#PollinatorWeek is This Week!

According to the Pollinator Partnership web site,

Birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small mammals that pollinate plants are responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food. They also sustain our ecosystems and produce our natural resources by helping plants reproduce.

monarch butterflies on Northern Plains  Blazing-star

Photo by J. Harrington

We've a number of wild flowers (and some tame ones) on our property. We sometimes see a butterfly or a bee, but not very often. Years ago we hung a bat house, and when that finally came down in a storm, we relplaced it in a different location. Bats used the first house, but, as far as we can tell, none have moved into the second house during the past several years. We've not had any better luck with the "solitary bee house" we built from a kit a couple of years ago. No one moved in the first year and so we moved it to where it gets better morning sunlight. Still, it appears that we have no takers.

Our Better Half recently gave us a handful of New England aster seeds as a gift. The instructions call for planting the seeds in "well-drained moist soil." It is no doubt due to our lack of soils education, but we're having problems wrapping our head around "well-drained moist." Those seem to us to be mutually exclusive adjectives that we will need to reconcile to enjoy germination success and please ourselves by providing late Summer sustenance to migrating butterflies.

bee hives behind electric fence

Photo by J. Harrington

One of the continuing challenges we face in making our property more pollinator friendly is that many of the flowers we plant to attract pollinators are also considered tasty by the local whitetails. We think that's where our annual plantings of this perennial disappear to. On the other hand, we've avoided the potentially escalating issues of having a few bee hives, which would then need to be protected from the local bear(s) by installing electric fencing, such as the arrangement we saw several years ago near the Audubon Society's North Woods Center near Sandstone.

Butterflies

By Samuel Green

Some days her main job seems to be

to welcome back the Red Admiral

as it lights on a leaf of the yellow

forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean

over to take in how it folds & opens

its wings. Then, too, there is the common

Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her

entirely uncommon in how it moves

about the boundaries of this clearing

we made so many years ago. If she leaves

the compost bucket unwashed to rescue

a single tattered wing from under the winter

jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle

& then spends a whole afternoon at our round

oak table surrounded by field guides

& tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to

a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular

mark is one of the great cat's eyes

of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is

simply practicing her true vocation

learning the story behind the blue beads

of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas

of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades

of the Spring Azure, moving through this life

letting her sweet, light attention land

on one luminous thing after another.

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