Dime-sized sightings can make a difference
Like a massive collection of old hunter's and angler's journals, citizen science websites compile millions of tiny jewels
Now that I’m older I feel a sense of envy every time I come across a hunter or angler of my age, or older, who took the time to meticulously journal decades of outings.
With all manner of things noted, from the weather to what was in bloom and how the game and fish fit into the environmental puzzle of the day, they have these little jewels of insight beyond that stuff we all casually repeat—like the sand bass run when redbuds bloom and crappie are on the bank when dogwoods bloom.
But these days we all have a chance to do that kind of journaling and we can do it in kind of a lazy man’s way by contributing to huge group efforts online. Citizen science observations can help confirm what we know about our environment and uncover much that we don’t.
This first day of spring, March 20, and days to come are a prime time to make note of the first-ofs, the last-ofs and the unusuals that pop up or come through to mark the passage of the season. Flora and fauna of all kinds and their behaviors are worth observing and noting.
This week I made several dime-sized observations and, as usual, hooked my thought processes into something a little larger.
Started out looking pretty silly, I supposed. After 10 minutes of zig-zagging across a 20-yard section of meadow, east to west and back again, the first butterfly I spied this season finally sat still for a portrait and I recorded it for the international iNaturalist app.
If any of the neighbors saw me out there doing that little dance they probably thought I’d been drinking or smoking something not available at the corner store.
The bright yellow little critter, an orange sulphur, could have been mistaken for a half a Post-it note bouncing on the breeze, if it hadn’t been bouncing upwind.
Just when I was about to give up on getting a photo of the dizzy thing with my mobile phone it dropped—calling it a landing would be a gross mischaracterization of its haphazard flight—right next to me and it just sat there.
Late in the day March 14 seemed darned early and it was not the warmest of evenings. But according to what iNaturalist citizen scientists in Oklahoma have observed, it was not a terribly unusual siting. At least a couple earlier records for sulphurs are on the list, including one on March 4 this year and on Feb. 17 in 2018.
Seeing that little butterfly made me think of recent reports of early sightings of monarch butterflies migrating through Norman and Muskogee. And it made me wonder what the heck that little guy and what other March emergers and migrators turn to for nectar.
And apparently I’m not the only one.
“In the database I have, we don’t have many records of monarchs visiting flowers in March,” said Ray Moranz, Southern Plains Pollinator Ecologist with the Xerces Society at the Stillwater office of the Natural Resource Conservation Service. “It would be good information if that is something people could report. In March and April, that is a period when we know the least about what the adult monarchs are feeding on. I would absolutely love to improve on that list.”
Observations can be noted on the Oklahoma Friends of Monarchs Facebook page, or if you’re an iNaturalist user you can drop those notes in those entries as well, he said.
JourneyNorth.org, which has tracking projects for everything about monarchs from first adult to first caterpillar and first milkweeds, offers a section for making notes. That would be a great place to add those observations. When I report migrations to the site I usually include weather information at my location.
That website might be of interest to a wide variety of readers. It also tracks migrations and movements of hummingbirds, robins, orioles, leaf-out, ice-out, common loons, frogs, and other critters and occurrences that come and go with the seasons. It’s worth a look for anyone who enjoys watching such things—or who has an annoying friend who insists they know when the hummingbirds or orioles “always” arrive.
What food sources all the pollinators turn to his time of year include many of those dime-sized observations I noted earlier. Plants we call “weeds,” like the purple henbit that colors meadows and roadsides all around Tulsa this time of year, and dandelions are important food sources in early March.
Saturday I saw more sulphurs in Osage County and they stopped on dandelions and tiny bluets.
The relative speed at which these little butterflies cover the ground, and fly against a 10 mph wind, and how quickly they drop onto a flower barely visible to the human eye from 15 feet is incredible.
The bloom of a bluet is .25 inches wide, petal tip to petal tip. Birdseye speedwell is similar, and only about .3 inches. American field pansy, a violet also known as johnny-jump-up, is a relative monster with a bloom almost a half and inch tip-to-tip.
Those are some tiny landing pads.
While looking to see what flowering plants might be available to monarchs now, Moranz navigated to the Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses website at kswildflower.org. The site offers a “wildflowers and grasses listed by time of flowering” link that shows what is blooming not only by month but by color.
In the list we found something interesting neither of us had seen, a native flower called Oklahoma phlox that blooms April through May.
Intrigued, we then looked online to the The Biota of North America Program website, known as BONAP, at bonap.org. The site, which offers indexed maps at the county level on hundreds of flower species nationwide, showed Oklahoma phlox is native statewide but has seldom been reported. There are only a few instances of it in southern Kansas and north-central Oklahoma—but it has been recorded statewide at some point in time, Moranz said.
Surely more could be found, they just haven’t been noted—or maybe it is a prairie flower that is disappearing? Small finds like that raise challenges that make the citizen science angle of outdoor exploration fun.
Within weeks—days really—more and more nectar sources will become available with the elms budding out, wild plums and Bradford and invasive Callery pear trees blooming. The eastern redbuds are lending purple hue to the landscape and are about to bloom.
But for now, as things just begin to change, it’s worth noting when you see your firsts and worth watching those early bugs and butterflies and blooms to observe not only what is and where and when it is, but what it was feeding on and what was the time.
Like an old hunter’s journal, collections of these observations can reveal great things over time.
Look to ‘Okies’ for planting March and April flowers
A great Oklahoma source for gardeners and butterfly lovers wondering what to plant to provide nectar for early monarchs, hummingbirds, bees and other butterflies is available at okiesformonarchs.org, the common website of the Oklahoma Monarch & Pollinator Collaborative, a statewide group of 40-plus organizations and citizens working together to ensure thriving Monarch migrations for generations to come.
Head to the website and just click on the WHAT TO PLANT link and you’ll find sources for milkweed and advice about seeds and plants by region of the state—as well as advice about what not to plant.