Some Virginia creeper climbs up as a vine into trees and is quite the sight now with red leaves wrapping around the trunks of trees. Some are also very short or even a small plant with usually 5 leaves coming out of one point. In some areas of the forest floor these small plants cover it and don't form the vine to climb up a tree.

Some oak and ash trees have already lost many leaves and are lining the trails with them. There are other trees whose leaves are still green and will not change color or let them fall until there is a harder frost. Here is a picture taken from Airplane Hill looking over the trees in the woods along Fort Ridgely Creek.

Another sure sign of the changing season is the v-shaped flocks of geese flying over. The one below flew over me last week as I explored Fort Ridgely.

Grand Finale of Flowers and mutual dependence

I hope you have caught one of the main themes of these updates.

Plants, insects and other animals are dependent on each other and their life cycles and actions. I have emphasized this dependence between flowers and bees. Pollination is the main way that plants depend on bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, wasps and other pollinators. They need pollination to produce fruit, nuts and seeds to keep their species going. Some plants can survive the winter by coming up from roots that can stand freezing on the tops here in Minnesota. Many depend entirely on seeds that survive the winter and new plants come up the next year from them. Most are a combination of the two as in the trees.

Bees and other pollinators are dependent on flowers of various plants for food from the nectar and pollen flowers produce. Some pollinators have a short lifecycle and live only during the flowering of a particular plant. Most are dependent on many plants that are flowering in spring, different ones in summer and finally different ones in the fall. Monarch butterflies are dependent on milkweed to lay their eggs on and their caterpillars feed almost entirely on the leaves of various milkweeds. The monarch butterflies get some nectar and pollen from milkweed flowers but can be found on almost any other flowers from the time they come to now after most have left for Mexico. One of the last flowers in the fall to bloom is the New England aster. It blooms right up to the first hard frost and sometimes survives and blooms after as well. You can see 2 monarchs below feasting on New England aster flowers.

It is so important for us in our gardens and parks to plant a variety of plants that bloom early in the spring, all the way through to late fall. Healthy prairie and woodlands have such variety. I hope you have seen that in these updates. We have created food deserts for pollinators by planting huge fields of crops that pollinate and have flowers at only one time during the year. We need to do that for our own survival but if we want pollinators to pollinate these crops, we need to make sure there is food for them the rest of the year. We need to eat each day over this period and so do pollinators.

Here is what is happening now in the prairie. The goldenrods and thistles are almost at the end of their blooming. Many of them are going to seed. The goldfinches are having a feast on the fresh thistle seeds. I seldom see them at my thistle seed feeder now.

The milkweed pods are drying out and many have opened to let their seeds fly in the wind. Some sunflowers are still blooming but coneflowers and some sunflower varieties are going to seed. The birds are eating their seeds and the ones that stay around all winter will continue to eat them all winter and into the spring. The picture below is of a female goldfinch eating seeds from a purple coneflower in our garden. She was so busy that she let me get very close before she flew away. Still plenty of coneflower seeds will be planted for next year's flowers.

There are at least 4 varieties of asters that are blooming right now.

I know about two that are blue and two that are white. One white one is the white heath aster. There is a dark paper wasp on white heath aster in the picture below. This has a small flower, usually smaller than the end of your little finger. The bigger white asters that are blooming are either panicled or hairy white oldfield asters. These flowers are larger, more like the size of the end of your pointer finger.

The smooth blue aster flower is a similar size but blue. A flower fly is getting nectar from a smooth blue aster flower in the picture below. New England asters are the other blue aster and it is just starting to bloom. I have seen light to very dark blue and even sometimes pink blooms. Their plant is taller, often 3-4 feet tall, and their flower are larger. They are more the size of your thumb, with a larger and more orange center. Refer to the picture above with the two monarchs on it. These asters, like goldenrods recently, are covered with honeybees, various other bees, wasps and flies as well as butterflies and moths.

Rare flowers at Fort Ridgely

Joan Sommers, on staff at Fort Ridgely, found some rare downy gentians blooming in some grass. I had seen bottle gentians in several places across the country but this is the first time I had seen this species. Joan told me where they are found and I am including a picture of both a bottle gentian and a downy gentian. Before they open the buds look similar.

A bumblebee is the only bee strong enough to open a bottle gentian where as you can see the downy gentian opens into a much more open and frilly flower. Notice the big bumblebee opening the bottle gentian in the picture above. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the little bee peaking over the edge of the flower when I focused in on the flower.

Downy gentians are also called prairie gentians as they are found amid prairie grass in dries areas. Most other gentians including the bottle gentian are found in wetter areas of the prairie or along marshes and lakes.