June 24 Wildflower Walk

A beautiful evening. We walked across to the South canyons, finding stonecrop and prairie smoke on the steep rocky slopes. A small bird making a squeaky see-saw noise had made a home in the dead upper trunk of an otherwise alive pine tree. The burned ground underneath had a few spots of bright orange lichen. Dry chickweed rattled as we walked by, and we found a few plants that also had dried seed pods but the stems were striped with bands of dark purple stickiness, presumably for protection from insects. The green parts of the stem were green and smooth. Wavyleaf thistle was blooming everywhere, and we also identified indian rice grass and slimflower scurfpea. The most exciting find was the blooming yucca, covered in yucca moths. The moths are less than 1" long, triangle-shaped with thin wings. They were all white, almost albino-looking. Lots of other insects were around the plants, including reddish wasps and ants on the leaves and petals.