Roadside Life in August

     For an hour one afternoon in mid-August, I walked about 100 yards along both sides of a farmland road to see what life was along it.  The day was beautiful with clear skies and a cool breeze.  Although those roadsides had been mowed earlier in the summer, there was much plant and animal life along that country road because the vegetation grew back.  Certainly there was a greater diversity of adaptable life along those two-foot-deep strips of vegetation between the blacktop and the cornfields that bordered them on the other side than in the adjacent fields.
     A few score migrant barn swallows and tree swallows lined the wires along the road.  Some of them flew over the fields at times to catch and eat flying insects.  I saw a male eastern bluebird perched on a wire near the swallows.  He was watching for insects to eat in the vegetation below.  And I noticed an American kestrel on a wire down the road a bit.  It was searching for mice and larger insects along the roadside.       
     A variety of plants competed for sunlight and rainfall along both sides of that country road.  Foxtail grass, wire grass and a grass I call wheat grass were loaded with seeds that field mice and small birds, including horned larks and sparrows will eat through winter.  Two kinds of tall weeds, lamb's quarters and red root, were also loaded with seeds that mice and birds will consume in winter.
     Several kinds of flowering plants were still blooming along that rural road.  They included common milkweeds and red clovers with pink blooms, chicory with some blue blossoms still open, white flowers on Queen-Anne's-lace and bindweeds, yellow blooms on butter-and-eggs and deep blue on alfalfa.  All those plants blooming together make beautiful flower bouquets along the roads, as long as the vegetation is not mowed off.
     Hoverflies, a few kinds of butterflies and a type of bees visited the lovely flowers of red clovers and milkweeds to sip sugary nectar.  The butterflies included silver-spotted skippers, meadow fritillaries, cabbage whites, yellow sulphurs and two monarchs.  The monarchs might also have been at the milkweeds to lay eggs on them because monarch larvae only eat milkweed leaves.  The bees were female bumble bees.  A few small, brown moths flushed from the vegetation as I walked by, but they probably won't sip nectar until dark.
     Field crickets and a variety of grasshoppers were common along those strips of vegetation.  The
 crickets and American, differential, red-legged, spur-throated, meadow and shield-backed
grasshoppers jumped away from me as I walked by them.  The crickets and grasshoppers ingest the grass and other plants along the road and they will lay eggs in the soil there before October.
     I saw a few other kinds of insects along that road, including two praying mantises, and three kinds of beetles.  The mantises were there to catch and eat grasshoppers and other insects.  Japanese beetles were eating the flower heads of red clover and the leaves of other plants.  Lady bug beetles were there to prey on tiny insects, particularly aphids.  And dogbane beetles were eating the leaves of dogbane plants, a milkweed relative.  Dogbane beetles are iridescent green and orange, making them quite attractive.                  
     Many country roadsides are intriguing with adaptable plant and animal life.  That 200 yard stretch I walked on both sides of a rural road one afternoon in August is an example of what can be experienced.  The reader can try it, probably with inspiring results.