Friends of Scioto Brush Creek

08/24/2026

Macro Monday! They are abundant in Scioto Brush Creek.

08/17/2026

Partnerships are so important in conservation. Well done everyone.

08/17/2026

Here's new one even for me. I'd never heard this term for a group of purple martins, a richness. They certainly bring "richness" to the April skies upon their arrival with their lovely songs. Enjoy them while they are still here. Some may have already left to fly south for the season.

The people who put up martin houses have always talked about their birds the way other people talk about family. The old bird lists agree. A gathering of purple martins is called a richness.

August is when you understand the name. The families are done nesting now, and they gather each evening into roosts that grow by the thousands, then the tens of thousands. The biggest ones swirl up off their trees at dawn in rings so vast that weather radar picks them up. Meteorologists call them roost rings and know better than to call them rain.

And then one morning soon, the house by the garden stands quiet. They are over the Gulf, bound for Brazil, and the yard is poorer until April.

If there is a martin house in your neighborhood, look tonight. The richness is counting down. 🕊️

08/17/2026

What a fun way to observe the singing insects. All 3 can be heard now in the watershed.

An August yard keeps time out loud, and the choir works in shifts.

The afternoon belongs to the cicadas, that long electric drone from high in the trees, loudest in the worst of the heat. As the sun drops they hand off to the crickets, the steady silver chirping from down in the grass that carries through the evening. Then sometime after true dark the katydids clock in overhead, harsher and choppier, rasping what old ears heard as an argument. Katy DID, Katy DIDN'T.

Three insects, three instruments, three shifts, and they run it every warm night from now to the first hard frost.

Step out tonight and check the time by ear. If the drone is gone and the rasping has started, the night shift is on. 🦗

08/17/2026

The fireflies will soon be leaving us, so enjoy that last "glowing lights" of summer before they are gone.

Enjoy them while they last, because they are already leaving.

The flashing you see in August is the season's final act. Every firefly out there tonight spent most of its life underground as a larva, one summer or two, all for a few adult weeks of light. The males flash, the females answer from the grass, and when the eggs are laid the lights go out until next June. By the end of the month most lawns fall dark.

So here is a small assignment. Stand on the porch tonight and count the flashes you can see at once. Do it again Sunday, and again next week. You will be watching the season close in real time, and nobody else on your street will know.

Two more weeks, give or take. Spend them outside. ✨

08/17/2026

This is a very common watershed creature. Adult craneflies lay eggs in clean streams and the larvae hatch, feed, & live the water. They are a good water quality indicator. As adults they look like giant mosquitos and are often killed. They do not bite so please let them be.

The swatter was already up before anyone got a good look. Porch light on, something the size of a quarter blundering at the screen, the whole family shouting mosquito.

Put the swatter down. That's a crane fly, and the resemblance is the whole misunderstanding. It can't bite you. It can't sting you. Its mouthparts couldn't break your skin if it tried, and it isn't trying. Most adult crane flies barely eat anything at all.

The other legend gets it wrong too. Folks call them mosquito hawks and swear they hunt mosquitoes for us. They don't. An adult crane fly has one job, finding a mate, and about a week to do it. All that clumsy bouncing off your porch screen is just bad flying on long, breakable legs.

So the giant mosquito is neither giant mosquito nor mosquito hunter. It's a harmless, wobbling bystander at the end of its season, and every swallow and phoebe in the neighborhood is grateful you left it alone. 🪰

08/17/2026

As fall migration approaches, you may look up and see a kettle of hawks. Don't forget to look "up" when you are outside.

Kettle.

That's the word for what you might see over the yard some warm afternoon between now and September. A dozen hawks, maybe a hundred, circling together in a slow spiral, high enough you could mistake them for flecks of ash.

The old birders' word fits perfectly. A kettle of hawks looks exactly like something simmering, round and round, rising as it turns. The birds have found a thermal, a column of warm air lifting off a sunbaked field or a shopping-center parking lot, and they ride it upward without flapping a wing. At the top they peel off and glide south, losing height slowly until they find the next thermal and boil up all over again.

That's the whole trick of migration. Stairs made of warm air, all the way to South America.

The first kettles of the season are forming right now, mostly broad-winged hawks getting an early start. Check the sky on the next hot, blue afternoon. The best free show of late summer is a pot coming to a boil, two thousand feet over your tomatoes. 🦅

08/17/2026

All 3 of these owls can be found in the watershed. Go out after dark and listen for their calls. Barred owls are also known to call in the daytime.

Who's doing the asking out past the porch light?

August is young-owl season, when this year's fledglings get talkative, and the three voices on this card cover most of what you'll hear east of the Rockies. The card does the work. Step out after full dark, stand still five minutes, and put a name to the voice. 🦉

08/17/2026

All snakes are important to our environment.

The shovel was already up in the air when the neighbor yelled across the fence to stop. What was about to get killed as a six foot monster was the reason his barn hadn't seen a rat in years.

The black rat snake earns her reputation the wrong way. She's big, she's dark, and when she's cornered she vibrates her tail in the dry leaves, which sounds close enough to a rattlesnake that people don't stay to check. It's a bluff. There's no rattle and no venom. There's a shy climber who freezes on the fence rail hoping you'll take her for a stick.

What she actually does all season is work. Mice in the woodpile, rats in the feed room, voles tunneling toward your root crops. She patrols them all, and she'll go straight up a tree trunk for whatever's raiding the nest boxes. One resident rat snake outperforms every trap in the yard, every night, for free.

She wants the rodents. She does not want you. Give her the right of way at the shed door and she'll return the favor for years. 🐍

08/17/2026

Not a pineapple but a group of doves ;-)

Dole.

That's the old word for a gathering of doves, and it comes from the same root as sorrow. The name is the fault of their voice. That low coo-OO-oo from the wire sounds so much like grieving that people have blamed the bird for centuries. Listen again this morning and you'll hear what it actually is: a perfectly content male, announcing a perfectly ordinary day.

Here's the trick that makes the dove genuinely strange. Watch one at the birdbath. Every other bird at the rim scoops a beakful and tilts its head back to swallow, over and over, like tossing back pills. The dove puts her bill in the water and simply drinks, head down, in one long draw. Doves are nearly the only birds in the world that can do it. Nobody fully knows why they got the gift and the robin didn't.

They'll give you the show all day. A dole on the wire, a mournful song that isn't mournful, and the only bird in the yard that drinks like the horses do. Count the dole on your own wire while the morning is still cool. 🕊️