Kaw Valley Almanac

Nov. 17 is the peak day for deer-car accidents, with some 700 of the 10,000 annual collisions in Kansas occurring on that day. Drive carefully, especially around dawn and dusk.

If you are a daytime person, find a sweet gum tree like this one and watch the star-shaped leaves falling to the ground this week.

With recent rains, puffball mushrooms have been popping up. These join a surprising variety of other fall mushrooms including chanterelles, pleurotis, lion’s mane and hen of the woods.

This time of year can provide incredibly lush landscape photos as the trees become more colorful by the day. But beware — deer-vehicle collisions peak soon.

Deer activity is starting to increase with the beginning of rutting season. Drive carefully, especially after sunset and before sunrise when deer are most active.

This still vibrant prairie or downy gentian is a good reason to continue to walk an area prairie, even as sunflowers and goldenrods finish up. The warm season grasses will begin turning color just like the trees this week.

Asters come in a variety of colors, and their name is derived from the Latin and Greek word for “star.” This will be a good week to observe both the floral and celestial asters — fall constellations, Jupiter, and Saturn.

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.

The Perseid meteor shower will be peaking Wednesday evening/Thursday morning after midnight, and with moonless skies, if the clouds don’t interfere, you could see more than 100 meteors per hour.