Common Nature

I recently had a chance to visit Bigelow Prairie Cemetery in central Ohio. It's an old pioneer cemetery where the indigenous prairie plants have survived. It's totally surrounded by farmland in cultivation since the 1800s, now corn and soy fields (I'm guessing GMO round-up ready stuff at that), so the cemetery is one of a very few places where the native vegetation survives.

The place was mad with life. Butterflies (sulphurs, painted ladies, pearl crescents, and several others I couldn't identify), bees and wasps, spiders, beetles, hummingbirds - wherever I walked I caused a commotion of living things. I wouldn't have thought that a half acre would be enough to sustain so much life, and maybe it doesn't. But I'm not sure where else they could be going for food in the surrounding ocean of monoculture fields.

Unfortunately my pictures don't do it justice; my camera likes to wash out detail in bright light. Such as they are:

( Bugs, butterflies, and prairie plants )