Field reports

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.

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.

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.

There is a tree in the dry country around Pune that cannot make a living on its own. Indian Sandalwood (Santalum album) was logged here twice last month, on 14 and 23 August, and the interesting thing about it starts underground. Sandalwood is hemi-parasitic: it makes its own sugars in its leaves like any other tree, but draws water and minerals out of the roots of neighbouring plants, tapping into them below the soil. Seedlings in particular need other plants around them to plug into, which is part of why sandalwood has always been difficult to raise in a plantation row and easy to lose when the scrub around it is cleared. The fragrance it is famous for is a heartwood story, not a leaf or flower one. The oil accumulates in the dense inner wood, and that heartwood builds slowly over decades. It also runs down into the roots, which is why the traditional harvest lifts the whole tree out of the ground and distills the root wood along with the trunk. There is no cutting it back and letting it come again. Those two facts together explain the species' predicament: a tree that takes most of a human generation to become worth anything, is worth a great deal the moment it does, and does not survive being harvested. Heavy cutting across its native range in southern India is why wild populations are now considered vulnerable to extinction, and iNaturalist flags the species as threatened.

Two Indian Spotted Eagles have been working Hoskote Kere, the old irrigation tank on the plateau east of Bengaluru, turning up on birders' lists over and over through the second half of August and confirmed there on the last day of the month. Clanga hastata is a medium-sized brown eagle of the Aquila group and one of the more easily missed raptors in southern India. Some of that is taxonomy: it is closely related to the Greater Spotted Eagle and still gets written off as one in the field. Some of it is simply that a large brown eagle on a bare limb over a tank looks, at a glance, like any other large brown eagle. South Asian surveys describe it as globally Vulnerable. What it needs is an edge rather than a forest. Those same surveys describe it as an uncommon resident tied to wetland margins, hunting open ground for small mammals, birds and carrion, and Hoskote Kere has that structure: open water, a grazed and scrubby shoreline, and dry deciduous trees standing tall enough to sit in and watch from. The prey layer is there to match. Indian hare, greater bandicoot-rat, three-striped palm squirrels and unidentified rats have all been logged in that landscape over the past month, along with an Oriental rat snake, a Pondicherry fan-throated lizard, rock dragons, and toads and paddy field frogs after rain. Every one of those is an animal of open ground or the water's edge, which is the point: this eagle hunts things it can see and drop onto, not prey hidden under a canopy. The tanks east of the city were dug and bunded to hold monsoon runoff for irrigation. The habitat is a by-product, and this is one of the birds that lives off it. Anyone going to look should scan the standing trees along the bund rather than the water.

Six Buff-breasted Sandpipers were on the ground along Reservoir Avenue at Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx on August 31, at the end of a stretch that also put American Golden-Plover, Baird's Sandpiper, White-rumped Sandpiper and Stilt Sandpiper at the same reservoir between the 21st and the 31st. All of them breed in the Arctic and all of them are headed south. The Buff-breasted Sandpiper (Calidris subruficollis) is the odd one in that company, because it is a shorebird that does not want the shore. It avoids wet ground. Instead of probing soft mud the way Lesser Yellowlegs work a lake edge, it hunts by eye on bare, dry, short ground: stand still, watch, then a quick run forward to snatch an insect off the surface. A mown, open reservoir perimeter is exactly the kind of surface that suits it. That preference holds at both ends of its year. It nests on high Arctic tundra and winters on the grasslands of the Argentine pampas, and it is a lek breeder, though a loose and flexible one by the standards of birds that lek, with males gathering to display rather than pairing off on defended territories. If one is on the ground in front of you, it reads warm and evenly buff all over, plainer and softer than the crisply patterned juvenile Baird's Sandpiper that may be standing a few feet away. It is a bird built for dry grass, passing through a city on its way from one end of the hemisphere to the other.

A Merlin turned up along the Rifle Range Trail at Wildcat Canyon Regional Park on August 29. Merlins don't nest in California. They breed far to the north and reach the Bay Area only as fall migrants and winter visitors, so a bird on an East Bay ridge in late summer is one that has just come a long way. It is a small falcon that hunts by outright speed. Rather than threading through branches like a Sharp-shinned Hawk, a Merlin works from a watch perch or flies low and fast over open ground, then closes on a small bird and takes it in mid-air. A miss doesn't necessarily end it: the falcon will tail-chase, firing off short repeat attacks, or climb after the bird in a rising spiral duel that falconers call a ringing flight. Pairs have been seen flushing flocks toward one another, one bird driving the birds into the other's path. Size puts it in kestrel territory, and that is where most people get it wrong. A Merlin is bulkier and darker than an American Kestrel, with fast piston-like wingbeats and a heavy flight that sinks on the glide instead of floating, and it lacks the kestrel's bold facial mustache marks. The kestrel is here year round; the Merlin isn't. Against a Sharp-shinned Hawk, look at the wingtips and tail: pointed wingtips and a dark tail crossed by narrow white bands on the Merlin, rounded wingtips and no white tail bands on the accipiter. It builds no nest of its own anywhere in its range, taking over an old crow, hawk or magpie nest on the breeding grounds instead. Its food is small birds, sparrows chief among them, and that is what the open grassland and coyote brush of the Wildcat ridge is good for. Song Sparrows, California Towhees, Savannah Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos have all been reported around the hills and the bay shoreline in the past two weeks, and Townsend's and Wilson's Warblers came in on migration at Lafayette Reservoir on September 1. A bird that hunts by running down other birds in open air has plenty to work with here right now.

Onondaga Creek has fallen fast over the past two weeks. At the Dorwin Avenue gage, flow dropped from 43.6 to 18.8 cubic feet per second and gage height slid from 2.43 to 1.57 feet, tracking a week in which the county's abnormally-dry footprint jumped from a quarter to 85 percent of its land area. Syracuse Hancock Airport, eight kilometers off, has logged only 1.5 inches of rain this month against a normal of just over three, with highs running a couple of degrees warm. The watershed above the gage covers only 88.5 square miles, small and quick to respond, which is exactly why a rain deficit that a larger river would barely notice can knock this creek down by more than half in fourteen days. The timing is unfortunate. The creek's upper and middle reaches are already listed as impaired and are still waiting on a federal pollution budget. Less water moving through the same channel means whatever nutrient and organic load it carries has less flow to dilute it, and less turbulence to keep it oxygenated, though the actual dissolved-oxygen and water-quality readings needed to confirm that effect here aren't in hand. The local insect records can't fill that gap. A handful of mayfly observations came in across Onondaga County this summer, but they sit apart from the story: Giant Mayfly and its close relatives were all logged on a single day in late June near Cicero, well off Onondaga Creek, while scattered single records of Red Speckled Dun and Common Square-gills came from Skaneateles, Oswego, Fabius and Moravia. All are community-science sightings still awaiting identification review, and each one marks a species being present at a spot on a date — not abundance, not condition, not a trend. The clean-water reputation mayflies carry as a group doesn't transfer neatly to this particular mix either: Caenis tolerates silt and low oxygen, and Callibaetis is a still-water genus. None of these records fall on the impaired reach, so none of them can speak to what a falling, warming creek is doing to it. What does change the calculus is the Syracuse Hancock International Airport discharge, which entered this month already flagged for a biochemical oxygen demand violation that has tripled twice in three quarters, a trajectory covered in an earlier report on the airport's oxygen-demand violation. Less water in the receiving creek means the same permitted discharge has less flow to dilute into, a concern worth watching even without direct downstream water-quality measurements yet in hand. The airport is also the subject of a SEQR determination notice tied to its 2040 expansion, which puts a facility with an active, worsening water-quality violation at the center of a live development decision on a waterway that is currently running at less than half its normal flow.

A shorebird that usually crosses the continent a thousand miles west of here has been feeding at Wrightsville Reservoir in East Montpelier for more than a week. Baird's Sandpiper (Calidris bairdii) showed up in six separate reports between August 21 and the end of the month, never more than two birds at a time. It is one of the small brown sandpipers birders lump together as "peeps," and the way to pick it out is structural rather than a matter of color. Its wingtips extend noticeably past the tip of the tail, giving the bird a long, tapered, attenuated look that the other peeps don't have, and a brownish buff wash spreads across the chest where most peeps are gray and white. On a flat it also gives itself away by where it stands: while the others probe at the waterline, Baird's works the drier margins above the water. That habit is tied to the kind of trip it is on. Baird's Sandpiper breeds in the high Arctic and winters in South America, and instead of running down the coast it migrates through the continental interior, funneling in bulk through the Great Plains. Inland Vermont sits off to the side of that corridor, an uncommon stopover rather than part of the route. Birds that do stop here are refueling on invertebrates in exposed sediment, and reports spread over more than a week suggest birds staging to feed rather than one flyover seen twice. Wrightsville is a flood-control detention basin rather than a water-supply reservoir, built to sit low through the dry season and fill only when runoff spikes. Inflow has fallen off sharply: the gauge on the North Branch of the Winooski at Wrightsville has dropped from about 62 cubic feet per second within the past month to 8 as of today, with gage height down roughly a foot and three quarters over the same stretch. Washington County went from no abnormally dry area at all in late July to 70 percent abnormally dry for the week of August 25 to 31. In a basin shaped like this one, falling pool stage would be expected to bring the shallow upstream margins up out of the water as bare sediment, the kind of surface a Baird's Sandpiper is built to walk — though confirming that link at this specific site would take a closer look at the reservoir's bathymetry rather than the gauge record alone.

The early-summer drought is finished. Severe drought covered as much as all of Kings County from mid-June through early August, and by the week of August 25 to 31 the county had none of any drought category, not even the abnormally dry tier. The sharp reversal is supported by an August running at roughly double normal rainfall: the Central Park gauge has logged 8.5 inches this month against a normal of 4.08 inches for these calendar days, a surplus of 4.4 inches. Where that water went matters as much as how much of it fell. Much of Brooklyn and Queens drains through a combined sewer system, a single pipe carrying street runoff, household sewage and industrial wastewater to one treatment plant. The design includes a relief valve. When incoming flow exceeds what the pipe and the plant can handle, the excess discharges untreated through permitted outfalls directly into the receiving water. That threshold is crossed by rainfall intensity rather than by monthly totals: an inch spread across a day mostly gets treated, an inch in an hour does not. Storm-by-storm rainfall figures for August aren't in hand, so how much of the 4.4-inch surplus arrived in bursts is an open question, but a month running more than double normal in a place where most of the ground is paved is the shape of month that tests the relief valve. The infrastructure on the receiving end of that test is already behind. NYCDEP's 26th Ward Water Pollution Control Plant, which discharges to Jamaica Bay about five miles from here, is in significant non-compliance with the EPA for missing a deadline in its compliance schedule by more than 90 days. The city's municipal storm sewer permit is separately in non-compliance for late progress reporting on its own schedule. Neither record documents an overflow event this month; what they document is that two pieces of the stormwater system are formally overdue. Jamaica Bay's western and eastern segments, meanwhile, are already on the state's impaired waters list and still awaiting a cleanup plan. NYC H2O teaches local water ecology across the city, and is a good organization to learn from for anyone who wants to understand the health of these marine ecosystems — and where the rain on their block ends up.

A solvent plume that has been moving through the ground west of Ann Arbor since the 1960s is now a federal Superfund site. EPA added Gelman Sciences to the National Priorities List on March 13 of this year, with a Hazard Ranking System score of 50; the threshold for listing is 28.5. The record names a single contaminant of concern: 1,4-dioxane, the solvent the plant used in making medical filters and disposed of on site, largely by spraying wastewater onto the ground. The chemistry is what made this a decades-long problem rather than a spill. 1,4-dioxane mixes with water completely, barely clings to soil particles, and resists the soil bacteria that break down most industrial solvents. So it does not sit where it was put. In this till-plain landscape, clay-rich glacial deposits threaded with buried sand and gravel, the plume has followed those permeable lenses for miles, closing a city water supply well and spreading under residential neighborhoods along the way. The record names the Huron River as the surface water that receives this groundwater. Ann Arbor's drinking water intake is on that river, at Barton Pond. Being listed is a beginning, not a remedy. The site carries no cleanup milestones yet, which is exactly what a five-month-old listing looks like: no remedial investigation completed, no cleanup plan selected, nothing built. What the listing does is move oversight of a contamination case that has been managed under a 1985 state consent judgment into the federal Superfund process, with the funding and enforcement authority that carries.

Thirty-five Indian Flying Foxes were counted at a single roost in Satya Sai Nagar, Dhankawadi, in late August, part of a cluster that has held steady across the Kothrud area for the past month. That kind of repeat use, the same handful of canopy trees occupied night after night, is what separates an established colony from bats simply passing through on a foraging circuit. These are among the largest bats in the world, with wingspans stretching past a meter, and they live in a way that looks almost backwards for a bat: by day they hang out in the open, packed into the crowns of tall trees in full view, chattering and jostling for shade and airflow. Only at dusk do they scatter, sometimes traveling many kilometers overnight to feed on soft fruit and flower nectar before returning to the same roost by dawn. Unlike the small insectivorous bats most people picture, flying foxes navigate by sight and smell rather than echolocation, which is part of why they can afford to roost so conspicuously and why colonies like this one are so easy to census from the ground. What almost certainly keeps them anchored to this particular patch of Pune is the fig trees still scattered through its older neighborhoods. Sacred fig, cluster fig, and Indian banyan have all turned up within about a kilometer of the roost cluster in recent weeks, and figs are a flying fox staple across their range. The relationship runs both ways: as the bats commute between roost and fruiting trees, they pass fig seeds through their gut and drop them, intact and viable, far from the parent tree. Fig wasps handle pollination, but it is bats and birds that give fig species their reach, and in a dense urban peth with few other large-bodied fruit-eaters covering that kind of distance, this colony may be doing a disproportionate share of that seed-dispersal work. The roost's location is also its liability. Sacred fig and its relatives are common enough in the area to draw bats into close quarters with dense housing rather than deeper forest cover, and iNaturalist lists the Indian Flying Fox itself as threatened. Roosting over rooftops instead of forest canopy raises the colony's exposure to heat stress on the hottest days, to disturbance from lights and noise, and to the friction that flying fox colonies routinely run into when neighbors object to the smell and droppings under a roost tree. For now it stands as a colony worth simply knowing is there, a working population of a threatened, ecologically useful bat settled in among people who may not realize what it's doing for the neighborhood's fig trees.

A Short-tailed Hawk has held its ground on Mt. Bigelow Road for the better part of two weeks, with 71 separate confirmed reports and repeat sightings of two birds together as recently as August 27. The persistence is the real story. This is a species built around Florida and the humid tropics, with only a scattered foothold in south Texas; a single bird passing through the sky islands of southeastern Arizona would already be notable, but a pair lingering through late summer, the peak of the breeding window, raises the question of whether something more than passage is underway. Short-tailed Hawks hunt on the wing, soaring high over forest edges and dropping suddenly on birds below, a technique that has earned them comparisons to a falcon more than a typical buteo. Nesting requires mature stands with tall trees, and this stretch of the Catalina Highway corridor still supplies that structure as it climbs from desert floor into pine-oak and mixed conifer forest. The land underneath is federal. PAD-US puts the corridor inside Coronado National Forest, and records a Catalina Highway Scenic Area unit — 15,537 acres in total extent, managed by the Forest Service — at GAP status 3: protected from outright conversion, but still open to extraction such as logging, grazing or mining. The surrounding national forest carries the same status. That is a step below the GAP 1 wilderness units a short distance away, Pusch Ridge and Rincon Mountain among them, where land is managed for biodiversity and natural disturbance is allowed to run its course. For a raptor that depends on old, standing timber, which management regime governs the trees it is using matters as much as whether the trees are there at all. The species' nesting habits are poorly documented even within its core range, which makes this sighting more than a checklist entry. Whether this pair is simply lingering or actually attempting to nest is a question worth watching carefully over the coming weeks, ideally from a distance that leaves the birds undisturbed.

A California buckeye along the Peninsula is doing something it has no business doing in late August: it flowered on the 27th, pale pink-and-white spikes opening even as its own leaves color and drop and last spring's fruit hangs ripe on the same branches. Three life stages, all showing on one tree at once. To understand why that's strange, it helps to know how this species normally runs its year. Buckeye is usually the first tree on the Peninsula to leaf out each spring, often by February, and one of the first to shut down again, dropping leaves as early as July in a dry year. That early exit isn't decline, it's strategy. Most deciduous trees drop their leaves on a calendar cued by shortening days and falling temperatures, but buckeye is drought-deciduous: it reads soil moisture instead, and pulls the plug on photosynthesis before the dry Mediterranean summer can pull the water out of it by force. A tree that manages its own dormancy on that kind of internal trigger, rather than an external clock, is also a tree with more room to misfire, and an occasional stray environmental nudge can push it into throwing a second, out-of-cycle bloom well after its main season has closed. What makes this particular bloom worth watching is who showed up for it. An Anna's hummingbird was logged working the same stretch of Mission Creek today, and buckeye's tubular flowers are built almost exactly for that bird: long and narrow, favoring a hovering, long-billed visitor over a crawling insect. Unlike the ruby-throated and rufous hummingbirds that clear out of California by fall, Anna's hummingbird stays on the coast year-round, so a flowering buckeye in late August isn't dropping nectar into an empty season. There's a resident pollinator on the landscape to use exactly what it's offering. California buckeye carries no special conservation status, so none of this is a red flag. It's simply a small, precisely timed piece of plant physiology showing its hand on one tree, the kind of detail that only stands out because the buckeye's usual calendar is so well known.

A Scarlet Leather Flower (Clematis texensis) turned up at Circle C Ranch in early August, its nodding, urn-shaped red blooms unmistakable where the vine climbed through the surrounding brush. This is not a plant most people will ever see outside a fairly narrow strip of Texas. Unlike most clematis species, which produce flat, open, star-shaped flowers built for a wide range of pollinator visitors, this one has evolved a thick, leathery, almost fully closed bell. That shape is thought to be a specialization for hummingbird pollination: a tubular, nectar-guarded flower that a hovering bird can probe but a crawling insect mostly cannot. It is a design detail that only makes sense once you know the range it comes from. That range is essentially the Balcones escarpment and nothing more. Clematis texensis is endemic to the limestone canyons of the Edwards Plateau and shows up in USGS vegetation classification as one of the diagnostic species of the Balconian dry-mesic hardwood forest, the canyon-slope plant community that gives this whole landscape its name. Finding it here is not just a rare-plant sighting; it is a small confirmation that this patch of ground still supports the actual community type the region is built around, rather than a degraded stand-in for it. It bloomed alongside a broader late-summer wave of Edwards Plateau natives, among them Leavenworth's eryngo, cedar sage, rose pavonia and agarita, all flowering in the same window. The vine's tight range is itself a consequence of water. It grows specifically on limestone canyon slopes and streamside margins, the exact terrain the Balcones system is carved from, and the surface water in that terrain is running low right now. Nearby Bear Creek is reading zero flow at both of its gauges, with gage height near the bottom of its 30-day range; Maha Creek at Von Quintus Road is also reading 0 ft³/s. Dripping Springs, the closest weather station, has logged no measurable rain this month against a normal of over an inch, with highs running nearly three degrees above average, and Travis County has held at moderate-to-severe drought for three straight weeks after peaking higher in June. None of that speaks to the condition of this particular vine — it is simply the weather and streamflow picture the August bloom happened in. Separately, and from a different part of the same investigation: the CRU-WRRF2 wastewater treatment plant is currently listed in significant non-compliance on its EPA record, and it discharges into this drainage system. That listing is a status on a regulatory record and nothing more. It does not identify a pollutant, a temperature exceedance, or any specific discharge event, and significant non-compliance is frequently assigned for administrative failures such as a missed or late report. It is also worth being explicit about what we cannot say: the USGS stations in this watershed report only gage height and discharge — there is no dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, or turbidity monitoring downstream of the facility — so there is no water quality data available to us that would show any effect on the creek or on the plant community above it. We are noting the compliance status because it is on the record, not because anything here connects it to conditions on the ground.

A Eurasian Eagle-Owl was confirmed at De Schavuienhof, near Bierbeek, on August 17, verified across three separate reports by regional reviewers. In the past two weeks it was the only species flagged as notable anywhere within 25 kilometers of this stretch of Atlantic mixed forest, which says something about how far outside the ordinary checklist this bird sits. This is not a small owl passing through on a whim. Bubo bubo is Europe's largest owl species, a sedentary, territorial hunter with a wingspan that can top six feet, built to take prey up to the size of a young fox or a heron. It doesn't migrate; where it settles, it tends to hold ground for years, which is part of why a single confirmed sighting carries more weight than a stray songbird would. Hunting pushed the species out of much of lowland Western Europe by the mid-20th century, and it has spent recent decades recovering and pushing back into former range, helped in places by reintroduction projects and by protection of the nesting cliffs and old quarries it favors. A bird turning up in a Belgian forest like this one fits that pattern of recolonization far more plausibly than it fits the alternative explanation of an escaped falconry bird. What it would find if it stayed is worth a note of its own. This same forest holds a small, recurring population of Siberian Chipmunk, an Asian squirrel that has become established in patches of Belgian and French woodland after escaping or being released from captivity. Eagle-owls are generalist hunters that take rodents readily in exactly this kind of habitat, so the owl's arrival and the chipmunk's foothold here are worth watching as connected threads in the same patch of woods, even though nothing so far confirms one is preying on the other.

The stream gauge on the Salt River at Priest Drive, near where the Verde River joins in below Scottsdale, read zero cubic feet per second on August 26. It's tempting to read that number as this summer's drought finally squeezing the last water out of the channel, and the numbers backing that read are real: Maricopa County is sitting at nearly 80 percent severe drought coverage, and Phoenix has been running more than five degrees above normal for daily highs. But the fuller explanation for a dry channel at this exact spot is infrastructure, not weather. This reach sits just below Granite Reef Diversion Dam, where the Salt River Project has for more than a century routed nearly all of the river's natural flow into the Arizona and South canals rather than leaving it in the bed. A USGS reconstruction of the system found this stretch running dry even in comparatively wet years back in the late 1970s. A zero reading at Priest Drive, in other words, is often the river doing exactly what it was engineered to do a hundred years ago; this year's drought and heat are simply added pressure on a channel that was already designed to run empty here most summers. A separate concern for this same stretch of the Gila/Salt Intermediate Basins is a permitted discharger rather than a diversion structure. MODERN INDUSTIES, INC holds a Clean Water Act discharge permit for this area, and its record is worth tracking precisely because the receiving channel is already this stressed. A waterway with no assured base flow has far less capacity to dilute or buffer any wastewater discharge than the same channel would in a normal year, so whatever this facility is permitted to release matters more here than it would somewhere with a reliable perennial flow underneath it.

A mile-a-minute vine (Ipomoea cairica) was confirmed at research grade along the forest edge near Puntarenas on August 17. That single record turns out to be one thread in a larger picture: over the past 30 days, eight separate introduced ornamental species have been logged around this stretch of Costa Rican seasonal moist forest, among them thatch screwpine, golden pothos, crepe ginger, blue pea, lesser bougainvillea, red ginger, and sea almond. These are opportunistic community-science sightings over a single window, so they can't establish a trend on their own, but the number and variety of introduced ornamentals turning up together is worth noting. Mile-a-minute vine earns its common name honestly. It is a fast-growing perennial liana that climbs rather than roots deep, and that habit is exactly what makes a forest edge vulnerable: the edge is already sunlit and disturbed, thick with low shrubs and saplings for the vine to scramble up. It throws itself over that structure and shades out the leaves beneath before they can respond, and once it reaches the canopy gap light an edge provides, it holds that light for itself. Ornamental escapes do not need a storm or a flood to reach a forest edge, only a nearby garden and a bird or a drainage line to carry the seed the rest of the way. Puntarenas's settlement edges sit directly against this forest, and eight escaped ornamentals surfacing in a single month is worth watching as a possible sign of spillover from garden to forest edge, even if a single month's sightings can't confirm it.

Boulder County's drought history this year is more of a rollercoaster than a straight slide. Severe drought (D2) has blanketed the entire county since late February. Extreme drought (D3 or worse) actually hit 100% of the county for over a month, from April 7 through May 11, then eased sharply — down to 14% through most of June and just 11% by the week of July 14 — before jumping back up. By this past week the figure had climbed to 85%, and it has held there for three straight weeks now. This is the county's second extreme-drought spike this year, not its first. The gauge record lines up with what the drought maps show. Fourmile Creek, at both Orodell and Logan Mill Road near Crisman, is running at 0.2 cubic feet per second, the low end of a 30-day range that never once climbed above that mark. For a creek of this size heading into late summer, that is barely a trickle. Upstream, the winter supply was thin too. The Niwot SNOTEL station sits at 9,940 feet, well above this ecosystem and outside the Fourmile drainage, so it is a proxy for high-country supply rather than a measure of conditions on the ground here. It banked 23.1 inches of water-year precipitation against a 28.4 inch median, 81% of normal. Snowpack and summer base flow are related in these mountains, but we don't have hydrologic data tying that specific shortfall to Fourmile Creek's specific numbers. What we have is a light snow year sitting alongside a hot, dry summer: the Boulder airport weather station has logged a mean daily high of 92.3°F over the past 30 days, six degrees above the 1991-2020 normal, hit 104°F on August 3rd, and has seen barely a fifth of an inch of rain against a normal of 1.31 inches. That is the broader pattern across the Colorado River Basin as well: thin mountain snowpack alongside an increasingly aggressive summer aridity. Eastern cottonwoods and narrowleaf willow have both been logged this summer along Boulder Canyon Drive and the Boulder Creek corridor, cottonwood as recently as August 23. Both are riparian trees that grow where shallow groundwater is reliable, which is why a creek at this level is worth keeping an eye on. No one has reported canopy stress in these stands, and we haven't measured any; if you walk this stretch, what the canopy looks like from here through September is the useful thing to note. The Boulder Watershed Collective works this ground and is worth following for anyone tracking what happens to Fourmile Creek and the county's other small streams as this drought holds, or deepens further.

The gage in this stretch of the Carolina Slate Belt watershed read 18.8 cubic feet per second on August 24, roughly 12 percent of its own 14-day average of nearly 155 cfs. Gage height tells the same story, down to 1.91 feet against an 8-reading average above 11. This isn't a gentle summer recession; it's a sharp break at the low end of anything the network has recorded over the past month. The land tells a matching story. Saluda County has slid into abnormally dry conditions after weeks of moderate drought, the nearest weather station is logging nearly an inch of rainfall deficit for the month, and daily temperatures have been running 2 to 3 degrees above normal, including a 102 degree day on August 18. Heat and low flow compound each other: warm, slow-moving water holds less dissolved oxygen just as biological demand on it rises, and a shrinking channel concentrates whatever is already dissolved in it instead of diluting it. Wastewater permits in this watershed, including the one governing the Town of Saluda's system and the SCWSA WWTP, are written against a statistic called the 7Q10, the lowest 7-day average flow expected once every ten years. That figure exists precisely because permitted discharges depend on the river supplying a certain volume of dilution. Flow this far below the recent average is exactly the kind of condition that statistic is meant to anticipate. Both facilities are in fact currently listed in Significant Non-Compliance in EPA's records, though the compliance record on hand does not specify a pollutant exceedance, so this may reflect an administrative failure such as a missed report or deadline rather than a chemical discharge — either way, a river with far less water on hand to buffer a discharge is a condition worth watching alongside that status. Separately, no frogs, toads, or salamanders have been logged in the area over the past six months, against 88 other species recorded in just the last 30 days. That's a gap worth watching rather than reading into. The Eastern Spadefoot, logged nearby in early July, is an explosive breeder that depends on rain filling temporary pools, so a dry stretch like this one would plausibly suppress its breeding activity. But a six-month gap this size could just as easily reflect fewer observers out looking. It's a thread to check against wetland conditions going forward, not a conclusion to draw from yet.

Something is walking across the roads and yards on the north side of Mérida this August, and it has eight legs, a dense coat of bristles, and a rust-colored patch on its abdomen that gives it its name. The Yucatán Rust-rump Tarantula (Tliltocatl epicureanus) appears to be turning up in greater numbers than usual, with 30 sightings logged on iNaturalist this May-through-August window compared to 10 over the same stretch in 2025. Eight of those records came in the last two weeks alone, clustered in a band running from the city's edge out toward the coast. This spider is a Yucatán Peninsula endemic, found nowhere else on Earth, which makes any shift in its visibility here worth paying attention to. Like other mygalomorph tarantulas, the males spend most of their lives in a single burrow, ambushing insects and the occasional small vertebrate that wanders too close to the entrance. They only leave that burrow behind once they mature, and when they do, it is for one purpose: to wander in search of a female's silk-lined tunnel during the rainy season. A male that has left home for good, with no burrow of his own left to retreat to, is a male with nothing to do but keep moving, which is exactly what puts him in a driveway or crossing a road in broad view of a person with a phone. That life-history detail makes mating dispersal a plausible explanation for this year's higher count, though a growing number of people logging sightings on the app over the same period could also be inflating the numbers, and the underlying counts are still small enough that some of the swing could be noise. The pattern to watch for is whether these sightings taper off as the rains ease later in the season; that decline would be consistent with the ordinary, if dramatic, business of a mature male tarantula looking for a mate, rather than anything unusual happening to the species itself.

A year ago this week, Oklahoma County's Cross Timbers country carried almost no drought signal at all: barely 5 percent of the county rated even abnormally dry, and none of it fell into an actual drought category. Twelve months on, that picture has inverted. By early October 2025 the entire county sat in at least moderate drought, and by late spring 2026 severe drought covered all of it, with extreme drought at times blanketing the whole county through early April. There was real relief this summer. From late June into early August, severe-drought coverage eased to around 81 percent and extreme drought disappeared entirely. That reprieve didn't hold. Severe drought climbed back to nearly 98 percent of the county by the second week of August and has now returned to covering the entire county in the most recent data, though without the extreme intensity seen last spring. For the oaks, hickories, and understory of the Northern Cross Timbers, this kind of whiplash, wet enough to ease stress, then dry again within weeks, matters more than a single bad season would. These Cross-Timbers savanna-woodland trees are adapted to drought generally, with the thick bark and deep taproots that let post oak stands persist on thin, rocky soils for centuries. But repeated swings between stress and partial recovery leave less margin for root systems, and for the aquatic life in the streams threading through this landscape. Separately, the Midwest City North wastewater treatment plant was flagged for significant non-compliance under its Clean Water Act permit in this same stretch of county. EPA records show the matter as an administrative one — resolved, pending, tied to reporting or compliance-schedule requirements rather than a documented pollutant exceedance — and the facility has since returned to compliance. It's a reminder of the regulatory backdrop in a watershed already under drought stress, though not evidence of an active discharge harming water quality right now. The Watershed Sustainability Alliance and the Conservation Coalition of Oklahoma Foundation both do water-stewardship work in this region, and how they respond as drought conditions persist is worth watching.

A permit application under review at the DEC would rebuild roughly 270 feet of shoreline at 2 Noble Street on Greenpoint's East River waterfront, between Noble and Oak Streets, and carry a public waterfront walkway along with it. Alongside reconstructing the bulkhead and riprap revetment, the project would open a stretch of tidal shoreline that has been closed off to the public. Greenpoint's waterfront has been opening up gradually, parcel by parcel, as old industrial sites are rebuilt and each one adds its own segment of public edge. This is another step in that sequence: 270 more feet of a shoreline that is slowly becoming reachable. What that offers is a chance for people to reconnect with the estuary at their doorstep. Most residents here live a block from tidal water they can only see through a fence, and there is a good deal on the other side of it. Double-crested cormorants, black-crowned and yellow-crowned night herons, great egrets, ospreys, Atlantic horseshoe crabs, Atlantic blue crabs, striped killifish, Atlantic silversides and ribbed mussels have all been recorded around this part of the harbor in the past two months, cormorants among them on Quay and Franklin Streets, a few blocks from the site. A walkway is what turns all of that from something happening out of sight into something people can watch, learn and speak up for. The DEC is accepting comments through August 27. Comments go to Jeanette Rodriguez at DEC Region 2 (dep.r2@dec.ny.gov, 718-482-4997). This is the window to shape how the space gets built: where the walkway meets the water, whether the edge invites people to stop and look at the river or just pass by it, and what habitat the new bulkhead and riprap offer below the waterline. The Newtown Creek Alliance, a watershed group based nearby at the Newtown Creek-East River confluence, works this exact stretch of shoreline and would be a natural voice on how the access is designed. Anyone who uses this waterfront has until August 27 to weigh in.

Mumbai's fragmented green refuges have a persistent, uninvited resident. The African Giant Snail has been logged 12 times in the past 30 days and 48 times over the past year within protected and semi-protected green spaces bordering the Malabar Coast moist forests, with sightings recurring at the same key sites: Aarey Milk Colony, Mahim Nature Park in Dharavi, and Malabar Hill itself. Records show up nearly every month, three to eight a month, rather than clustering in one burst, which points to an established population rather than snails that wandered in and died out. This species, native to East Africa, is one of the most widely spread invasive land snails in the world, and it earns that reputation by being a generalist that eats through native seedlings and understory plants, competes directly with smaller native mollusks for food and space, and can carry parasites, including the rat lungworm nematode, that pose a real risk to anyone handling them or eating unwashed produce from infested gardens. In a city where these three sites are already squeezed to a fraction of what once bordered the Malabar Coast forests, a slow-breeding native plant community has little room to absorb sustained grazing pressure from a snail that can lay hundreds of eggs a year and shows no sign of dying back on its own. None of this shows the population is spreading beyond these sites or getting worse year over year, since recurring sightings can also just mean more people are looking. What the record does show is that the snail is no longer a passing curiosity at Aarey, Mahim, or Malabar Hill. It's a fixture.