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Moderate drought spreads fast as shoal habitat on the Middle Oconee comes under stress

Moderate drought spread across more than half of Oconee County in a single week. In the Drought Monitor's map for the week of September 1 through 7, 55 percent of the county sits in moderate drought, up from 14 percent the week before and from none at all through most of August. The whole county has been rated abnormally dry since late June, with a brief patch of moderate drought flickering in and out during July, but nothing in the summer moved this fast. No part of the county has reached severe drought. The heat behind it has been steady rather than spectacular. The weather station at Watkinsville, about three miles from this stretch of the Piedmont, has averaged a daily high of about 94 degrees over the past thirty days, topped out at 99 on August 17, and has not recorded a night cooler than 62 since August 25. That station publishes no long-term normals, so these are simply the readings; what they describe is a month with little chance for the soil to recover overnight. What this could mean is worth watching in the shoals of the Middle Oconee. The riffles are the shallowest water in the channel, and riffle habitat is generally the first to shrink, warm, and disconnect as flow drops, ahead of the pools. That is exactly the habitat the river's native shoal fish live on: Northern Hog Sucker, Margined Madtom, Turquoise Darter, Striped Jumprock, Bluehead Chub and Yellowfin Shiner were all recorded together on one shoal near Bob Godfrey Road in April, a fair sample of what a healthy Piedmont riffle holds. The same reach turned up giant stoneflies in the spring and net-spinning caddisflies as late as August 9, insects that anchor themselves to cobble in fast water and depend on current to bring them food and oxygen. Warm water holds less dissolved oxygen to begin with, and slack water reaerates poorly. Early fall adds one more load: leaves are starting to come down, and in a low, warm pool the bacteria and fungi breaking them down draw on the same thin oxygen supply the fish and insects need. Local streamflow readings this week weren't reliable enough to say how far the Middle Oconee's shoals have actually moved along that path, so this is a mechanism worth watching rather than a change already confirmed on the ground. On land, the timing matters for the trees. A drought that arrives in the heat of late summer, rather than in a cool October, tends to scorch hardwood leaves brown on the branch before they can turn; the plumbing that moves water up the trunk fails under heat and dryness together. Whether the oaks, hickories and tulip poplars along the river show that this year depends on what September brings, and the Drought Monitor updates every Thursday.

Rosy Bee-eaters return to the Ogooué's low-water sandbanks

Two Rosy Bee-eaters (Merops malimbicus) were seen on 7 August at Lambaréné, along the Ogooué near the Schweitzer hospital. Once in view the bird is hard to confuse with anything else on the river: slate-grey above, deep rose-pink from throat to belly, a clean white stripe running back beneath a red eye, and a squared tail without the long central streamers most bee-eaters carry. It is a little bigger than a starling and seldom alone; a rolling, chattering call usually gives a flock away before the pink does. The bird's tie to the Ogooué is where it nests. Rosy Bee-eaters dig their nest tunnels into flat, bare river sand, and they do it together, in colonies that on the big rivers of Central and West Africa have run to thousands of pairs and in the largest cases tens of thousands, each burrow a hand's width from the next. A colony on that scale can only exist on a sandbank, and a sandbank only exists when the river is low. Early August at Lambaréné is the heart of Gabon's long dry season, which runs roughly June through September, when the Ogooué drops to its lowest stage of the year and its bars and islands come out of the water. That is the window. The birds arrive, excavate, lay and raise young while the sand is dry and firm, and the colony has to be finished before the October rains bring the river back over it. Between breeding seasons the species does not sit still. It moves in nomadic flocks across the forest-savanna mosaic, hawking insects on the wing, and two things pull it in particular: the leading edge of a grass fire, where the heat flushes insects into the air, and the clouds of winged termites and ants that pour out of the ground after rain. Those emergences are rain-triggered, so as the dry season breaks the flocks have something to follow. A pair on the riverbank at Lambaréné in the first week of August is the bird exactly where and when it belongs. Anyone on the Ogooué in August or September who finds a low, bare sandbar pocked with holes, with grey-and-pink birds streaming in and out over the water, has found the reason this species lives here.

Lantern flowers of the Ceropegia genus open in the post-monsoon hills

Late in the monsoon is when the lantern flowers open in the hills south of Pune. Two of them have been turning up over the past several weeks: Eyed Ceropegia (*Ceropegia oculata*), logged five times between August 20 and August 28 below Sinhagad fort, around Chirmodi and Phanshi in the Velhe hills, and in Pune itself, and Hairy Ceropegia (*Ceropegia hirsuta*), seen seven times from July 2 into late August from Pune out to Wai and the Panchgani road. Ceropegia is a genus of the milkweed family, and the Western Ghats hold more of its species than almost anywhere else on earth. Most of the local ones live the same way. A tuber sits dormant underground through the eight dry months, sends up a thin twining stem when the rains break, climbs whatever grass or shrub is nearest, flowers in August and September as the monsoon starts to slacken, sets seed, and dies back to the tuber before the ground hardens. The whole above-ground plant exists for a few months a year, which is why a slope that shows nothing in March can carry dozens of them in September. The flower is the reason to go looking. It is a narrow tube, often swollen at the base, whose five petal lobes stay joined at their tips instead of spreading open, so the top of the flower forms a small cage or lantern. In the Eyed Ceropegia the tube is pale and marked with dark, eye-like blotches (the "oculata" in the name), and the lobes carry long, fine purple hairs that move in the slightest breeze. Hairy Ceropegia is a smaller plant, hairy along its stems and leaves as the name says, with a shorter greenish-yellow flower mottled in purple. That lantern is a trap. The flower produces a scent that draws small flies; it offers them no nectar, and in several species studied the scent imitates something the fly is actually hunting for, such as the smell of an injured insect that certain flies feed on. A fly that lands and crawls in finds the inside of the tube slick and lined with downward-pointing hairs, so it slides to the swollen base and cannot climb back out. Down there it blunders against the flower's reproductive column, where pollen is packaged in tiny paired sacs with a clip that snaps onto a leg or the base of the mouthparts. The fly is held for roughly a day. Then the flower begins to wilt, the tube softens and the hairs slacken, and the fly walks out carrying the pollen to the next lantern that fools it. The families involved are mostly the very small flies most people never notice: freeloader flies, grass flies, biting midges and their relatives, a few millimetres long. The tubers have a long human history in these hills too. Several Ceropegia species have edible starchy tubers that were dug and eaten in the Sahyadri, and digging remains one of the pressures on the genus, alongside the loss of the open grassy slopes and rock-edged plateaus where the vines climb. A good many of the Ghats species grow in only a handful of hill ranges each. For anyone walking the Sinhagad or Velhe slopes in the next few weeks, the thing to look for is a thread-thin vine wound through grass or a low shrub, with one or two odd pale tubes standing off it, each topped with a little hairy cage. Look closely at the cage and there may be a fly inside, waiting to be let go.

Signal crayfish reach a stretch of the Ter still holding natives

A signal crayfish was recorded in the Ter at Sant Joan de les Abadesses on August 5, in the middle of town where the old bridge crosses the river. The following day three white-clawed crayfish were logged at the same point, a few metres away. Signal crayfish had already been seen lower down the valley this year, at Ribamala a day earlier and at Les Llosses in June, but this is the first one logged on the stretch of the Ter running through the town, and the first time the two species have been recorded side by side there. The white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) is the only crayfish native to these rivers. It is a modest animal, rarely much over a hand's length, olive to brown with a rough shell and pale, whitish to pinkish undersides to its claws, which is where the name comes from. It wants cool, clean, well-oxygenated water with stones and undercut banks to hide beneath, and it has been losing ground across Europe for half a century. The signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) is the main reason. It is a North American species brought to Europe for farming in the 1960s and 70s, larger than the native, with smooth claws that carry a white or pale blue patch at the hinge of the pincers and red on their undersides. It also carries crayfish plague, a water mould (Aphanomyces astaci) that lives in its shell without doing it much harm. The mould sheds swimming spores into the water, and a European crayfish that picks them up dies, typically within weeks. There is no treatment. Where carriers and natives share a reach, the native population usually vanishes within a season or two, and the signal crayfish, which also breeds faster and competes harder for the same hiding places, takes over the river bed. Two sightings on consecutive days do not show that plague is present in the Ter here, and no die-off should be read into them. What they do show is that the carrier has reached a stretch where the native is still living. That is the moment when what people do on the riverbank matters most. Plague spores travel in water and on anything wet: boots, nets, dog fur, a bucket. Never move crayfish or water between streams, let gear dry fully before using it in another river, and if a crayfish with white-blotched, red-bottomed claws turns up in the Ter or its side streams, photograph it and report it to the Generalitat's wildlife service rather than handling or releasing it.

An Indian Skimmer works the slack tides at Dharamtar Creek

An Indian Skimmer (*Rynchops albicollis*) has been working the Dharamtar Creek estuary at Mlrapada, on the Raigad shore south of Uran. Four separate reports have come in there since August 22, 2026, with a high count of 1 on every visit, so this is most likely a single bird being re-found on successive trips out. The skimmer is built around one trick. Its lower mandible is noticeably longer than the upper, thin and blade-like, and the bird feeds by flying just above calm water with that lower blade slicing the surface. When the blade touches a fish, the head snaps down and the bill closes on it in a fraction of a second, without the bird ever breaking stride. It hunts by touch rather than sight, which lets it work at dusk and into the night when small fish rise to the surface film. Sheltered creek water at slack tide, like the channels between the mangroves and mudflats at Dharamtar, is exactly the kind of flat surface the method needs; it does not work in chop. Recognizing one among the terns is straightforward once the bill is seen. It is tern-sized with long, narrow wings and a black cap running down the back and upperwing, white below and across the forehead. The bill is thick, orange-red and tipped yellow, and the lower half visibly overshoots the upper. In flight the wingbeats are slow and deep for a bird this size, and it holds low over the water rather than hovering and plunging the way terns do. Skimmers are river birds for most of the year. They breed in the dry season on open sandbars of the big north Indian rivers, the Chambal and the Ganga chief among them, laying in a scrape in bare sand before the monsoon comes up and floods the bars. Once the young are flying and the rivers rise, the birds scatter, and some reach the tidal creeks and estuaries of the west coast. A bird at Dharamtar in the last week of August fits that post-breeding movement, arriving as the monsoon eases and the creek water settles. The species is listed as Endangered; nesting sandbars are lost to dams, sand mining, and the pressure of people and livestock on the few rivers that still run free enough to build them. Dharamtar Creek offers the other half of the year: quiet tidal water, mudflats full of small fish, and mangrove edges to roost against. Anyone birding the Uran and Rewas shoreline this month should scan the low flyers over the creek at first and last light.

Chinook return to the Sammamish through one of its warmest, slowest reaches

Chinook salmon are back in the lower Sammamish River. Over the past four weeks they have been seen along the slow, dredged reach that runs from Kenmore through Bothell toward Woodinville, with a scattering of other sightings toward Edmonds and across the Sound on the Kitsap side. These are adults on the last leg of a trip that began in the North Pacific and passed through the Ballard Locks sometime this summer. The Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) is the largest of the Pacific salmon and the easiest to name with the fish in hand: black gums along the lower jaw where a coho's are white, and small dark spots across both lobes of the tail rather than just the upper one. In salt water they are silver with a blue-green back. By the time they reach a river like this one they are darkening to bronze and olive, the males growing the hooked snout and heavy teeth they will use to fight for position on the gravel. Lake Washington fish typically run ten to twenty-five pounds, three to five years old. What they are doing right now is mostly waiting. Adults enter Lake Washington through the locks from June into September and hold in the lake's cooler depths, then push up the Sammamish toward Bear Creek, Cottage Lake Creek and Issaquah Creek to spawn from mid-September into November. The Sammamish is the bottleneck. It was straightened and dredged in the 1960s, runs shallow and slow through open valley floor, and is one of the warmest salmon rivers in the region in late summer. Fish moving through it in August and early September are traveling in water that regularly sits near the twenty-degree mark where migrating salmon start to burn energy they cannot spare. Cooler nights and the first fall rains are what open the door upstream. Snohomish County's dry spell, described here two weeks ago, has not let up; a little over half the county has sat in moderate drought since the third week of August, and the past month at Paine Field ran about 2.7 degrees above normal for daily highs. Those numbers describe the air and the land, not the river, and no current gauge reading on the Sammamish was available to say how the water itself is running. The fish are in it regardless. Once they spawn, Chinook do the thing no other family of fish does at this scale: they die on the gravel and stay. A single carcass feeds bears, otters, eagles, gulls, dippers and the insects the next generation of fry will eat; the nitrogen from an ocean life ends up in streamside alders and cedars. The eggs overwinter in the gravel, the fry emerge in late winter, and most of this run's young will spend only a few months in fresh water before dropping down through the lake and out the locks, small enough to fit in a palm. Puget Sound Chinook have been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 1999, and the Lake Washington run is among the more heavily worked-on in the region. Adopt A Stream Foundation does its stream restoration from North Creek in Everett, a tributary that meets the Sammamish at Bothell, right in the stretch where these fish were seen. Anyone who wants to watch the run can do it without waders. The fish ladder windows at the Ballard Locks show Chinook passing into the lake through September, and by early October they will be on the gravel in Bear Creek and Issaquah Creek, where a footbridge is all the equipment needed.

A Golden-winged Warbler passes through Sewickley Heights

A Golden-winged Warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) spent at least a few days in Sewickley Heights Borough Park at the end of August, first reported on August 26 and logged on four separate checklists over the days that followed, never more than one bird at a time. It was moving through with the first real push of fall migrants; two Cape May Warblers were in the same park on August 21, and Yellow-bellied and Olive-sided Flycatchers have followed into the first days of September. It is a small, sharply marked warbler, easy to name if seen well. The male is soft gray above and clean white below, with a black throat and a black mask through the eye, both edged in white, and a patch of bright yellow on the crown and another on the wing. The female wears the same pattern in gray where the male has black. The bird it gets confused with is its close relative the Blue-winged Warbler, which is yellow-bodied with a thin black line through the eye and two white wing bars. The two interbreed freely where their ranges meet, and the offspring, known as Brewster's and Lawrence's warblers, mix the parents' markings in ways that keep birders honest. A fall bird in these hills calls for a careful look at the throat and the wing. Watch one feed and its way of making a living is plain. Golden-wings probe curled, hanging dead leaves in the understory, often dangling upside down like a chickadee to reach inside for caterpillars and spiders. That dead-leaf specialty is why the bird turns up low in shrubby edges and tangles rather than in the canopy, and it is a useful habit to know in fall, when a quiet bird working a leaf cluster is more likely to catch the eye than one that is singing. What the species needs to breed is young, shrubby ground: the regrowth after a clearcut or a burn, an old field filling in with saplings, a shrub swamp, a utility right-of-way. That is a habitat that does not last. Left alone, a shrubland grows into a pole-stage forest in a decade or two and the warblers leave. Golden-wings once bred across the Appalachians, Pennsylvania included, and their retreat from this part of the range has two well-documented causes: young forest that has matured or been developed, and the Blue-winged Warbler, which moves into the same openings, competes for them, and hybridizes with the Golden-wings that remain. Roughly seventy percent of the world's breeding Golden-wings are now in the upper Great Lakes states and Manitoba. The species is on the federal list of Birds of Conservation Concern, tracked but not listed as endangered. A bird here at the end of August is on its way from wherever it nested to wintering grounds in Central America and northern South America, feeding in whatever cover the route offers. Sewickley Heights Borough Park, 1,005 acres of borough-owned woods and edges open to the public, is one such stopping place, and the next few weeks are when the rest of the warblers will be passing through it.

A Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl hunts in daylight from a Mérida garden

A Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl (*Glaucidium brasilianum*) turned up on September 3 in a garden on Calle 7 in Mérida, the same kind of shaded yard where Golden-fronted Woodpeckers, Green Jays, Great Kiskadees and Clay-colored Thrushes were being logged a few blocks away that day. That company is the point. This is an owl of forest edge and scrubby lots, and a city built into low deciduous forest suits it fine. It is small enough to miss: about the length of a hand, 16 to 18 centimeters, with a wingspan under half a meter. Most people who find one do so by looking for the commotion around it rather than the bird itself. Unlike nearly every other owl here, it hunts in daylight, sitting on an exposed perch and dropping onto lizards, large insects and small birds. Songbirds treat it as a serious threat and gather to scold it, which is why birders imitate its long, even series of whistled toots to pull hidden birds into the open. Look at the back of its head. Two dark spots edged in pale feathering sit on the nape, a pair of false eyes that make the owl appear to be watching in both directions at once. The likely value is against those mobbing songbirds: an owl that seems to be looking at you is a harder thing to dive at from behind. It nests in tree cavities, often holes that woodpeckers have excavated and left, so an old tree with a few woodpecker holes in a Mérida yard is doing quiet work for more than the woodpeckers. Anyone who hears the yard birds erupt in the middle of the afternoon should scan the bare branches nearby for a fist-sized shape with a long, barred tail before it slips off.

Purple Bladderwort's suction traps, hiding in plain sight

There is a carnivorous plant drifting in the small ponds of the Ossipee and Sebago country, and almost nobody who swims past it knows it is there. Purple Bladderwort (*Utricularia purpurea*) has no roots at all. It floats free just under the surface as a loose tangle of fine submerged stems, and strung along those stems are hundreds of hollow bladders, each one only a couple of millimeters across. Every bladder is a trap, and it works by suction. Glands in the bladder wall pump water out until the inside is held under negative pressure, with a small door sealed watertight against that pressure. On the outside of the door sit mechanosensory bristles. When a swimming animal brushes one, the bristle flexes, the door inverts from convex to concave, and at that instant it can no longer hold; it springs, and the inrush of water carries the animal inside. It is one of the fastest movements known in the plant kingdom. The rootlessness is the reason for all that machinery. With no roots to draw nitrogen and phosphorus from the sediment, the plant has to take them from the water column, and the bladders are how it does it, catching zooplankton and other microinvertebrates. That fits where the species turns up: nutrient-poor pond and lake margins, the tea-colored, low-fertility water this glaciated country is full of. Purple Bladderwort then complicates its own story. Its traps are not sterile prey chambers. They hold a dense resident community of algae, ciliates and bacteria, and the literature on this species suggests it has partly relaxed its reliance on catching and digesting animals, drawing instead on what lives inside the bladders. Darwin was already looking into those traps and finding tenants. Twenty-six records have been logged in the surrounding ponds and lakes over the past two years, and they cluster in late summer: three at Chocorua on August 17 of this year, one at West Newfield across the Maine line on August 15, and three at Sebago on August 14 the summer before, with another at Naples on August 9. It is a native plant here and carries no federal listing. To find it, wade a quiet pond edge, lift a strand of submerged stem out of the water, and look closely at what is hanging off it.