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| At about the size of a dime, this Eastern Tailed Blue is the smallest and most common blue butterfly found in Ohio -- it had me on the move trying to capture its exquisite detail on another Indian Summer afternoon |
The days are definitely getting shorter -- and fast -- but with nearly an entire week with afternoon highs in the seventies, it's truly hard to believe that November is right around the corner. I spent most of my last day at the marsh (last Thursday) sweating through a couple t-shirts. It hardly felt like the second half of October . . .
Roy and I spent the majority of that day clearing "debris" in preparation for a "field mow." I put both terms in quotations because the "field" is actually the ~six-acre former woodlot that we concentrated on back in the spring. [You can read about our initial efforts through some of my earlier posts: Step 1 of a Woodlot Restoration and Step 1 of a Woodland Restoration, continued . . .]
And the "debris" is a broad term -- it consisted mostly of smaller chunks of wood (mainly pieces of trunks, stumps, and roots). But it also included (1) a few newly fallen trees (four of the ~65 large specimens that we salvaged that didn't quite make it through the season's winds) and (2) dozens of thick necks of wine bottles cast into the thick understory years ago. This jagged green glassware has a story worth retelling (probably best for its own post), but suffice it to say the sharpened ends would make fast work of an unsuspecting tractor tire sidewall. So they had to be picked up before Roy could get going on the mower.
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| BEFORE: The "Tower Woods" restoration site just after noon on Thursday -- a complete hodgepodge of annuals (mostly ag weeds) has taken over much of the understory since the removal of invasive bush honeysuckle and dead ash trees last March; after a few hours on foot, things were picked up just enough that Roy could get underway with the mower |
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| AFTER: The Tower Woods from a similar vantage point just before 5:00 Thursday afternoon; what a difference a few hours makes with a brush hog mower and chainsaw! |
Between bouncing around on the tractor (Roy) and lugging a chainsaw and downed limbs (me), both of us were pretty well ready to tag out by late in the afternoon. We probably have another 6-8 hours of tag-teaming left to ready the site for the transition to winter -- and eventually spring . . . when we will be planting 1,100 new tree seedlings on the site. Now that we know we can handle it with a tractor/mower, our management options expand for weed management after tree planting. It's going to be a lot of work, and (unlike marsh management) a lot of time. But eventually, we look forward to a new crop of woody habitat to infill among the towering canopy of hackberry, locust, maple, and other tree survivors.
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| I'll end this post the way I started: with a cool insect -- this Autumn Meadowhawk (see p. 61) is a classic holdout for the late season bliss of Indian Summer |
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| Sunny sumac leaves were lousy with these little predators (I watched them zero in on a handful of mosquitoes and midges while I changed out of my work boots); but just because there were lots of them, it doesn't mean they were easy to capture in a clear frame! |
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| This particular male was the most cooperative, but I still wish I could have better captured the brilliance of his red coloration -- autumn just seems to know how to bring out the reds! |