The purple silky asters and the yellow blossoms of the Great Plains goldenrod await you at the Prairie Park Nature Center prairie, located southeast of 27th and Harper in Lawrence.

Insects continue to be prolific, with lots of monarchs and other butterflies, dragonflies, cicadas, grasshoppers, mantids and walking sticks, and katydids and moths after dark. Help tag monarchs from 8 a.m. to noon this Saturday at the Baker Wetlands Discovery Center.

With morning lows dropping into the 60s and even 50s this week, it’s the season for fog. If there is no wind, you can sometimes see steam devils, which like dust devils are caused by warming air rising in a vortex that is made visible in this case by fog.

As the Dog Days of summer slip away, here is a picture of a Sun Dog Day, taken on Sunday, with mini-rainbow bright spots to the right and left of the setting sun. Sun Dogs are caused by sunlight reflecting off ice crystals in cirrus clouds formed by an isolated thunderstorm that injected moisture into the stratosphere.

Monarch butterflies have benefitted from enough moisture and not too much heat to recolonize well in this region.

Showy partridge pea, a native annual, yellow-flowered legume, has begun to bloom in area prairies. Ragweed will be pollinating soon.