That is very cool. I love seeing open spaces treated more as natural untrained/sprayed grassland/forest/floodplain spaces for native species to thrive in. I’ve seen unexpected consequences like mosquito and deer mice population growth which can be concerns for human impacting diseases BUT nature has a fantastic array of natural defenses like bat colonies to eat flying insects and predatory bird programs that munch all day long on rats n mice that work well at controlling these potential pest problems & keeping them in balance with the urban and suburban spaces should they develop. Plague, Hantavirus are concerns around here & the county/state have done well controlling them.
That the key: restoring a balance, including of animals we tried to eradicate entirely, throwing everything else out of sorts.
Speaking of: the particular spot in which I rescued eggs was mowed at the end of July, during a heat wave week. I didn’t get an opportunity to check for eggs that week, so there’s no doubt several were destroyed (as much of the small patch has many sprigs of milkweed growing amidst the grasses). But I spoke with a neighbour a few days later who surprised me when he said he saw a young grass snake looking lost, just days after the mow-down, as a lot of the food sources on which they’d been relying for the year just vanished instantly. I wish I’d been there to chronicle it with pictures and/or video.
Although they’re hardly unheard of for this region, grass snakes tend to only be spotted in the large municipal and provincial parks designated as native habitat and rest stops for migratory species. So to spot one far afield of those select parks was a sign said public corridor is more than ready for micro-level ecological restoration.
We have bats here, too, although I’ve only ever seen them along a hydro corridor public park peppered with poorly shielded lampposts. The (avoidable) light pollution attracts the bugs, and the bugs attract the bats. (Only downside: bats around here are known carriers of rabies, and just days ago, Canada reported its first rabies case since 1967 transmitted to a human; it was through exposure to a bat.)
The lone star tick is making its way north to this region. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s only spiders or if there are other species which treat them, black-legged ticks, and deer ticks as prey. Opossums and skunks are abundant here, and both are good about keeping rodent populations in check; as generalists, both are known to eat various insects and (possibly) arachnids. As deer are the key vector for ticks, it’s worth noting how wolves and coyotes,
their predators, have come back to the city: twice this summer I heard coyotes crooning less than 1km from my home!
I saw a black swallow tail maybe a month ago although the most common butterfly I see come through here are the Yellow Western Tiger swallowtail butterflies.
That’s awesome! I managed to see only a couple of black swallowtail this year (I looked for caterpillars, but finding those is next-level challenge for my limited skills). I did manage to see a slightly larger number red admiral butterflies (including one “mudding” on the middle of a side-street during midday. I’d move them, and they’d fly back to the same spot. I gave up after the third try. I couldn’t stay, and I worried a car might crush them.)
We have an overabundance of cabbage white throughout all the warm months and, beginning from later August, the European Common Blue. Both of those are introduced/invasives. I don‘t mind them, but know they introduce other problems. I did find a large yellow underwing moth (another invasive) emerging from my garden as an adult (at night), and another a month later as a sixth-instar caterpillar, munching on my onion plant (also at night).
A goal for me is to put a bat house about 20 feet up in the corner of my yard by next summer. I get ALOT of mosquitos during the summer so want to introduce a bat colony around me to eat them all. I saw some last night flying around munching on bugs and are natural to this high desert habitat so I figure I could stick one up on a big pole and give them somewhere to live close by.
Bats are fantastic for taking down mosquitoes. That should be a decent height for them.
Oh, and Macs are great personal computers! </on_topic!>
