Journal for October 31, 2024

We’re continuing to have warm, dry, sunny and very windy weather. The drought is starting to be hard on plants – leaves on some of the trees curled up and turned brown without ever changing color, and even the leaves of some of the prairie plants have shriveled. But the fall colors were beautiful and it’s been great weather for outdoor projects. (Today we’re finally getting some rain!)

This is the month when the landscape changes from summer greens to winter browns. At the beginning there’s still a lot of green.

View from the Knife Edge Point on October 12

Western Road – October 11

Buffalo Ridge Prairie – October 14

Twisted Oak Savanna – October 20 – starting to have more color

Our big project this month was clearing a part of Hidden Oaks hillside. The Kule Region Forestry folks cleared one section of it in 2017, but we hadn’t gotten around to tackling the rest. Most of it has turned into a jungle – a tangle of small oaks, apple trees, and sumac mixed with bush honeysuckles, buckthorn and prickly ash. This time we cleared one strip all the way from the bottom to the top. If there are enough days left before the snow comes, maybe we’ll get another strip done.

Looking down from the top of the point:

10/21/24 - after clearing

10/3/24 - before clearing

Looking up from the bottom:

10/21/24 - after clearing

10/3/24 - before clearing

Another project was to cut and treat the buckthorns and honeysuckles that were growing up in 3 Finger Valley – the long narrow valley that runs up the middle of our property.

Removing the bushes in the middle of the valley and along the edges went pretty quickly. There are still more growing back into the edges of the woods that will have to wait for another time.

One other smaller project was fixing our bluebird nest boxes. We’ve had problems with bears pushing down the posts. The bear stands up next to a box and leans against the post, the post bends, and the box hits the ground. This time we mounted the boxes on thick metal pipes in hopes that they’ll be sturdier.

We’re still seeing a few butterflies on warm days: Common Buckeyes, Eastern Commas and Clouded and Orange Sulphurs. We interrupted these Clouded Sulphurs doing a mating dance.

This Field Thistle has had blooms since mid summer and they’re still attracting bees – these are Half-black Bumblebees

The only other late flowers we’re still seeing are Aromatic Aster – October 29th.

These are Bird’s Nest Fungi. I found several groups of them on the stems of honeysuckle bushes we were cutting. The ‘eggs’ contain spores which are dispersed when raindrops hit the ‘nests’. The ‘nests’ with orange coverings are at an earlier stage – soon the orange covering will wear away and the ‘eggs’ will be visible.

We arrived at our birding bench one day last week to find it 30 feet downstream, turned upside down and with several pieces broken off.

We took it home for repairs and replaced it with another bench – and we put up a trail camera so if it happened again we would see who did it. The next day the new bench was upside down! – fortunately not as badly damaged. Here’s video of the culprit.

One of Mike’s ongoing goals has been to find a way to organize the data we’ve been collecting from our sound meters. He’s recently been having good luck with a program called BirdNet-Analyzer which has dumped him in the middle of a fun “Big Data” project. Here’s an example — this photo shows the beginning and end of a Species by Month list for 2024 – Click on the photo to download a PDF of the full list – (note: only through October). He reduced 7 million ID’s down to 660,000 by only listing the ones that BirdNET-Analyzer’s “confidence” in the result was 75% or greater.