Bull Thistle Beauties

     For a couple of hours in the afternoon a few days ago I was driving around in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland to see what was happening in nature.  I noticed a few clumps of tall bull thistles blooming here and there above the short grass of certain grazed cow pastures.  And I saw a few each of American goldfinches and butterflies at one of those patches of bull thistles.  I stopped to get a better look at the goldfinches and butterflies among the flowers of those thistles.  Two of the goldfinches were striking males in their bright yellow feathering with black wings, tails and jaunty caps set forward on their foreheads.  The third goldfinch was a pretty olive and yellow female.  Looking at the butterflies with field glasses, I saw they were the lovely painted ladies and one monarch.  The birds were eating seeds from the thistles, making the fluffy parachutes drift away on the breeze without their seed cargoes.  But the painted ladies and monarch were sipping sugary nectar from the reddish-purple blossoms.  The flowers, birds and butterflies were all beautiful in that sunny farmland meadow in mid-August.
     Though I see Canada thistles and nodding thistles, both aliens from Europe, blooming in June in Lancaster County, I don't think I see bull thistles blossoming until August in this area.  Bull thistles are also aliens from Europe and western Asia.  All three of these thistles species have long ago adapted to disturbed ground in Eurasia and have benefited from that characteristic here in North America.  Where the soil has been denuded or mowed for agriculture, these thistles have less competition from other plants for rainfall and sunlight.
     A biennial plant species, bull thistles grow a ground-hugging rosette of prickly leaves during its first year of life.  But during their second growing season, they develop a half-dozen, more or less, spiny stems that can grow up to seven feet tall, each of which bears one to three pretty flowers.  And this species avoids being grazed by livestock because of the sharp prickles on its leaves and stems.
     Bull thistle blooms attract several kinds of insects that sip their nectar, including honey bees, bumble bees and a variety of lovely butterflies, all of which pollinate those thistle blossoms while ingesting the nectar.  Some of the more colorful and common of butterflies that consume bull thistle nectar are monarchs, frittillaries, clouded sulphurs, some of the swallowtails and painted ladies.  In fact, the caterpillars of painted ladies ingest the foliage of this and other kinds of thistles before they pupate and change to butterflies.
     Interestingly, ruby-throated hummingbirds also sip nectar from bull thistle flowers.  As they do among all flowers, these hummingbirds hover on rapidly beating wings above or before the blooms, insert their long beaks into the blossoms and lap the nectar with their even longer tongues.  In August, adult ruby-throats, their young of the year and migrants of their species benefit greatly from the nectar of bull thistles and other late-blooming flowering species.
     Here in Lancaster County, American goldfinches and house finches are the seed-eating birds most likely to eat bull thistle seeds.  The reddish-purple of the remaining flowers among green leaves, the yellow and black of the goldfinches and the pink of male house finches make lovely pictures of much natural beauty.  Goldfinches delay their nesting so they can make their petite nurseries of thistle fluff, bound together with spider webs, and feed their young in those lovely cradles a predigested porridge of thistle seeds.    
     Fluffy bull thistle parachutes blowing on the wind, each with its seed, or without, make another pretty sight in sunny pastures in August.  Many seeds are scattered on the wind, some of them to plots of open, sunny ground where bull thistles aren't growing, thereby spreading and increasing the numbers of bull thistle plants across the landscape.
     Bull thistles are just one kind of wild vegetation in farmland.  They and the other types of green plants throughout the world have their life histories, and influences on the environment, wildlife and us people.  And they are pretty to see.  We could not live without plants' edible parts and beauties.