Eastern Corn Belt Plains

Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) have been recorded nearly every day this week along parks and green corridors, with three sightings on July 28 alone. This is the summer breeding generation — the one whose offspring will undertake the thousand-mile autumn flight to central Mexico starting in late August. That migration depends on host plants being available now, and they are: swamp milkweed was logged at more than a dozen sites across the area this month, including along the Huron River in Ann Arbor on July 27 and at Liberty and Eberwhite on July 28. Common and butterfly milkweed turn up just as often. What the records show is co-occurrence — adult butterflies and their larval host plant in the same corridor in the same week. They don't tell us whether any given stand is in flower, or whether a female has used it. Monarchs lost roughly ninety percent of their North American population between the 1980s and early 2000s and are flagged as threatened, which is what makes each of those milkweed patches worth knowing about.Conditions this week have been favorable. Air quality is good — PM2.5 AQI at 40, ozone AQI at 23 — and the Huron River at Ann Arbor is running steadily at around 140 cubic feet per second, keeping wetland edges moist and milkweed accessible.

Ninety-four facilities hold active Clean Water Act discharge permits within about 15 kilometers of here, and nearly a quarter of them are currently in significant noncompliance. What stands out isn't the raw count, it's the roster. There is no single industrial villain to point a finger at; instead there's a scatter of hotel and apartment swimming pools, apartment-complex stormwater permits, the Saline municipal storm sewer system and its counterpart, the Ann Arbor municipal storm sewer system, a water treatment plant at Austin Commons II, and one manufacturer, Plastechs. Among the pools alone, violations turn up at properties like Weber's Inn, the Marriott TownePlace Suites, the Hyatt Place, the Holiday Inn Express & Suites pool, the Homewood Suites pool, and the Hampton Inn & Suites, alongside apartment-complex permits such as Broadway Park West, Foundry Lofts, The Yard, University Trails, The Standard at Ann Arbor, Mill Creek One, Traverwood-Oakcliff Apartments, The George Apartments, Woodview Commons, plus smaller pool permits at 950 Greene Street, Big Blue Swim School, North Oaks, and Bicentennial Park. Sixty of these permittees logged violations in the past year, and sixty have actually been inspected, so the gap here isn't a lack of oversight. It's that only one facility faces any formal enforcement action, and total penalties assessed across all ninety-four permits add up to zero dollars.That matters because the water downstream isn't starting from a clean baseline. Twenty-two of forty-nine nearby water bodies, including the pond chain this watershed feeds, are already listed as impaired and required to have cleanup plans. This landscape sits within the Clayey High Lime Till Plains, a flat, poorly drained till landscape within the broader Eastern Corn Belt Plains, where heavy clay subsoils shed water quickly across the surface rather than letting it infiltrate. Low-grade noncompliance from dozens of small permit holders doesn't show up as a dramatic spill, but it accumulates the same way runoff does: a little excess chlorine here, a little untreated stormwater there, spread across a whole city's worth of pools and parking lots, feeding into water already on the state's impaired list.For several of the flagged permits, including the lone manufacturer and both municipal storm sewer systems, the specific pollutant and exceedance size aren't visible in the compliance record, only the noncompliance designation itself, and the Saline River near Saline, MI gage showed normal flow with no water-quality readings available to check against. So the exact mechanism connecting these violations to downstream impairment can't be confirmed. But the pattern, one in four permits out of compliance with no penalties attached, is documented, and it describes a watershed where enforcement isn't keeping pace with the paperwork.

Catalpa Sphinx moths (Ceratomia catalpae) have reached peak activity across the region, with eleven sightings logged from mid-June through late July, ranging from Metamora and Richmond out to Oxford and Trotwood. These are among the largest moths in the eastern United States, and their caterpillars are strict specialists: without northern catalpa trees, there is no Catalpa Sphinx. By midsummer the larvae can build up enough to strip a catalpa bare, but the trees are adapted to it and typically push out a second flush of leaves within weeks.The singing insects, the katydids and crickets of the order Orthoptera, are also beginning to turn up. Single records of Common True Katydids, Two-spotted Tree Crickets, and Sword-bearing Coneheads have each been logged across the past eight days. Individually these are just presence records, but taken together they suggest the singers that mark the back half of summer are starting to emerge.

Two permitted dischargers on the East Fork Whitewater River are both in significant non-compliance with their Clean Water Act permits — and the wildlife drinking from that water downstream has no way of knowing it.RICHMOND WWTP, CITY OF and BELDEN WIRE & CABLE COMPANY have no penalties assessed yet. Meanwhile, iNaturalist observations from the downstream watershed over the past year show a steady parade of native mammals that routinely drink from or forage along riverbanks. White-tailed Deer, Common Raccoon, Virginia Opossum, Groundhog, Eastern Cottontail, and Striped Skunk have all been recorded within the corridor in recent months — the most recent as recently as July 19.Also observed in February: an Eastern Red Bat, a threatened species that drinks on the wing, skimming the water's surface during low passes over the river.Late July into August is peak thermal stress season for warm-water streams. Flow drops, temperatures climb, and whatever enters the river from those two discharge points becomes more concentrated. The mammals observed here don't stop drinking because a permit is out of compliance. That's the gap this data can't close on its own.

Cup plants, brown-eyed Susans, great blue lobelias, and tall blazing stars are all leafing into their July bloom across the native forb community of the glacial till plains. Observed at multiple sites within fifty kilometers of the city center, these species are ecological remnants of the tallgrass prairie mosaic that once stretched continuously across this landscape, shaped by Pleistocene glaciation into some of the most fertile and botanically diverse terrain in eastern North America.This July flowering window was once tended deliberately. The Miami and Potawatomi peoples managed these prairies with fire for centuries, maintaining the open structure that blazing star and lobelia depend on for dominance. Without regular disturbance, woody encroachment displaces them within years. In the fragments that survive here — cemetery prairies, restored roadsides, park edges — this midsummer bloom is among the most important of the year for the specialist native bees that evolved alongside these plants and have no functional substitute for them.

Wild Indigo Duskywing butterflies (Erynnis baptisiae) appeared along the Fall Creek corridor near the old Arsenal grounds on June 13 — a small but ecologically precise signal. These skippers are obligate specialists: their caterpillars feed only on wild blue indigo, and an adult turning up at this urban site suggests something more than a passing vagrant.Wild blue indigo was once a dominant forb in the wet prairie and savanna mosaic that blanketed this part of the landscape before large-scale conversion to agricultural and urban use. It is not a plant that colonizes new ground easily, and its presence — reliable enough to draw a Duskywing — points to either a surviving prairie remnant or a native planting mature enough to sustain reproduction. In a fragmented city landscape, that is a quiet measure of what ecological restoration can accomplish, even in pieces.

Air quality hit unhealthy levels today—PM2.5 climbing to AQI 110—at precisely the moment when breeding birds are metabolically stretched to their limit. Nestlings demand constant feeding, and parents must spend their days in sustained flight through an atmosphere thick with industrial emissions and wildfire smoke. Avian lungs are uniquely sensitive to particulates—more so than most mammalian respiratory systems—making this timing especially precarious.The stagnant summer air has trapped pollutants close to the ground, preventing dispersal. For birds mid-fledging cycle, the cost is real: impaired oxygen uptake during the most energy-demanding weeks of the year. The margin between survival and stress in a breeding colony is rarely wide.

Over 25 moth species appeared at a late-June blacklight in the gorge — North American Luna Moth, Giant Leopard Moth, Sycamore Tussock Moth, and Painted Lichen Moth among them. The larvae of most of these species are specialists, feeding on native trees — sugar maples, oaks, sycamores — and that diversity of host plants reflects a canopy still intact and diverse.This glacial gorge sits as a forest refugium in a farmed landscape, and the moths are a measure of what it still holds. The presence of 25 species on a single night signals that the forest structure here — the variety of mature trees, the undisturbed understory — remains intact enough to support a full community of native lepidopterans.

Eagle Creek Reservoir, the city's primary drinking-water source, carries a federal impairment listing — the only water body among 34 nearby systems requiring a formal cleanup plan. This designation reflects years of mounting pressure that converge most acutely during summer heat.Two major wastewater treatment plants serving the area remain in permit non-compliance, continuing to discharge nutrients into a system already stressed by seasonal heating. July is peak season for toxic algal blooms — the conditions that threaten both ecosystem health and public safety are now fully aligned.

The river dropped from 12 to 6 feet this week, flushing a surge of flood water through the chain of ponds downstream — Barton, Argo, and Geddes — during the height of amphibian breeding season. All three ponds are already officially impaired, their ecology compromised. The timing could not be worse.The city's own stormwater permit is now in violation, pushing unchecked runoff into an already-stressed system at the moment when Spring Peepers, American Toads, and other breeding amphibians depend most on stable shallow water. The disturbance will scatter eggs and larvae, and the influx of sediment and pollutants will further degrade habitat that these ponds can barely support.