The air has been drier this week, so less clouds in the sky, but the airplane vapor trails can lead to interesting patterns in the sky. I wonder if there is a treasure under the X and what the treasure could be. One would find colored leaves for a few more days at least and the rest of nature’s beauty.
X Marks the Spot
With the warmer temperatures this week, the bluebirds have been singing more. I love seeing and hearing the bluebirds but soon they will head south and I will have to wait until spring for their return. I love the way the blue feathers are reflected in the bluebird’s eye.
Bluebird Enjoying Warm Fall Weather
Since I used a digital painting of a photograph for the prior post, I thought I would do one more painting of the rustic road that I was on yesterday. And it is a ‘rustic’ road since the Wisconsin Legislature established the Rustic Roads program in 1973 to help citizens and local units of government preserve what remains of Wisconsin’s scenic, lightly traveled country roads.
To qualify for the Rustic Road program, a road should have outstanding natural features along its borders such as rugged terrain, native vegetation, native wildlife, or include open areas with agricultural vistas which singly or in combination uniquely set this road apart from other roads.
Rustic Road 4 description on the WI Rustic Road web site, the rustic road I traveled on yesterday, says “Beautiful fall colors mark the road in autumn, along with many coniferous trees. Watch for glacial rock formations and wild turkeys.” I saw the rock formations and caves, fall colors but didn’t see any turkeys but plenty of other birds.
Rustic Road 4
And the original photograph that I took of Rustic Road 4 before I made a painting out of it.
The shortening daylight, cool nights and sunny fall days bring more than just the turning of colored leaves. It also brings out the equipment harvesting fields of soybeans and corn. Shortly after I snapped this shot of standing corn, it was picked and the ears of corn were in a wagon. I do some digital painting and this picture beckoned me saying it wanted to become a painting.
Standing Corn before Harvest
After being a taxi service for my brother to get all the equipment to the field to pick corn, I decided to do a little ‘leaf peeping’ in the area yesterday. ‘Leaf Peepers’ are appreciated by business owners since they benefit from the autumn tourism but are often disliked by the locals that have to share the roads with the sightseers. I might have been a local but still had to pull over and let the locals get around me who weren’t out photographing the autumn colors. But I did find one road that I didn’t have to worry about any traffic and so I was able to enjoy the fall colors in peace without worrying if anyone was behind me or not.
Quiet Road for Leaf Peeping
The maple tree has many functions, including being a major source of pollen in early spring before other plants have flowered and are important for the survival of honey bees. I don’t have a lot of maple trees but there must be enough to keep my bees going in the spring.
The Sugar maple is tapped for sap to produce maple syrup, maple sugar or maple taffy. The sugar maple wood is the choice for bowling pins, pool cue shafts and butcher’s blocks.
But the bright autumn colors of the maples, from yellows, oranges and reds, might be what gets the most attention and many countries have leaf watching traditions such as Japan which is called “momijigari”. The custom of viewing the changing color of maples in Korea is called “Danpung-Nori”. Leaf peeping is an informal term, commonly used in the United States, for people who travel to view and photograph the fall foliage in areas where foliage changes colors.
Leaf Peeping
The honey bees should be out in full force today collecting pollen for winter storage, once the temperature warms up some more. In cold climates honey bees stop flying when the temperature drops below about 50 °F and crowd into the central area of the hive to form a “winter cluster”. The worker bees huddle around the queen bee at the center of the cluster, shivering in order to keep the center between 81 °F at the start of winter during the broodless period and 93 °F once the queen resumes laying. The worker bees rotate through the cluster from the outside to the inside so that no bee gets too cold. The outside edges of the cluster stay at about 46–48 °F. The colder the weather is outside, the more compact the cluster becomes. During winter, they consume their stored honey to produce body heat. The amount of honey consumed during the winter is a function of winter length and severity but ranges in temperate climates from 30 to 100 lbs and maybe more for here since it can get rather cold in January.
I don’t know how big the hive is that I have in an old oak tree since the bear wasn’t able to rip the tree open but left plenty of claw marks in his attempt. There has been a steady traffic in and out of the tree when I watch but there is one less worker bee since when it was getting a drink of water at the pond, a frog ate it, although it took two tries so the frog might have got stung on the tongue!
Honey Bee at Work
The birds were busy visiting the bird seed feeder today, even the young nuthatch, who took multiple tries to land on the feeder. The nuthatch get their common name from their habit of jamming large nuts and acorns into tree bark, then whacking them with their sharp bill to “hatch” out the seed from the inside.
Young Nuthatch
The critters must have heard the forecast of the freezing temperatures tonight since they were stocking up on food but the chipmunks seemed to eating more than storing for the winter like the squirrels were. But the chipmunk had to settle for an acorn since the little red squirrel has claimed all the bitternuts.
Hungry Chipmunk
A tree frog is any frog that spends a major portion of its lifespan in trees, so I guess I will have to call this a porch frog since he spends most of his time hanging around my porch and on the porch door window at night catching moths and other bugs.
“Porch” Tree Frog
