A Look at the Season's Main Events
By Virginia Barlow
June
The scarlet tanager’s song is often described as sounding like a robin with a sore throat / Bumblebees are foraging from chokecherry blossoms / Keep an eye out for luna moths over the next few weeks – beautiful, large, green moths with long tails / Porcupines aren’t as destructive in summer, because their diet shifts from bark to include leaves, fruits, and grasses / Just before giving birth, pregnant moose drive away their offspring from the previous year
Blue flag is blooming / Wood thrushes are feeding on insects and spiders now. They will switch to a high-fruit diet in the fall / Pear thrips larvae drop to the ground and enter the soil / Large, fuzzy eastern tent caterpillars may be underfoot as they leave their tents and search for a place to pupate / The first deer flies are looking for you / After hatching, toads spend up to two months as tadpoles. They are black, unlike the tadpoles of other frog species
Oyster mushrooms are fruiting on dead elms / Twinflower is blooming / Fish find whirligig beetles easy to catch but hard to swallow. The beetles secrete a noxious substance, and fish are likely to spit them right out / The violet-blue flowers of pickerelweed will add color to shorelines from now till October / Shadbush fruits and wild strawberries are ripe / The red eyed vireo, our most inveterate songbird, repeats his song as many as 22,000 times in a single day
The tiny, tan moths of the arborvitae leaf miner are emerging / Red tailed hawks fledge after being fed at the nest by their parents for six or seven weeks. Listen for their persistent begging as feeding continues for the next three weeks / Bullfrogs and green frogs have replaced spring peepers as the dominant amphibian vocalists / Maple leaf cutter mines can be seen on leaves. The expected damage can be estimated by counting the number of larvae per leaf
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These listing are from observations and reports in our home territory at about 1,000 feet in elevation in central Vermont and are approximate. Events may occur earlier or later, depending on you latitude, elevation - and the weather.
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© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
