News from the preserves, parks and backyards of Princeton, NJ. The website aims to acquaint Princetonians with our shared natural heritage and the benefits of restoring native diversity and beauty to the many preserved lands in and around Princeton.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Getting Close to the Madding Crowd
You have to admire the ambition of a flower that tries to be, and succeeds in being, all things to all bees. The plant is like a miniature town, its stems and leaves providing cover, and avenues for ladybugs to patrol like Pacmen in an old video game. Bumble bees slept under its blossoms at night, like drunks who can't quite make it home from the local saloon.
Now the deed is done, the nectar drained, the pollen carted off and stowed. Flowers fade and seeds ripen. This Fly-By-Day operation, after mesmerizing the insect world for many weeks, finally closes down, making room for other, later flowering species to step forward and garner attention. As it happens, Late-Flowering Boneset--a different species of Eupatorium scattered here and there across the Princeton landscape--is just opening for business.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Two Bees, Two Styles, One Flower
I couldn't find anything online elsewhere showing this behavior, and I can't speak to whether it's common for one flower to accommodate the differing needs and capabilities of different types of bees in such a contrasting way. Richweed (Collinsonia canadensis) is also called horsebalm or stoneroot. This quote from a previous post about richweed goes well with the first video:
"Bumblebees look perfectly matched for this flower, bobbing from one to another, giving each one a bear hug as they sip the nectar. The flower is so shaped, with the stamens jutting out on either side of the flower, to appear as if the embrace is mutual."The first video I took while talking to a friend next to our front yard raingarden.
Then along comes another kind of bee that relates to the flower in a completely different way.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Plants of Tusculum
The fields have great potential as habitat for prairie wildflowers. Some are already there. The first photo shows butterflyweed, living up to its name. The flower was also attracting lots of tiny green bees during our visit, which reminded me of a NY Times article about the many kinds of native bees, and how various of them have evolved to favor particular flower shapes.
Particularly suggestive of these fields' potential for dramatic wildflower displays was this gathering of black-eyed susans, with narrow-leaved mountain mint in the background (white). The insect activity in this patch was tremendous.
Mountain mint, common in the fields, also attracts butterflies.
One plant that sent me scrambling for my plant book was this ragged fringed orchis, of which only two were found.
Another fairly rare plant found at Tusculum is green milkweed (not shown).
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Pollinator Talks at D&R Greenway
Two talks on the fabulous diversity of native pollinating insects will be given on January 27th (butterflies) and February 16th (bees) at the DR Greenway's Johnson Education Center, out Rosedale Rd, on Preservation Place. Both events start at 6:30. More info can be found here.
For past posts about all the wonderful pollinators that can be catered to by planting native wildflowers and shrubs in Princeton, try typing words like "bees" into the search box at the top left of this page. The butterfly in this post was feasting on mountain mint growing in the meadows at Tusculum. Projects I've been involved in through Friends of Princeton Open Space to provide habitat for pollinators include the high school ecolab wetland, a field at Mountain Lakes, and the marsh at Rogers Refuge.
Thursday, October 22, 2020
The Work Behind a Natural-looking Meadow--Smoyer Park in Princeton
There are places where native diversity happens without intervention. I've known a few, where the original hydrology is intact, and introduced species have yet to invade, and fire is allowed to sweep through periodically and beneficially, as in ancient times, and the soil still holds within it the seeds to feed all the stages of succession, from field to shrubland to forest.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
A Pettable Blue-Winged Wasp's Mating Frenzy on Princeton Campus
This post gives a demonstration of wasp petting, and describes a funny thing that happened while helping our younger daughter move into her college dorm.
There's a wasp that's both pretty and pretty harmless. It's named after its wings, which reflect blue in the sunlight, and is easily identified by the rusty orange abdomen with two yellow spots. Scolia dubia, as it's called in latin, is a frequent visitor to the boneset in our backyard garden, more methodical in its nectar drinking than many other wasps.
It's understandable that people are afraid of wasps, given the stings most of us have endured after accidentally stepping on a yellow jacket's nest out in the field. But not all wasps are social like a yellow jacket, or even have nests. A female blue-winged wasp (males cannot sting) has no nest to defend, but rather digs down to lay its egg on an underground grub, then leaves the egg to hatch, consume the conveniently paralyzed grub (usually a larva of the June bug or the Japanese beetle), and emerge on its own as an adult.
Here's an example of how docile these creatures are as they peacefully sip nectar.
This year's visits seemed less frequent than in previous years, leading me to wonder how the species is faring, given all the talk of pollinators being in trouble.
That question was answered in the most unexpected way. Helping our younger daughter move into a dorm for her first year at Princeton University, I noticed one of these blue-winged wasps on a flower near the entryway. Then, on the third or fourth trip in with stuff, I happened to look over at the lawn in the courtyard, and noticed that hundreds of the wasps--let's call it an even thousand--were roaming in zig-zaggy patterns just above the grass. It wasn't at all obvious what they were doing. They looked lost, each flying around and back and forth in its own orbit. Perhaps the grounds crew had blocked their nest, leaving them to search in vain for the entrance. One passerby joked that the wasps were a metaphor for incoming freshmen. Another suggested that the University should take action on what seemed like a threat to the students.
My sense was that any danger was more perceived than real. Having spent many hours this summer photographing the various pollinators visiting the backyard boneset, seeing how harmless are the various bees and wasps when preoccupied with other matters, I waded out into the fray to have a closer look. Were they in fact lost? Or hunting? Or mating? There was no sign of prey, and if they were mating, then why was there so little interaction?
The first clue came only after watching them for awhile. Every now and then, some 20 or 30 of the wasps would suddenly converge on one location in what appeared to be a mad scramble in the grass. It's not easy to photograph wasps zipping around your ankles, but I did manage this photo.
And also this video of one of the sudden convergences. If they were fighting, it appeared brief. If they were mating, it looked pretty clumsy.
Some internet research made it clear that the goal of this mass, planar mingling of wasps was to mate. Some websites state that the males and females do a figure eight-shaped mating dance. Others suggest that those cruising the grass are males waiting for a newly mature female to emerge from the ground. They then converge on the female and compete for a chance to mate. If one's heart can go out to a wasp, my heart went out to the hapless female who, having just emerged as an adult from its underground birthplace, must immediately deal with a frenzied crowd of males seeking to pass along their genes to the next generation. If that is true, though, the sheer numbers and intensity of the gathering suggest that a whole lot of hatching was going on that day, and might the males have also just emerged from the ground? The explanations weren't quite making sense.
I did manage to get up close and personal with one of the convergences, close enough for a voyeuristic view of a male and female taking a tumble amidst the grass blades, clearly mating, with another male up next to them, bending its abdomen and probing in vain. What was surprising was how quickly most males gave up on the project, quickly returning to their holding patterns above the grass.
Males of the wasp Scolia dubia search for emerging females by flying low over the ground in areas, such as lawns, that contain the immature scarab beetles upon which the grubs feed. When an adult female emerges and is discovered by a searching male, other males often join the discoverer, forming a frenzied ball of males around the female. When captured along with these males by an observer, a freshly emerged female continues to attract males even after she has mated, presumably because her scent continues to be detected by other males. Some males of S. dubia also search for mates in shrubs and trees encircling a lawn as shown by the sexual response of these males to a frozen but thawed female placed in a shrub or tree known to be visited by flying males. Male flight activity peaks around midday but then diminishes as the afternoon proceeds.It was in fact late morning, sunny, warm, and some of the wasps were flying about the branches of the evergreen tree in the middle of the field. But there are many lingering questions. Do these gatherings happen only once per year, or multiple times in the summer? Was this lawn special in some way, or does this happen all over town? And how did these rituals play out before lawn mowers were invented?
One thing is clear. These docile wasps do us a favor by preying on a notorious garden pest--the Japanese beetle. Maybe some September, walking home from the Dinky station, you'll cut through campus and some late-flowering thoroughworts will catch your eye. There, in the clouds of white flowers, blue-winged wasps will be busy living their quiet lives, minding their own business while doing good deeds, their solitary pursuit of nectar giving no clue as to the elaborate choreography that brings them into being.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Healthy Children, Healthy Planet Garden Fair Raises $5000 for Riverside Garden Programs
Build a garden, like Dorothy Mullen did over many years at Riverside School, and they will come. Dorothy has since moved on to other projects, but only after the garden had become woven into the school's curriculum. It's role in educating kids is sustained in part by the spring garden fair, which this year raised $5000. Dorothy had a table, where she was giving away seeds and making small batch sauerkraut with massaged cabbage and salt. She has an amazing website at thesuppersprograms.org that's full of recipes.
The cider press got a workout, turning apples bought at Terhune Orchards into cider. I asked a few questions, and got a story about how apples originate from an area of Asia where forests of wild apple trees still grow. He agreed that Stayman apples enhance the taste of cider, and said that most cider is made from red delicious apples, which originally had a lot of taste but lost it over years of breeding for color.
I had a little display about the Friends of Herrontown Woods and the Veblen House, along with some native wildflowers to sell.
A couple tables down, I was surprised to see edible insects being sold. I didn't think the future would arrive so soon. Competing with the grasshoppers and crickets were silkworm larvae and chocolate covered scorpions. I decided to be conservative and went with the grasshopper. Tastier than the batch I bought at a tourist site in Mexico.
Even the bees came to the fair, to check out the garden, to be checked out themselves, or to just bee.
It was a very pleasant way to raise money for a good cause. As chief organizer of the event, Beth Behrend, described, "These funds enable us to maintain our beautiful school gardens and offer over 120 hours of garden lessons per year to our 250+ Riverside children. These sessions are life-changing for our children and their families. Kids enjoy hands-on lessons about healthy food, where it comes from, how to plant, cultivate and harvest, and what it tastes like - and share this knowledge (and even requests for vegetables) at home. Princeton elementary schools now use garden “classrooms" to teach science, social studies, health, math and other subjects."
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Early Autumn Vignettes
Nature can sometimes come in close in the fall. This wooly creature, the caterpillar of a great leopard moth, not to be confused with a wooly bear, showed up on the floor in a corner of our bathroom.
Perhaps it came in with some firewood stacked in the sunroom next to the bathroom. I meant to take the caterpillar outside, but got distracted, and found it the next day in the hallway beyond the family room. At that point, it was given transport out to the back corner of our yard, where it will presumably find some cover for the winter.
Bumble bees can get soporific in the fall, dozing on a flower as if they've forgotten their reason for being, which all but the queens may well have. This one landed on my hand while sitting outside a cafe on Nassau Street. Its curiosity seemed harmless enough.
Another surprise came while walking home on Moore Street. Pokeweed (inkberry) is a large, fleshy plant that often looks rank and weedy, but every now and then, it grows in a place that reveals an elegance and beauty. Its perennial root sends up a new stem each year, unlike its close relative in Argentina, the ombu, which has a tree-like perennial top but lacks a real tree's xylem.
A subtle surprise of the ornamental seed variety came during a recent walk at Herrontown Woods, where the path intersects with one of only three hearts a' bustin' shrubs (Euonymus americanus) as yet to be found growing wild in Princeton. These three somehow grew tall enough to elude the deer, whose appetite for the plant has kept all other specimens in the woods only a few inches tall.
Also coming as a recent surprise is the University's native prairie planting next to the Firestone Library. It's off to a good start, with the classic eastern grassland species.
This ambitious planting comes after another attempt at a native grassland a few years back, at the psychology building, was mowed down after mugwort, Canada thistle and other weeds were allowed to invade until they became unmanageable. It's good to see the University didn't give up on the concept. This latest planting next to Nassau Street is higher visibility, which could prioritize its maintenance. If there's someone on staff who can provide the early, skilled intervention to keep the weeds out of this complex plant community, it should become a low-maintenance planting whose rich diversity echoes the book collections stored below.
A Mexican milkweed growing next to our carport turned into a miniature monarch butterfly nursery this summer. The monarchs are unpredictable as to which milkweeds they'll actually lay eggs on, but this one plant finally played host to some caterpillars late in the season.
Even harder to predict, oftentimes, is where the fully grown caterpillars will go to make their crysalises, but these were easy to find underneath the shingles of the house. This particular one did not mature into a butterfly,
but a few others did, the evidence being the wispy remains of the chyrsalises coinciding with sightings of a couple monarchs whose flight looked tentative in the way one would expect first flight to be. Reports on fall migration back to Mexico have been promising thus far, though the next post on Monarch Watch should speak to any impact from the hurricanes.
(Note: The Journey North site has more frequent updates, and for NJ, check out the Monarch Monitoring Project in Cape May )
Fall is also a time for biking down to university soccer games, in the process crossing the pedestrian bridge, where the native persimmon trees planted there have finally risen high enough
to push their fruits close against the wire mesh. Not quite ripe when this photo was taken, but there are two home games to go. Catching them when they're ripe would be a fine surprise.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Bee Flies
The bee fly was hard to photograph, but can be seen somewhat blurrily hovering over a spring beauty flower in this photo.
From Wikipedia: "The large bee fly, Bombylius major, is a bee mimic. The eggs are flicked by the adult female toward the entrance of the underground nests of solitary bees and wasps. After hatching, the larvae find their way into the nests to feed on the grubs."
The photo is borrowed from a website that provides thousands of images to help identify various critters: http://www.cirrusimage.com
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Sailing and Seaside Solidago
Sailing is a lot like gardening in that it teaches one to work with nature rather than against it. Yesterday, I helped a friend get his most-amazing sailboat ready for the winter. I say most-amazing because I had not before been on a sailboat that's been around the world three times. My previous notion of a great sailing adventure came from camp counseling days when I took some high school kids from Camp Innisfree, near Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, out to Lake Michigan's South Manitou Island in a daysailer.
This boat, called Makulu, which in an African language means "big happy Momma", is equipped to nurture far greater ambitions.
For the time being, though, it will spend the winter with all the others, parked on stilts.
Among the emotional struts keeping my love of sailing well supported and ready to launch at any moment through all these non-sailing years is surely that feeling of acceleration experienced many decades ago when a strong breeze hits the sails. There's the sheer elegance and gracefulness of sailing, the economy of well-trimmed sails, the great good luck--a sort of alchemy--of being propelled forward with no effort beyond keeping a good grip on the rope and tweaking the rudder. Sailing permanently associates the elements of sustainability--renewable energy, efficiency, reuse--with pleasure. Experiencing how something invisible can power travel is also good training for understanding how carbon dioxide could be so transformative.
While big happy Momma was getting a good powerwashing to knock off the accumulated barnacles and algae, I decided to do some seaside botanizing. A jumble of concrete may not look like the most promising spot to explore, but it yielded some beauty and meaning.
First seen was an encounter between two grasses. The smaller one I'll say is smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), with the proviso that my coastal botany chops haven't been refreshed since the days of reading Rachel Carson's descriptions of two species of Spartina in the salt marshes decades back. In the background, taller and with pompoms for seedheads, is Phragmitis. It's a pretty picture, but there's drama beneath the tranquility.
Phragmitis is both beautiful and a botanical bully. In a freshwater wetland, it is the uber-invasive exotic, able to overwhelm even the aggressive native cattail. Here, the peaceful scene shows nothing of the underground battle being waged, as the Phragmitis' rhizomes invade the cordgrass' territory, ready to outcompete, overshadow, and ultimately displace. Meanwhile, the smooth cordgrass, loved as an integral part of the coastal ecosystems of the eastern seaboard, is proving detrimental and bully-like where it has been introduced into the differently evolved marshes of the west coast. As they say in real estate: location, location.
Here, the cordgrass plays off the sailboat masts in the distance.
One tough beauty blooming in the rubble is Seaside Goldenrod, Solidago sempervirens.
Bees were showing appreciation.
(Time out here to take a swipe at that most durable of botanical falsehoods, which thrives even in the minds of many nature lovers--that being the stubborn belief that goldenrod is allergenic. No. Ragweed, an unassuming wind-pollinated plant that blooms at the same time, is the one that produces the symptoms people falsely associate with goldenrod. How that falsehood has been able to thrive without periodic smear campaigns should be a topic of political science research.)
Here's an evening primrose growing up through Japanese knotweed.
The knotweed, whose invasive tendencies seem muted by the salty environment, grows next to a big clump of native indigo bush (Amorpha fruticosa), a legume whose acacia-like, bluegreen foliage can provide an appealing contrast in a backyard garden.
All this mixed talk of beauty and invasiveness is really about balance, which sailing teaches as well. Give us wind, but not too much or too little. Nearly two years ago, this sailboat and all the others at this marina got a big gulp of too much wind, when Hurricane Sandy rolled in, piled boats as if they were toys, and sank this sailboat in the harbor. To salvage the mast if nothing else, it was deemed worth pulling up out of the muck.
The plants, I'm sure, dusted themselves off and went back about their business of growing.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Signs of Fall
Walk along most any nature trail in Princeton this time of year and you're likely to see a shrub that is turning yellow a few leaves at a time. This is spicebush (Lindera benzoin), an important shrub for bird nesting and also for its lipid-rich red berries. Lipids are fats, and fat is a more concentrated form of energy than sugars and carbohydrates. Birds like to travel light, so high lipid foods are the best fuel for their migrations. Professional deer management in the township over the past decade has allowed spicebush to make a dramatic comeback in Princeton's forests.
Now is the the last chance to pull out Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) that may be invading your flower beds, before its seeds mature and fall to the ground. Stiltgrass is an annual introduced to the U.S. back when it was used as packing material for porcelain from Japan. At Mountain Lakes Preserve, it forms monoculture meadows on the forest floor. It uses a "warm season" growth strategy similar to crabgrass, sprouting from roughly a gazillion seeds late in spring, maturing in late summer. You'll find it growing in miniature in your lawn, or crawling 4 or 5 feet high, up and over other plants. This plant's a big, big problem if one's interested in promoting biodiversity, and the best way to keep it from becoming an ongoing nuisance in one's yard is to catch it early and pull it out before it drops its seed. If deer would eat it, some sense of balance could return to the local woods, but don't expect their taste buds to change any time soon, despite the presence of this hugely abundant food source. Read more here.
Persimmon is a native tree that typically bears fruit out of reach. This photo was taken thirty feet up, looking down from the new university bridge over Washington Road, between the chemistry building and the athletic fields. A couple more years growth and we'll be able to pluck the fruit from the bridge.
Saturday, May 04, 2024
Tent Caterpillars and the History of Black Cherry Trees in Herrontown Woods
Black cherry trees draw attention in early spring because of the "tents" that tent caterpillars weave on them. I was surprised to find out that these tents are sometimes mistaken for gypsy moth infestations. There's also some disagreement as to how damaging tent caterpillars are to the trees they feast upon, so I decided to do some investigation.
First, some distinctions between tent caterpillars and gypsy moths. Tent caterpillars are native, feed primarily on cherry trees, build conspicuous tents, and do their feeding on the fresh, tender leaves just beginning to emerge in April. Gypsy moths are a nonnative species imported from Europe, start feeding in May on a very wide spectrum of hardwoods and even some conifers, and do not build tents.
Gypsy MothsSurprisingly, the subject of wild cherry trees in what is now the Barden (formerly a pine plantation) came up more than 50 years ago, in Richard J. Kramer's book about Herrontown Woods.
"Wild black cherry, which grows to magnificent size in the Allegheny Mountains, is a poorly formed tree in Herrontown Woods, occurring mostly in areas which were recently open fields. Its best growth has been in the pine plantation, where specimens are 30 to 40 feet tall and possibly may develop into good-sized trees. Apparently these black cherries were able to develop along with the young pines after these were planted in the open field. Although the birds do bring seeds of the cherry into the forest, the many seedlings and the few saplings that occur there grow poorly and remain shrub-like."