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Monday 7am - 9pm Tuesday 7am - 9pm Wednesday 7am - 9pm Thursday 7am - 9pm Friday 7am - 9pm Saturday 7am - 9pm Sunday 7am - 9pm

Lac Lawrann Conservancy, 300 Schmidt Road, West Bend, WI (2026)

08/28/2026

The Secret City Inside a Goldenrod Stem

Quick myth-busting before anything else: if your eyes are itchy right now, goldenrod probably isn't the reason. Its pollen is heavy and sticky, built to stick to a bee's leg, not to float up your nose, the real allergen blooming alongside it is ragw**d, a plain green plant nobody notices because it doesn't turn whole fields gold the way goldenrod does. So goldenrod gets blamed for a crime it's basically incapable of committing.

Here's the part that actually deserves your attention: the stems themselves. Walk into any patch of goldenrod and look for a round, swollen bump partway up a stem, usually about the size of a golf ball, sometimes blushed red or purple. That's called a gall, and it's not damage. It's a nursery, built by the plant, at the insect's direction.

How does an insect get a plant to build it a house?
Back in spring, a goldenrod gall fly laid a single egg on a growing stem tip. This species spends its *entire* life cycle on goldenrod and nothing else. When the larva hatched, it started chewing into the stem, and the plant responded the way plants always respond to injury by growing extra tissue to seal the wound. Except the fly's saliva contains chemical signals that hijack that healing response, steering the extra growth into a hollow, insulated chamber instead of just scar tissue. Within about three weeks, the gall is fully formed.

That larva then rides out the entire Wisconsin winter inside its gall, sometimes freezing solid, protected by natural antifreeze compounds (glycerol, mostly) that keep ice crystals from forming inside its cells and shredding them. Come spring, it wakes up, chews an escape tunnel almost all the way to the surface, pupates, and emerges as an adult fly with no working mouthparts and about two weeks left to live, just enough time to mate and start the cycle over.

Not every bump on a goldenrod stem is this species, either. A spindle-shaped swelling means a different insect, a moth, tunneling through the stem's interior. A weird rosette of bunched leaves at the very tip means a midge laid its egg in the growing bud instead. Same plant, three completely different insects, three different engineering solutions.

A few things worth spotting on your own walk this week:
- Round galls on stems, including last year's dead, dry ones, the flies don't need a living plant, so old galls persist
- Small round exit holes already pecked into old galls, usually the work of a chickadee or downy woodpecker after the larva inside
- Orange-and-black goldenrod soldier beetles crowding the flower heads, doing the actual pollen-moving work
- Bees and monarchs both leaning hard on goldenrod nectar right now, it's one of the last big food sources before frost

Next time you drive past a "w**d patch," remember there's a fly frozen mid-metamorphosis inside one of those stems, waiting on a chemistry trick and a Wisconsin winter to work in its favor.

Sources:
- UW–Madison Extension, Wisconsin Horticulture: "Goldenrod Gall Fly, *Eurosta solidaginis*"
- Wisconsin DNR, native and invasive plant fact sheets on *Solidago* species
- USDA NRCS Plant Guide, Showy Goldenrod (*Solidago speciosa*)

08/27/2026

Pot Trailer at Lac Lawrann
Lac Lawrann makes it easy to recycle your empty landscape pots. Once you have planted your new plants, bring the empty pots to Lac Lawrann so that they can be reused. There is a trailer designated for pots in the back of the parking lot near the solar panels. The trailer will be there until the end of the month.

08/26/2026

Nighthawks Are Leaving, and West Bend Gets a Front-Row Seat

Go outside in the hour before dark this week and look up, not at the trees, at the open sky above them. There's a real spectacle happening right now, and almost nobody notices it.

Common nighthawks aren't hawks at all. They're actually closer relatives of whip-poor-wills, and they're built for one job: snatching insects out of the air with their mouths wide open. All summer they've stayed quiet and mostly active after dark, easy to live near for years without ever spotting one. Then late August hits, and for about a two-week window, right now through early September, they flip that habit completely and migrate south in broad daylight, often in loose groups of dozens or more, sometimes drifting overhead for an hour without a break.

How do you spot one? Their flight looks like nothing else in the sky: bouncy, erratic, banking hard side to side, nothing like a gull's steady wingbeat or a hawk's smooth soaring. The giveaway is a sharp white patch near the tip of each wing, against a graying evening sky, that patch flashes on and off every time the bird tilts. The body is slim and pointed, more like an oversized swift than an actual hawk.

Why show up in daylight after a whole summer of hiding? The best guess ties back to food math. Warm, humid late-summer evenings produce huge hatches of flying insects, and a bird about to fly a thousand miles can't afford to wait around for full darkness when dinner is already swarming at 6 p.m. Migration burns a lot of energy, showing up early for the buffet is probably worth the risk of being seen.

Tips for catching a flight yourself:
-Go out in the hour before sunset, warm, humid, calm evenings work best
-Any open sky will do: a driveway, a parking lot, a ballfield. You don't need woods or water
-Listen for a nasal, buzzy "peent," though birds on migration flights are often silent
-Not every evening delivers big numbers, some nights bring a handful of birds, others bring a steady stream for an hour or more

Wisconsin sits right in the middle of this species' migration route, and birders along Lake Superior have counted thousands of nighthawks passing over in a single evening during peak nights. West Bend won't see numbers like that, but a loose group of a few dozen crossing an orange sky is well within reach this week, and it only costs five minutes of looking up.

By the time the leaves turn, the nighthawks will already be deep into their trip toward South America. This week is your window.

Sources:
Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, "Common Nighthawk" and "Summer Night Birding"
Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas (eBird), Common Nighthawk species survey strategy

08/24/2026

Losing the Light

Okay, here's something wild: right now, in late August, we're losing daylight faster than at almost any other point in the year. Faster than in November. Faster than right after the solstice. Let me explain why, because it's actually a neat bit of orbital mechanics, not just "summer's over."

Day length doesn't shrink at a steady pace, it moves more like a pendulum. Near the solstices (December and June), the sun's path across the sky barely shifts day to day, so the daylight hours barely change either. Near the equinoxes (March and September), that path is tilting as fast as it ever does, so day length swings fast too. We're closing in on the September equinox, which puts us right in the steepest part of the curve: roughly two and a half to three minutes of daylight disappearing every single morning. Stack that up over a week and you've quietly lost about twenty minutes since last Sunday.

Why does the angle even matter? Earth's axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees, and that tilt is the entire reason we have seasons at all. As we orbit the sun, the tilt points the Northern Hemisphere either toward or away from direct sunlight. The rate at which that changes (not the amount of tilt itself) is what's fastest right now. Think of a swinging pendulum again: it moves quickest through the middle of its arc and slowest at the top and bottom of the swing. Late August is the middle of the arc.

There's a second, related thing happening at night. Longer nights give the ground more time to radiate heat back out into the sky before sunrise, so surfaces cool down more than they did in July. Cooler surfaces plus humid summer air equals dew, heavier, later-lingering dew than a month ago. That's also exactly why spiderwebs suddenly seem to appear everywhere in the morning: they were there all summer, you just couldn't see them until this week's extra moisture started beading up on every strand.

A few things worth noticing outside this week:

Sunset arriving roughly a minute and a half to two minutes earlier each evening, easiest to feel right around dinnertime
Dew-soaked spiderwebs strung across fences and tall grass in the early morning
Late-afternoon sunlight sitting lower and warmer-toned, throwing longer shadows earlier than it did even three weeks ago
Morning fog forming more easily over rivers, where warm water meets noticeably cooler night air

Nothing about this week looks like fall yet, the corn's still tall, the leaves are still green. But the tilt has already turned the corner, and once you know to watch for it, you can practically feel the days shortening under your feet.

Sources:
Astronomical day-length data for West Bend, WI (latitude ~43.4°N)
Wisconsin State Climatology Office, seasonal climate summaries

08/14/2026

Signs of the Season: Friday, Sunflowers

Why do sunflower fields around Washington County suddenly look like they're glowing? Late July into August is peak bloom, and there's more going on in those tall yellow heads than meets the eye both biologically and culturally.

Young sunflowers actually track the sun across the sky, a behavior called heliotropism, the head slowly turns east to west during the day, then swings back overnight to face east again by morning. But once a flower matures and fully opens, it stops tracking altogether and settles permanently facing east. Research suggests this fixed eastern orientation warms the flower faster in the morning sun, which in turn makes it more attractive to pollinators, a warm flower is a more rewarding one for a bee to visit. What looks like a single bloom is actually thousands of tiny individual flowers packed into a spiral pattern that follows the Fibonacci sequence, one of the more famous examples of mathematical order showing up in nature.

Sunflowers also carry real weight in Indigenous agriculture, particularly here in the Great Lakes region. Corn, beans, and squash (the Three Sisters) are widely known as a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) companion-planting method, where the corn gives beans a pole to climb, the beans fix nitrogen into the soil, and the squash's broad leaves shade out w**ds. Sunflowers are often grown as an unofficial fourth sister, traditionally planted along the north edge of the garden. Their height and sturdy stalks let them stand in like a second corn plant, while their seed heads pull hungry birds toward them and away from the corn. Some traditions describe the sunflower as the garden's guardian of the north, protecting the other three sisters from being raided. Beyond the practical role, they draw in pollinators for the whole planting, tying the four crops together into one interdependent system.

Once the petals drop later in the season, sunflower seed heads become a major food source for goldfinches and other birds heading into fall, echoing that same fourth-sister role of feeding the birds, just on a longer timeline.

Local farms around Washington and Waukesha counties typically hit peak bloom for just a two-to-three week window in late summer, so if you've been meaning to see a field in person, this is close to the moment.

Sources:
UW–Madison Extension, flower field research notes (today.wisc.edu)
Wikipedia, "Three Sisters (agriculture)" Haudenosaunee companion planting and the fourth sister tradition
Rodale Institute, "The Three Sisters... And that Fourth Sister No One Really Talks About" (rodaleinstitute.org)
Iowa State University, Three Sisters Project (threesistersproject.language.iastate.edu)

08/13/2026

Signs of the Season: Thursday, Sweet Corn

There's a sound that means summer's peaking in Wisconsin: a car pulling over for a hand-lettered "SWEET CORN" sign. August is the height of the season, and there's more to the crop than what ends up on the grill.

What you're buying at the stand isn't the same plant filling most of the fields around Washington County. Sweet corn and field corn are genetically different varieties, bred for opposite goals. Sweet corn is harvested early, while the kernels are still soft, plump, and packed with sugar, that's the whole point of the crop. Field corn stays on the stalk for months longer, left to dry down until the kernels harden, which is what makes it suitable for grain, livestock feed, and ethanol rather than eating fresh.

Timing matters more than most people realize. The moment an ear of sweet corn is picked, its sugars start converting to starch, which is why the best corn is harvested in the cool of early morning and sold the same day, the difference between corn picked at dawn and corn sitting for 24 hours is noticeable on the plate. It's also why farm stands rather than grocery stores tend to have the better ears; there's simply less time between field and table.

A small detail worth knowing: sweet corn kernels always grow in an even number of rows on the cob, usually somewhere between 12 and 20, depending on the variety. Wisconsin ranks third nationally in sweet corn production, with Columbia, Portage, and Waushara counties among the state's top growing areas, and Fond du Lac and Dodge counties, both close to home, contributing as well.

Next time you're at a roadside stand, you're looking at one of the fastest farm-to-table trips in local agriculture.

Sources:
Wisconsin Corn Growers Association, Corn Fun Facts (wicorn.org)
Wisconsin State Farmer, sweet corn season overview (wisfarmer.com)

08/12/2026

Signs of the Season: Wednesday, Perseid Meteor Shower Peak

The Perseid meteor shower hits its peak overnight this week, and 2026 is shaping up to be one of the best years in a while to watch.

The Perseids happen every August as Earth passes through a trail of debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle, a comet roughly the size of a small mountain that only swings through the inner solar system once every 133 years or so, the last time was 1992. As Earth crosses that debris field, tiny particles, most no bigger than a grain of sand, slam into the atmosphere at around 37 miles per second and burn up roughly 60 miles overhead, which is what creates the streak of light we call a shooting star.

At their peak, viewers under dark skies can see 50 to 75 meteors an hour, and this year's peak coincides with a new moon, meaning no moonlight to wash out the fainter streaks, which makes 2026 an especially good year to catch them. The best viewing window is after midnight through dawn, looking toward the northeast where the meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus. That's just a matter of perspective, though, the meteors themselves have no real connection to those stars, which are light-years away, while the meteors themselves are burning up practically next door in atmospheric terms.

For the darkest nearby skies, head somewhere away from West Bend's streetlights and give your eyes about 20 minutes to adjust the fields and clearings around the Kettle Moraine make a great spot to lay back and watch.

Sources:
- The Planetary Society, 2026 Perseid guide (planetary.org)
- EarthSky, Perseid meteor shower 2026 (earthsky.org)

08/11/2026

Signs of the Season: Tuesday, Monarch Super Generation

Have you noticed monarchs seem extra busy along the prairie edges this week? They're not just passing through this is the "super generation," and it's one of the wildest things happening in West Bend's skies right now.

A few quick facts: every monarch you see in a typical summer is part of a relay. Starting in spring, it takes three or four generations to repopulate the U.S. and Canada each one living just four to six weeks, mating, laying eggs on milkw**d, and dying, with the next generation picking up the journey north. But the generation born from about mid-August on is different. Shorter days and aging milkw**d trigger a hormonal switch that puts reproduction on hold entirely -no mating, no egg-laying- and that pause is what unlocks their superpower: instead of four to six weeks, this generation lives up to eight months, roughly eight times longer than their parents and grandparents.

That extended lifespan exists for one job: flying up to 3,000 miles to fir forests in central Mexico, wintering there, then starting the journey partway back north in spring before finally laying eggs and handing off to a new relay of generations. It's the only two-way migration of its kind among butterflies, and it's done by an insect that's never made the trip before and has no one to follow.

Southern Wisconsin sits right in the heart of monarch breeding range, so our late-summer nectar plants, goldenrod, asters, and yes, those black-eyed Susans from Monday, matter more than usual right now. They're essentially fueling stops for a journey that hasn't happened yet in that butterfly's lifetime. Keep an eye out for roosting clusters in trees near dusk as migration ramps up over the next few weeks.

Sources:
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, "The Phenomenal Monarch Migration" (fws.gov)
Monarch Joint Venture, breeding & migration updates (monarchjointventure.org)
UW–Madison Field Station, Bug of the Week (uwm.edu/field-station)

08/10/2026

Signs of the Season: Monday, Black-eyed Susans

Why are there suddenly yellow flowers everywhere? Roadsides, ditches, empty lots, the edges of parking areas, this week they're full of black-eyed Susans, and West Bend is hitting peak bloom for them right now.

A few quick facts: the "black eye" at the center isn't one piece, it's actually hundreds of tiny disk flowers packed tightly into a dome, surrounded by the bright yellow ray petals we notice first. They're not picky about soil, which is why they show up in rough, disturbed ground just as easily as a tended garden bed, roadsides, gravel edges, and old fields are prime real estate for them. They're also a biennial or short-lived perennial, meaning a given plant usually flowers heavily in its second year, then reseeds itself to keep the cycle going.

The blooms are a magnet for pollinators right now, bees and butterflies work them steadily through the day. Once the petals fade later this season, the seed heads stay standing through fall and into winter, and birds like goldfinches rely on them as a food source when not much else is available.

Black-eyed Susans are one of the most common prairie wildflowers in Wisconsin, alongside other prairie species such as pale purple coneflower. This week is close to their showiest point of the whole year.

Sources:

Riveredge Nature Center, Out on the Land phenology reports (riveredgenaturecenter.org)
Wisconsin DNR / EEK Wisconsin, Prairie Plants & Black-eyed Susan facts (eekwi.org, dnr.wisconsin.gov)

Lac Lawrann Conservancy

08/28/2026

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