Please click on photos to enlarge.
Butterflies and ground hogs may be associated with rich soil and healthy plant life, but the two above were trying to maintain their territory despite a lot of human activity nearby and even the removal of the habitat along the railroad near Spring Street and West Avenue south of Dickson Street.
It isn't easy to leave one's home territory. People evicted from rental property often camp nearby for lack of a better place to go. Wild things tend to be the same way. A monarch caterpillar tossed into the surrounding grass when a mower takes out a milkweed is in trouble. Monarch caterpillars cannot live without live milkweed foliage and become bird food or die without ever becoming a butterfly and provide a little extra nutrition to the ground.
Squirrels finally give up the spot where a big oak or hickory has fed their ancestors for generations and migrate to the nearest similar habitat, but the number of squirrels in their new habitat may already be at carrying capacity, which means they may have to move on or fail to reproduce in that area. Numbers of a given species are limited by predators, of course, but food and shelter must be adequate or numbers fall anyway.
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1 comment:
Thanks for balancing your news a little. We all see plenty of the ugly things going on in our city every day.
Your getting closeups of a few survivors in these situations helps give us hope for a better future.
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