Follow our adventures living in the woods and meeting wild ones. Check out Gerry the ruffed grouse, our hiking buddy, and watch Makwa the black bear as he grows up! This year we’re talking about pollinators and their host plants.
Dear Wood Folk, We’ve covered a tinier iris before: blue-eyed grass. It’s a miniature lookalike you might find in your lawn around cottage country Ontario. Our title iris on the other hand can grow close to a few feet tall. Common along wetlands here, Northern blue flag (Iris versicolor) is our native blue flag iris. …
Dear Wood Folk, Buttercups are one of the first flowering plants I noticed when I moved to Haliburton County, Ontario. They have a reflective shininess to them that makes them pop. Buttercups are common in my yard, and common along the nearest trail. These mostly perennial plants show up in varied terrain. Some species are …
Dear Wood Folk, You’ve likely heard of or seen the plant bleeding heart. I have some planted over the graves of my beloved pets. Dutchman’s breeches (dicentra cucullaria) and squirrel corn (dicentra canadensis) are the native relations to bleeding heart in Ontario. Dutchman’s breeches have yellow “waistbands” on their upside-down knicker shaped flowers, while squirrel …
Dear Wood Folk, We covered so many butterflies in Volume 3, but never got to moths, bees, wasps, ants, etc. Someday we’ll get back to pollinators. And the previous birding series is far from complete too. But I feel like something different, and I’ve wanted to cover my favourite poisonous or toxic plants for sometime. …
Dear Wood Folk, Lately, we’ve been covering a lot of overwintering butterflies, but this month’s sulphurs (colias spp.) are migrators. We have three species around Haliburton, Ontario, noted on iNaturalist. The clouded sulphur (c. philodice) is the species you are vastly more likely to see. It’s followed by the orange “alfalfa butterfly” (c. eurytheme) who …
Dear Wood Folk, I suppose northern viceroys get overlooked a lot due to their twin being perhaps the most popular butterfly in North America. At first glance they sure look like a petite monarch. Viceroy (limenitis archippus) is a poisonous butterfly mimicking another poisonous butterfly that mimics it. Or it goes something like that. They call …