Exploring Thistle World

What a radiating presence is a thistle!   Winged creatures fly to it, and energized, fly away:   Here are some of the creatures that came to Wavy-Leaf Thistle (Cirsium undulatum) in the last week of June and the first week of July:

In order of appearance: Ruby-throated Hummingbird; Thistle Fly (Paracantha sp.); Grass Skipper (Hesperiinae);  Wild Joy Beetles (Euphoria sepulcralis); Looper Moth (Caenurgina sp.); Leaf Beetles (Diabrotica cristata); Blister Beetle (Epicauta atrata); Eight-spotted Flower Longhorn Beetle (Typocerus octonotatus); Striped Sweat Bee (Agapostemon sp.); another Grass Skipper (Hesperiinae); Bee-like Flower Scarab (Trichiotinus piger); another hummingbird; grasshopper; lightning bug; crab spider; Leatherwing beetle corpse plus Slender Crab Spider (Tibellus sp.); Silver-tailed Petalcutter (Megachile montivaga); American Bumble Bee (Bombus pensylvanicus); Ruby-throated Hummingbird. 

The audio features Dickcissels singing persistently with a Bob White in the background. 

Now the Tall Thistles (Cirsium altissimum) are starting to bloom.   Here is what I wrote about "Thistle School"--in the Junction City Union, September 7, 2021: 

 https://www.junctioncityunion.com/lifestyles/blessings-from-native-thistles/article_491e6dd5-e29e-54c6-b23f-434d886e1afe.html

Northern Broken-Dash Skipper in the Creek Field

 Here on July 26, 2021 was a new visitor to the Creek Field: A Northern Broken-Dash Skipper (Wallengrenia egeremet).   
                                                           

 She landed first on Bee Balm.

Then she hopped over to Echinacea.

Broken Dashes are Grass Skippers, with grasses as their food plants.  

It is gratifying to find Grass Skippers in a prairie restoration!

Frog Males "Dance" Together

Puzzling to many is the behavior of male Blanchard's Cricket Frogs!   They often seek each other out, two by two, for a "partner dance" involving leg displays and tumbling.  

Here are two little males I encountered yesterday along McDowell Creek:   

Only males do these leg displays, according to herpetologist Eva Horne.  

Females lay eggs in water, and the males fertilize the eggs externally--so what these male-male interactions have to do with reproduction is not clear.   

At the end of the video, one of the "dancers" goes off to start chorusing.  You can see his inflated vocal sac is almost as big as he is!  

Beloved herpetologist Joe Collins wrote that Cricket Frog "breeding choruses" may be misnamed, as they do not indicate that eggs have been or will be laid.  They may serve some "unknown purpose," he wrote.   

The interactions shown here appear more friendly and cooperative than aggressive and competitive.   These two youngsters play well, politely taking turns jumping on top of each other!  

Two-spotted Bumble Bee on Foxglove Penstemon

 Every prairie restoration goes through a "Penstemon digitalis phase," I am told--a time when Foxglove Penstemon seems predominant.   Our Creek Field is coming down off that phase, but there is still plenty of Foxglove blooming heartily.   This year the flowers were covered by diminutive bumble bees--a kind I had never seen before, or at least never noticed.   It was so hard to get a still photo, as the small bees were either deep inside the tubular flowers or moving hectically from flower to flower.   Finally, I had enough photos to submit to bugguide.net and got an ID:  Bombus bimaculatus, Two-spotted Bumble Bee.  Apparently, the identifying field-characteristics are small size, long face, and the second abdominal segment, where the yellow hairs stop before reaching the sides, leaving two black "corners."   I include freeze-frames in the following video showing one of the corners.    

B. bimaculatus has an unusually long tongue, especially designed for tubular flowers such as those of Foxglove Penstemon.  

Pollinators Extraordinaire: Green Metallic Sweat Bees

Over the years, small, shiny green bees nectaring on wildflowers in our prairie restorations have been identified for us by bugguide.net as two different kinds of Sweat Bees.  The first is a genus of "Striped Sweat Bees," genus Agapostemon, shown here on Wavy-leaf Thistle, in our Road Field.  Wavy-leaf (Cirsium undulatum) is a magnificent native pollinator-plant: 
 

The second is a different group of metallic-green Sweat Bees, classified as tribe "Augochlorini."   Here are some Augochlorine Sweat Bees on Grey-headed Coneflower, in our Creek Field:

Now after all these years I am finally putting two-and-two together!   Both kinds of shiny green Sweat Bee are members of the bee family Halictidae, and both are wonderful pollinators!