In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.
June is also 30 Days Wild and I’m participating again this year.
This week is National Pollinator Week so today I went out front to watch the pollinators in our garden. It’s one of my favorite activities to do at home and ever since we dug up some lawn and threw out a bunch of seeds, I’ve been watching our pollinators. When designing habitat in our yard I chose to focus on insects and particularly pollinators, so we have a lot of flowering plants. In the backyard are mostly native plants like Goldenrod, Fireweed, Mock Orange, Red-flowering Currant and so on. In the front however, are more general flowers like Rudbeckia, Foxglove, California and other species of poppies and Hollyhock. Over time I’m hoping to replace the flowers with a native seed mix because they’re more tailored to our native bees. I’ve noticed the Borage mostly attracts the non-native Honey Bees and the common Bumble Bee species, but not much else. The Hollyhocks attract mostly nothing at all.
But the smaller flowers tend to attract more of a diversity of bees. It’s these that I focus on and have been trying to document the variety of species found in our yard. A few days ago on Day 168 I found quite a few different species. On Day 161 I took photos of everything I found on our blooming Fireweed.
Late yesterday afternoon I watched another pollinator in our backyard, a pair of Anna’s Hummingbirds. I’m not sure if they were siblings or a parent and juvenile, but they were interacting and it was fun to watch them chase each other back and forth and then perch along side one another when they were done.
