Hopefully the chipmunk didn’t eat all the acorns he found this fall and stored a lot for this long, cold winter. Chipmunks construct expansive burrows with chambers for the food storage, sleeping quarters and refuse tunnels. During the winter, the chipmunk may enter long periods of decreased physiological activity, but does not truly hibernate and instead of storing fat, they periodically dip into their cache of nuts and seeds throughout the winter.
Chipmunk Eating an Acorn
The Black-eyed Susans have lost their former spectacular glory which had filled the landscape with yellow and black earlier but even in their faded life, they do provide seeds for the Goldfinch to eat as winter approaches.
Seed Eating Goldfinch
The honey bees are enjoying the late blooming asters and the way the bees have been collecting pollen, I don’t think it will be a mild winter so I better get busy like the bee and get the outside work done before the snow flies!
Busy as a Bee
These small yellow mushrooms are easily overlooked since so tiny on the forest floor, but to an insect they might look as large as the rocks in yesterday’s picture and hard to jump from one to another.
Yellow Mushrooms
The fall blooming flowers are attracting various insects including this Red Admiral butterfly. And although friendly to humans and may perch on your shoulder, the males Red Admirals are very aggressive defending his territory and his mate and will scout out his ‘turf’ up to thirty times per hour to get rid of other males.
When the Red Admiral folds its wings up, the underside almost looks like a moldy leaf and provides excellent camouflage. Its habitat preferences vary widely, from clearings in woods to vacant lots in downtown areas. An avid flower visitor, it is regularly seen in gardens.
Red Admiral
The road ditches are displaying yellow colors again, from golden rod to these tall flowers. I believe these are the native plant called Sawtooth Sunflowers but I didn’t climb down into the ditch to check out the leaves since the flowers were sharing the ditch with poison ivy.
Sawtooth Sunflowers
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
They say Labor Day marks the end of summer as the kids go back to school, summer vacations ends and the daylight gets shorter. Apparently the trees looked at the calendar too since the maples are making it look like fall instead of summer. And while I won’t miss the heat of summer, fall never seems to last long and soon we will be complaining about the cold snow.
End of Summer
