Greensboro Birds

Summer is cranked up to a crazy pitch in our garden. Everything is blooming, birds are nearly finished fledging, and butterflies are flapping around everywhere we look. This is a tiny sunflower that found itself a spot to take root next to the dry creek. Phaon crescents are almost always on it, as are tiny bees with pollen-covered legs.

Look at this ravaged coneflower. Japanese beetles have been munching on this bloom (they also dig my knockout roses, the blossoms of my Chrysler Imperial rose, the Japanese maple, and the occasional Shasta daisy). Besides hunting down the critters and feeding them to the chickens, my other strategy is to keep the chewed foliage on the plant, which seems to keep the beetles from moving on to the rest of the plant. There are plenty of intact blooms emerging beneath this tattered one, for instance. Thankfully the beetles’ numbers are dwindling, although I will miss watching the chickens gulp them down.

But also check out the gray hairstreak with the honey bee. The hairstreaks have become my favorite butterflies. I love that conservative velvety gray punctuated by a surprise of orange and a little flair of tail. (If they were a man, I’d probably see them shopping at Steven Alan or APC.) The garden also sees a lot of Eastern tailed-blues, which are nearly as understated chic, but they’ve been too quick for my camera so far.

Check out the skipper coming in for a landing! The garden suffers no shortage of pollinators in this era of colony collapse. Honey bees are abundant (there are two in the pic above), as are bumblebees, those tiny sweat bees, hummingbird moths, various oddball insects, and dozens of butterfly species. We have a good variety of plants and trees for them to feed from and live on, and we keep our wooded area as natural as possible, with the grasses allowed to grow tall and go to seed and the pokeweed running rampant where it prefers (even in the yard near the dry creek). It’s easier and cheaper to let the garden do its own thing rather than to control it with various sprays and such, and the result seems to be a place literally buzzing with activity.