Last week, I wrote that poison ivy vines were turning red and now they’re way more colorful than they had been. And also way more orange or yellow leaves are dappling trees, but that’s how it should be now that autumn is about to begin.
As you travel along major highways right now, you’ll almost certainly see that the leaves of small sumac plants are turning orange or yellowish red. They always seem to change before the leaves of bigger trees or shrubs do.
At this time of the year, some plants that went unnoticed all summer are blooming at places previously unknown. One of those plants is sweet autumn clematis, an exotic that escaped cultivation and easily germinates in all kinds of soil.
It’s a vine whose white flowers suddenly cover the tops of fences or other shrubby plants. But it’s pretty and most people like it even though it’s an invasive that easily replaces native wild clematis.
Clematis virginiana, commonly called virgin’s bower after Queen Elizabeth I and her association with the Virgin Mary, is our native clematis. But the sweet autumn clematis that was brought here in the 1800s from East Asia often forms dense mats and chokes out this native clematis. Telling them apart is difficult and involves the shape of their leaves.
Another plant that’s suddenly blooming right now with white flowers is common boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), but this one is a North American native. It’s not a vine but rather you’ll see its white blooms on 4-6 foot tall plants in fields or wild places among yellow goldenrod flowers.
Boneset flowers are great attractants for late pollinators and they’re used by all kinds of bees and butterflies. They’re also a host plant for several different moth species larvae.
Boneset, which has leaves that are fused together and which make the stems look like they penetrate them, has long been used medicinally, especially by Native Americans and early settlers. At some places, the common name of feverwort still exists because it was used a lot to treat fevers along with bone problems.
Recently, David and I drove past a small roadside garden where some small plants were blooming, although they weren’t what you’d expect to see at this time of the year. They were autumn crocuses with lilac-colored flowers whose shape is described as looking like a goblet, although saying they look like a bowl-shaped drinking vessel doesn’t really describe them to me.
On the bird front, specifically on hawk migration, kettles of broad-winged hawks have been moving overhead at various sites in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey this past week. Some groups have measured in the thousands, while others contained 50 or less. And there may or may not still be thousands to come, although you just never know. But even if most of the broadwings have already moved through, there are eight or more other raptor species that will migrate through here from now until early December.
Raptors are big birds that are easily seen. However, the ones that we see in back yards or on bird feeders are small and referred to as passerines. And already some of the winter passerines are showing up, specifically white-throated sparrows.
