80AcresOnline

Some grasses should be planted just for the way they look with sunlight slanting through them in the fall.

This is one.  It’s one of the Muhlys, but I don’t know which.

I  found one sideoats grama whose seedheads still had color–had rebloomed after the rain.   Here its red shows up well against the soft blue-green of prickly pear, and below it are three seedheads of silky bluestem:

Lots of butterflies were out–mostly American Snouts, but also various sulphurs (not cooperative about holding still for pictures except for the smallest, the Dainty Sulphur) and various skippers, including quite a few Common Skippers, both male and female.

It’s on one of the tiny yellow mallow-family flowers (another just visible in upper right corner.)

Here’s a Dainty Sulphur, one of a half-dozen each perched singly on the dried flower-head of this Compositae:

Here and there in the dry woods, I found wild onion blooming:

But the prize for the day was finding that the small population of Mirabilis alba, a native prairie forb, up by the SW corner of the dry woods, had multiplied…

It first showed up in our restoration project quite a distance from this  group, and several years before it.   Glad to see it spreading.    It’s hard to recognize except when it’s blooming, and due to the drought it didn’t bloom at its normal time this year.