Miner mowed

After way too long an absence—almost two months—I hauled myself back to my natural history "home-away-from-home": the Thomas Miner preserve that I've been visiting regularly since April 2013 to monitor amphibian populations, as well as to survey butterflies and dragonflies. Part of my absence had to do with an impossible work schedule. Another part was the result of the drought: with no water anywhere in the refuge, the frogs, toads, newts, and salamanders had disappeared from view. There was nothing to be surveyed in mid-August, and there were still none today on my tally sheet. On the lepidopteran and odonate front, there was the same result: a distinct lack of both. I'd more or less expected this, and I suppose the knowledge of what the refuge management plan—haying the main field in mid-August—was going to do to the insect population was the real reason I couldn't bring myself to visit what had been an invertebrate paradise. As I walked, I felt like I was on a golf course fairway instead of a wildlife refuge. It was certainly tidy. It had certainly been overdue for this kind of haircut, which would keep down the incipient trees. It was definitely pretty, in its fall finery. But it didn't feel right: too ordered... too empty... a refuge with no visible refugees.