What to See This Week

The Bird Watching Garden is being regularly visited by fledgling cardinals and their attentive dads! Northern cardinals are known as some of the very best dads in the animal kingdom, tirelessly taking over the care of the fledglings. The female is usually busy sitting on the next set of eggs. The young cardinals can be recognized by their brown color (similar to the adult female) as well as their brownish beak that eventually turns a bright red as they mature regardless of if they are male or female. Sometimes it is the fledgling behavior that really gives them away. They can often be seen doing little wing flaps and calling out asking to be fed again.

Pokeweed is often thought of as weedy, but it benefits a whole lot of wildlife! It can grow quickly to over 9 feet tall and is covered in spikes of flowers. These flowers attract pollinators and eventually develop tons of dark berries. The berries can be used to make an incredibly vibrant magenta dye. They are also a great food source for a variety of fruit-eating birds, although they are toxic to people.

Most everywhere you look right now you can run into an orchard orb-weaver spider on their web. These spiders are tiny but even looking closely at this photo you can see their beautiful green color. Like the majority of orb-weaver spiders, the orchard orb-weaver builds a classic wheel-shaped web, typically horizontally. These spiders often hang from the underside of their web while waiting for prey to get trapped.

Blue vervain is a beautiful plant that has begun to bloom in both gardens and natural areas like the Red Barn Reserve and Dutch Fork Wetlands. Blue vervain is considered a facultative wetland plant, meaning that they usually occur in wetlands but also can be found outside of wetland areas naturally.

Blazing stars are amazing native prairie plants that are beautiful and beneficial to wildlife. Like other native plants they are well adapted to Ohio’s climate and readily available in nurseries. They are one popular swap for invasive purple loosestrife which also has spikes of purple flowers. While purple loosestrife can still be seen in prior plantings, it is now illegal to sell or plant due to the damage it has done. 

Hover flies, also called flower flies, are interesting insects. They are convincing mimics, sharing the black and yellow stripes of many bees and wasps. However, hover flies are completely harmless and also important pollinators! They especially prefer small yellow or white flat-topped flowers like this dill. In addition to being pollinators, hover fly larvae feed on aphids, so they are a great benefit to have in the garden!

Hornworms are generally not a very popular insect to have in your garden. There is no denying that even a single large hornworm is able to do substantial damage to tomato plants. Pictured here is actually a tobacco hornworm, a species more common in our area that still feeds on closely related tomato plants. When they grow up, tobacco hornworms turn into Carolina sphinx moths, an extremely important pollinator. Carolina sphinx moths are even known to successfully pollinate some species of threatened native orchids! While not always feasible, one solution to the hornworm problem is to move all caterpillars to a chosen tomato plant and allow them to continue their lifecycle.

The Learning Garden is being guarded by some very intimidating insects: Ohio’s largest wasp species. Cicada killer wasps can be seen zooming around the garden every July. While they can make you uneasy just by their size, they don’t often sting. Cicada killer wasps are solitary, although several may nest in the same area. Because of this, they aren’t defending a nest the same way paper wasps, yellow jackets, or hornets might. As their name suggests, they hunt cicadas to carry back to their burrow and use to provision the nest for their offspring.