"I understand spiders are hard to cherish. They appear to be all right angles and stubble, and they do not sleep, and their eyes never close, and we find it difficult to admire that which does not blink."
― Katherine Rundell
These were the bird species found during Saturday's Pope Farm Conservancy field trip:
Canada Goose
Mallard
Mourning Dove
Sandhill Crane
Killdeer
Cooper's Hawk
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Eastern Phoebe
Red-eyed Vireo
Blue Jay
American Crow
Black-capped Chickadee
Horned Lark
White-breasted Nuthatch
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Northern House Wren
European Starling
Gray Catbird
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
House Finch
American Goldfinch
Chipping Sparrow
Field Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
White-crowned Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Savannah Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Lincoln's Sparrow
Eastern Meadowlark
Red-winged Blackbird
Tennessee Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Bay-breasted Warbler
Chestnut-sided Warbler
Palm Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Northern Cardinal
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Indigo Bunting
The boreal sparrows are already here. I shouldn't be surprised — late September always brings them — yet their arrival still makes the season feel as though it has slipped by too quickly. The year's insecting days are numbered, even if the weather has stayed unusually warm. That lingering heat feels out of step with the turning prairies, where asters and seedheads tell the truer story of autumn.
A dapper Lincoln's Sparrow!
Using our binoculars, we trained on a brush pile alive with sparrows — Song, Savannah, Chipping, and Lincoln's all shuffling through. Oh, House Wrens, too! I called out the species and their clock positions rapid-fire, and more than a few participants wondered how I was picking them out so quickly. To most, they're just "LBJs" — little brown jobs flickering in and out of cover. With no vocalizations to lean on, the Merlin app offers no help here. What makes the difference is simply the trained eye of a birder with four decades experience in the field.
"Did you get all that?" I asked the participants.
The prairies are alive with asters ...
Splashes of purple, blue and white spread across the fading grasses. Their blooms stand as one of the last bursts of color before frost, a reminder that while the sparrows are already moving south, the season still has its hold here.
And who's that in the Swamp Milkweed?
Above, 4th instar Milkweed Bugs (Oncopeltus fasciatus), and below a Two-striped Planthopper (Acanalonia bivittata).
But wait, there's more!
The weekend's highlight was finding dozens of Banded Garden Spiders (Argiope trifasciata) strung through the grasses at Barneveld Prairie. It's been years since I've seen them in such numbers at one place — webs shimmering between stems, each spider poised at the hub.
They're a large orb-weaving spider in the family Araneidae with a slender abdomen in yellow, white, and black horizontal bands, giving the species its common name. Females are much larger than males, often reaching over an inch in body length, while males are small and short-lived. This species builds large, vertical orb webs in open habitats such as prairies, grasslands, and gardens, usually from late summer into fall.
But I just wasn't sure ...
when I should ...
... stop photographing them!
It looks like it's flying through the grasses, doesn't it? I just rotated the photo for this effect.
And so September draws to a close. The prairies feel both full and fleeting — wildflowers still shining in patches of yellow, purple, and white, sparrows filtering steadily southward, and the grasses woven with fine threads from spiders. Each sign marks a transition, the edge between abundance and decline, between the warmth of summer and the chill soon to come. Autumn always seems to arrive too quickly, carrying with it both beauty and the unmistakable sense of another season slipping away.
All images © 2025 Mike McDowell