Today, I'm just staying in one place for an hour or so, admiring my wife's garden and watching to see what turns up.
By Karl Anderson
Today, I'm just staying in one place for an hour or so, admiring my wife's garden and watching to see what turns up. I have a couple of squirrels to keep me company. There's a rabbit, also -- we have two of them, a big one and a small one. The garden plants are now mostly too big to be bothered by them.
Everything in the garden has done well this year. The zinnias are 5 feet tall, with flowers in shades of orange and red. Overtopping them are a few plants of Mexican sunflower. I first saw that species as a roadside weed in Kenya, many years ago; heat and drought doesn't seem to bother it.
Virgin's bower drapes over a fence -- it's somewhat of an invasive species, but very pretty. The English ivy has buds on it. You don't think of ivy as having flowers, but when it gets mature it produces little clusters of greenish flowers. It's almost the last plant to flower locally.
There are still bumble bees and carpenter bees flying about, but no honeybees. The local colony has probably died out. I see several species of wasps. Somebody should write a field guide to wasps; there are over 300 species in New Jersey but I've only seen about a dozen species here.
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Our summer-resident female hummingbird is still working the flowers, but she will soon be on her way to Mexico. But I will be looking for hummingbirds for another few months; I've twice seen "western stray" species here in early November. These are birds like rufous hummingbird that get lost on their way south and wind up in New Jersey.
All butterflies have been scarce this year. I'm still seeing an occasional monarch butterfly, but they will all have migrated south by the end of the month. But there are a few tiger swallowtails, black swallowtails and cabbage whites flying around -- enough butterflies to add some pleasing activity to the scene.
And there are several skippers: small brown butterflies that are notoriously difficult to identify. I can recognize a few. I could recognize more of them last year, but I've not been studying them this season, and what you don't work with, you forget.
There's not much bird activity today. If I kept my eye on the sky I would probably see a few migrating hawks. Nesting birds in our yard this season included robin, Carolina wren, catbird, cardinal, and house finch.
An eagle flew over a couple of days ago. But in the yard today? Just house sparrows, robins, blue jays and Carolina chickadees. It's time to start putting out food for the birds -- not that they need it, but, well, it's a kind of tradition.
For information about the Gloucester County Nature Club, see gcnatureclub.org/.
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