiring or watching one. How many of us have enjoyed tossing an insect to a spider like that and watching it roll it up in silk? Those kinds of interactions help breed connections with nature that are hopefully unbreakable.

One of many research projects I’d enjoy doing would involve the little shiny brown leaf beetles that feed on stiff and Maximilian sunflowers this time of year. I’d love to track their abundance from year to year, and the percentage of flowers that are fed upon through time. This seems like a moderately abundant year for them at Lincoln Creek Prairie, but I’m not keeping good records or doing any kind of sampling to really find out. It would be fun to see whether their abundance tracks with weather, management, or other factors, but apparently not fun enough that I’ve prioritized that data collection…

It took me many more years than it should have to realize that we have two waves of soldier beetles each year in our prairies. The first wave occurs in late spring/early summer and the second – a different species – is happening now. Goldenrod soldier beetle adults (Chauliognathus pensylvanicus) seem to be on every sunflower in the prairie right now, feeding on pollen and nectar. They’re on other flowers too, but they sure seem especially enamored of sunflowers and close relatives. Because they often sit fairly still, or move slowly, they make great photo subjects.

I talked last week about male bees and other insects that spend the night roosting in vegetation and wake up covered in dew most mornings. Here are more photos of those insects, taken as they begin to warm up and dry out. I don’t need to understand why or how they choose their roost sites to be grateful for them as photo subjects! (Which is a good thing because I definitely don’t understand those choices!)

If you haven’t yet, I’d sure encourage you to experience some late summer prairie hiking this year. Here in Nebraska, many prairies are tall and full of color, movement, and noise. Sunrise isn’t until after 7am, which is a pretty reasonable time to be up and out. An early morning in a dew-covered, flower-rich late-summer prairie is something everyone should enjoy at least once. On the other hand, if you do it once, it sure won’t feel like enough, so be prepared to go back again!

Late summer might be my favorite time of the year for prairie photography. Sunrise is at a reasonable time of day and is often accompanied by calm winds and heavy dew. Many of the tall summer wildflowers are in full bloom, as are a lot of the warm-season grasses. Insects are super abundant, active, and (some of them) noisy. Perfect.

The last week has been particularly great for all of those reasons and I’ve had an unexpected amount of time for photography. As a result, I’m only sharing a fraction of my favorite images from that period and will probably share at least another post’s worth next week. I sure hope you are all getting a chance to explore late summer prairies wherever you are. Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, of course. In that case, happy spring!

A lot of grasses are blooming right now. Big bluestem, Indiangrass, sideoats grama, and other tall-to-mid-height grasses are full of anthers. I’m not going to make a joke about what questions they might have anthers to. That would be puerile. Also, I don’t get the chance to use the word ‘puerile’ very often.

Because grasses are wind-pollinated, they don’t have showy flowers or nectar to attract insects, but they do still have flowers. Grass pollen, though, is nutritious enough that at least some pollinating insects are drawn to grass flowers to feed. There’s a little leaf beetle I see on those flowers pretty often, along with lots of little hover flies (both pictured below).

Sideoats grama flowers are always my favorites because they hang so nicely from their stems. They often look like laundry on the line. Neat and tidy.

Except when they aren’t. Then the flowers look like they are full of static electricity and stick out as far as they can from the stem.

Our family prairie was full of bees, butterflies, and grasshoppers this week. We’re still stubbornly in extreme drought, according to the Drought Monitor, but we’ve caught enough rains that most of the vegetation is green and flowers are blooming. The biggest indication of the drought is the slowness with which grass is recovering from grazing, which is why we will be pulling cattle out soon and reducing next year’s stocking rate significantly.

Meanwhile, when walking through the prairie now, grasshoppers are like popcorn at our feet, exploding in every direction with each step. I imagine that’s providing a lot of food for animals that enjoy grasshoppers. Interestingly, I don’t see a lot of obvious impact of those grasshoppers on the vegetation. That’s clearly a sign of me not knowing what to look for, of course, because they have to be eating. But I sure don’t see evidence that they’re reducing vegetation height. Hmm.

Late summer also seems like the peak time of year to find male bees roosting overnight on vegetation. I’ve always assumed that those males just find a random roost site each night, but observations in my backyard prairie are making me question that. We have a strip of prairie garden along the back alley and there is one Indiangrass plant among mostly wildflowers and sedges. During much of the summer, I’ve been finding several male bees on that Indiangrass plant each morning I remember to check.

While I can’t tell one bee from another within the same species, it sure appears that I might seeing the same bees every night, or at least that some of them are repeat visitors. That makes me want to drop everything and do a research project in which we mark bees one morning and see if they return. Of course, if we mark them while they’re on their roost, that might dissuade them from returning… Hmmm. How do we set this up? Oh, wait, I don’t have time to do that study anyway. You should, though.

I also wonder about flies and other insects that get covered in dew overnight. Do they select roost sites where they feel protected from predators? Or places where they’ll get early sunlight to warm and dry them the next morning? Or do they just gradually slow down as evening comes along as if they are clockwork toys winding down? What an evocative image that is!!

(Do you young whippersnappers know what clockwork toys are? Do you know what whippersnappers are?? Actually, I don’t think I really know what whippersnappers are…)

One of my favorite discoveries this week was a snail at Lincoln Creek Prairie, right across town from me. I’ve been exploring and photographing Lincoln Creek Prairie for 26 years or so and have never seen a snail in the prairie until this week. In fact, I can’t think of where I’ve seen a land snail in a Nebraska prairie anywhere close to here. Why now? Where was it hiding? Are there more? What species is it? Why does Wendy’s make square hamburgers??

I was doing some work on the exterior of our house this week, but kept getting distracted by insects, including a couple monarch caterpillars in our swamp milkweed patch. I watched them munch away for a while and finally got to capture a phenomenon I’d heard about but hadn’t seen in person. Sometimes, larger caterpillars will chew through part of the leaf petiole (the stem of the leaf) before feeding on the leaf itself. It apparently cuts off the flow of sticky white latex into the leaf, making it easier to eat the leaf material. That seems eminently sensible, but what a cool adaptation! The third photo below shows that happening.

There were quite a few monarch adults in the yard too, most of them feeding on Kim’s zinnias. Take that, purists who don’t think anything but native flowers should be in our yards! (There’s nothing wrong with putting only native plants in your yard. There’s also nothing wrong with adding some non-native flowers that make you happy, as long as they don’t have systemic pesticides in them and aren’t invasive species.)

During one of my many ‘breaks’ from working on the house, I chased a plume moth for a while until it finally sat for a photo. There was also a Carolina mantis hiding in the milkweed patch, too. I saw it several days in a row. It was mainly lurking in the shadows, which is why I enjoyed getting the photo I got, which captured that very well. I haven’t finished that house project yet. Weird.

Finally, here’s a toad.