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A few pictures for early summer. Street Prophets Coffee Hour on Sunday. [1]
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Date: 2023-06-04
Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, where politics meets up with religion, art, food, nature, and life. Come in, take a cuppa and a cookie or three, and join us.
Like many places in the world, changing climate has caught up with me in Kansas. Our winter temperatures were regularly -12° to -17°F (we had an outlier once of -23°F) and snow was plentiful—and constant. My pond froze solidly enough for regular ice skating. Now, it’s unusual to get below 25°F, and 0°F is rare, indeed.
Who wouldn’t want warmer winters, right? And summers were pretty much the same as always—until now. While we aren’t seeing the highest temperatures spike, we are seeing them occur earlier and more often. Even before the end of May, we were into full-on summer.
Here’s what’s been going on around here:
The little blue-tailed lizards are in and out of the stone retaining wall.
Some people have to buy their penstemmon (beards tongue) at the nursery, but it’s a native prairie flower that grows wild here at my house.
The wasp is making the “paper” with its mouth. I don’t spray these nests, ever. The little Carolina wrens will eat the wasps and their eggs, and I don’t want to give them a mouthful of poison. Yesterday, I was on the deck next to a birdbath, and a wasp settled on the edge to drink.
Leopard frogs used to be everywhere. I still see some, but I’m afraid they’ve been caught in the nationwide (worldwide?) frog losses.
I find chorus frogs in the oddest places. Turn over the birdbath on the deck railing, or look behind the downspouts on the house, or, maybe inside the birdhouses, and there they are.
Toads have a distinctive sound. Especially at night, I like to listen to them.
Lots of different dragonflies are around the fountains.
I can still find the occasional spiderwort in bloom.
This is a close-up, but damselflies look so fragile I’m surprised they don’t break.
Tree swallows nest a little later than some birds, so they will sometimes take over a bluebird nest once the bluebirds have fledged. This confuses the adult bluebirds, because, unlike swallows, they always raise a second clutch each summer, and now the nestbox is occupied.
The brown thrashers nest low to the ground in thorn bushes. The weedy multiflora roses suit them.
Another thing that’s declining is the wild prairie rose. I’m losing most of mine to the changing conditions.
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