Kaw Valley Almanac

Many in eastern Kansas are experiencing the annual explosion of hackberry butterflies, which typically perch with their wings folded together. Here they’re sunning themselves by opening their wings.

Butterfly milkweed, shown here in red-orange, can be anywhere from dark red to yellow in its genetic variations. Enjoy these beauties for most of June, and count the butterflies, too!

Echinacea pallida, seen in eastern Kansas, is emerging at various rates: The pink-purple ray flowers begin by shooting straight up in a circle from the edge of the flower disk, then they flatten into a horizontal disk, then curve around and down.

The three-petaled triangular blue spiderwort blooms for a day, but there is another bud below it, ready to step up and open the next day. Butterflies and hummingbirds love this plant.

It’s going to be a perfect week to watch more prairie wildflowers emerge. The darker red markings in the center of these prairie phlox blossoms guide long tongued butterflies to reach the nectar and get coated with pollen in the process.

Groundplum milkvetch is a native perennial prairie legume currently blooming that attract a variety of butterflies and other pollinators. Even though the rest of the plant is toxic, the fruit is edible and tasty.

Verbena is a showy prairie wildflower blooming right now. Flower clusters start blooming around the edges and work their way toward the center as the season progresses.

Native prairies are beginning to show their treasures, including the yellow star-grass and the purple prairie violet. Both have leaves designed to thrive in the sunnier, windier and drier prairie environment.

To survive, the common Eastern Swallowtail caterpillar resembles a bird dropping, then acquires a pungent odor, then a growth that resembles a snake head. As a butterfly, it eats nectar from a wide variety of flowers, including this lilac.

Known variously as dogtooth violet and trout/fawn lily, Erythronium albidum is beginning to bloom in native woodland soils, with the flower/bud pointed toward the ground for protection from the spring showers.

This should be a great week for seeing “spring ephemerals,” the woodland wildflowers that use sunlight to bloom and finish up before the leaves come out on the dominant oaks and hickory trees by the end of April.

A wave of pink, red and white redbud blossoms is sweeping south to north across Kansas right now. The flowers and early green pods are quite edible and delicious.

With dry weather across the state, the winter mushroom, the puffball, is fully mature and dried out, looking a little like a biscuit on the ground (left). Step on it (right) and you’ll see the “puff” of spores.

Conservation Reserve Program grasslands require periodic burns to slow woody plant incursion, as well as in native prairie remnants and brome pastures.

“This crocus was photographed on Feb. 21, 2016, and I have photos of the same crocus in the warm, dry year of 2012 on Feb. 5. This year it was March 1,” Ken Lassman writes.