Field reports

Spotted lanternflies are in their adult stage now along the river towns, from Kingston and Port Ewen up through Saugerties, across the river in Red Hook, Rhinebeck and Tivoli, and up into the Catskills at Palenville and Woodstock. The adult (Lycorma delicatula) is about an inch long with gray forewings speckled black. When it jumps, the hindwings flash red with black spots and a white band. Most people meet it first on a house wall, a car door, or the trunk of a tree-of-heaven along a road. Spotted lanternflies follow a set life cycle in general: eggs hatch in spring, nymphs pass through four stages (black with white spots, then red), and adults typically emerge by mid-summer, with mating beginning in late summer. That puts the population here now in the egg-laying phase, which runs from now until the first killing freeze, likely mid-to-late October in this area. Each female lays one or two masses of 30 to 60 eggs and coats them in a putty-like layer that starts creamy white, dries to pinkish gray, then darkens and cracks until it looks like a smear of dried mud. On a tree, most masses end up ten feet or more above the ground. But they go on almost any smooth surface: rock, a fence post, split firewood, the side of a trailer. That last habit is how the insect travels. Adults are poor fliers. They walk and jump and cover a few miles at most in a lifetime. The long moves happen when egg masses ride on vehicles and firewood, and the places they are turning up this month fit that: riverfront streets, road corridors, a fairgrounds, a college campus, rather than deep forest. Both nymphs and adults feed by piercing bark with needle-like stylets and drawing sap from the phloem, the inner bark. Tree-of-heaven, itself an introduced tree from the same part of Asia, is the host on which they survive best and lay the most eggs, and it is thick in Kingston, where it was recorded again this week. Where dozens crowd one trunk, the bark weeps sap and the insects rain sugary honeydew onto everything below. The honeydew grows a black sooty mold and draws yellowjackets and ants. Trees rarely die from the feeding; they are stressed by it. Grapevines are the exception. Heavy feeding can cut yields drastically and kill vines outright. Wild riverbank, summer and fox grapes were all logged around Red Hook and Rhinebeck in the past two weeks, and the valley's vineyards are the one crop with real losses on the line. Native animals have started eating them. Cardinals, catbirds, blue jays and tufted titmice all take adults, as do praying mantids, wheel bugs, orbweaver spiders and spined soldier bugs. None of these predators came over with the insect. Researchers have also proposed that lanternflies feeding on tree-of-heaven may store its bitter compounds, potentially making them less palatable to some predators — a hypothesis still being tested, not a confirmed effect on their numbers. Dutchess and Ulster are both counties where the state considers the insect established. The DEC's ask is plain: kill adults on sight, scrape egg masses into a bucket of hot soapy water or a bag of hand sanitizer, and check vehicles, firewood and outdoor gear before moving them, especially when leaving an area where lanternflies are thick. Reports of specific locations are still welcome through iMapInvasives. From here until the first hard frost is the window when scraping an egg mass removes up to sixty of next year's nymphs at once.

Tamalpais lessingia (Lessingia micradenia var. micradenia) is a small daisy that grows nowhere on earth except a few serpentine outcrops around Mount Tamalpais. It was in flower at Cascade Canyon Open Space Preserve above Fairfax at the end of August, and it has been logged through this season along Pine Mountain Fire Road toward Bolinas and on the Marin Municipal Water District lands between the two. Its entire known range runs from Phoenix Lake on the north side of Tamalpais to French Ranch near Forest Knolls. It is an easy plant to walk past. It is a wiry annual, anywhere from a few centimeters to knee height, with spreading branches and often a hairy or woolly surface. The upper leaves are small and pointed, under two centimeters long. The lower leaves wither early, so by September the plant is mostly stem. The flower heads sit singly or in small clusters at the branch tips. Each head has no ray petals at all, just a few funnel-shaped, lobed disc florets in pale purple to nearly white, wrapped in bracts tipped with purple and sticky with glands. From a few steps away it reads as specks of pale pink scattered among greenish-gray rock and cured grass. The rock is the reason it is here and not somewhere else. Serpentine soil weathers from the ultramafic rock exposed along the Tamalpais ridges, and its chemistry is hostile to most plants. It holds very little calcium relative to magnesium; most plants want the two roughly balanced, and serpentine topsoil commonly runs three parts magnesium to one part calcium. It carries elevated nickel, chromium and cobalt, and little nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium. It is also thin, gravelly and quick to dry. Plants that persist on it generally keep nickel out at the root or take up calcium selectively over magnesium. How this particular lessingia manages the chemistry has not been studied. Its timing is unusual for a serpentine annual. Most of them flower early and set seed before the soil dries out. Tamalpais lessingia flowers from late May through September, in the weeks when the surrounding grassland has already gone brown. The likeliest explanation is the ground itself rather than any special drought physiology, though no study has measured it in this plant. Thin, rocky serpentine holds far less grass than deeper soil, so there is little around the lessingia drawing down moisture and nothing shading it. Whatever water lingers in the gravel and rock cracks through summer is largely its own. That same gradient is where the pressure on it lies. Deeper serpentine soils hold more grass and more of it non-native; shallow, rocky serpentine holds more of the natives and endemics. Anything that deepens or enriches soil at the edge of an outcrop, such as fill graded along a road shoulder or added nutrients, moves the ground toward the grass-dominated side. In South Bay serpentine grasslands, nitrogen settling out of vehicle exhaust has been documented doing exactly that, fertilizing thin soils enough for annual grasses to crowd out the native forbs. The California Native Plant Society ranks this variety 1B.2, rare and moderately threatened. It has no federal listing, unlike its serpentine neighbors Marin dwarf-flax and Tiburon jewelflower. The water district's own rare-plant inventory puts about half the watershed's rare species and 80 percent of its sensitive-species occurrences on serpentine ground, so any grading, grazing or vegetation work on those tracts lands on this plant's habitat by definition. For the next few weeks it is still findable. Look where a fire road crosses bare greenish rock and the grass thins to almost nothing, on Pine Mountain Fire Road or the upper trails of Cascade Canyon, and check the wiry, near-leafless stems at knee height for pale heads no bigger than a fingernail.

The discharge permit for the Metropolitan Syracuse wastewater treatment plant, the single largest pipe into Onondaga Lake, is up for renewal and modification, and the state is taking public comment on the draft through October 2. The plant sits at 650 Hiawatha Boulevard West on the lake's south shore and treats the sewage of Syracuse and most of the county. On September 2 the DEC published a draft permit and a tentative decision to approve Onondaga County's application, with a finding that the changes will have no significant environmental impact. That decision is provisional until the comment window closes. Onondaga Lake's recent history runs through this plant. In the 1990s the treated effluent carried about 90 percent of the ammonia and somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the phosphorus entering the lake from outside, on roughly a fifth of the water. Ammonia is toxic to fish and the phosphorus fed the algae that stripped the deep water of oxygen every summer. Fewer than ten fish species were holding on in the lake. The county then rebuilt the plant: a biological filter that converts ammonia to nitrate came online in 2004 and a high-rate settling stage for phosphorus followed in 2005. Ammonia loading from the plant fell 98 percent and phosphorus loading fell 86 percent. In 2008 the state took the lake off its impaired-waters list for ammonia, and DEC biologists now count about 60 fish species using it. Walleye, yellow perch, freshwater drum, longnose gar and channel catfish have all been recorded in the lake over the past two years, and a common logperch, a small bottom-hugging darter, turned up there today. The introduced round goby and European carp are in the same records. The lake is not clean. Both the north and south basins remain on the state's impaired-waters list for other pollutants, each under a pollution budget, and the lake bottom is a federal Superfund site listed in 1994 for industrial contamination that predates any sewage upgrade. What the plant controls is the part of the problem that has actually been turned around, which is why the terms of its permit matter more here than they would on most lakes. They matter a little more this month. The plant normally sends about 130 cubic feet per second of treated water into the lake, roughly 20 percent of everything that flows in over a year. Onondaga Creek at the Spencer Street gauge, just before it reaches the lake, is running at 52.9 cubic feet per second. The plant is currently putting in about two and a half times as much water as the creek. Two weeks ago the creek's collapse upstream at Dorwin Avenue was the subject here; since then the abnormally dry area of Onondaga County has grown from 85 percent to essentially the whole county, and the natural inflow to the lake has kept shrinking while the plant's contribution holds steady. In a dry fall the lake's chemistry is more a function of what comes out of that pipe than in a wet one. The plant is not on EPA's current list of facilities in significant noncompliance. The published notice does not spell out what the modification changes, and that is the first thing anyone reading the draft should look for: whether the effluent limits for ammonia and phosphorus stay where they are, tighten, or loosen, and what the permit requires when heavy rain pushes the plant toward its wet-weather capacity of about 371 cubic feet per second. Comments go to Trendon Choe at DEC Region 7 in Syracuse (dep.r7@dec.ny.gov, 315-426-7438) through October 2.

A flock of eleven Elegant Terns (*Thalasseus elegans*) was resting at the Garibaldi Marina on Tillamook Bay on September 11. This is a bird of the Gulf of California and the Southern California coast. More than nine in ten of them nest on a single island, Isla Rasa, in the Gulf of California, and only five nesting colonies remain in the world. Another was photographed in Tillamook County in late April, so the species turns up on this coast in more than one season. Picking one out from the Caspian Terns that also work this bay is mostly a matter of the bill. An Elegant Tern is a slim, crow-sized tern with a long, thin orange bill that droops slightly toward the tip. A Caspian Tern is a much heavier bird with a thick, deep red bill, and in flight its outer wing feathers are mostly black from below where the Elegant Tern's are pale with dark tips. Royal Tern, scarce this far north, also has an orange bill, but a stouter one, and a short bushy crest that stops behind the eye with white between the two. The Elegant Tern's crest is longer and shaggier; it starts above the eye, wraps around it and runs down the nape. In September the adults show a white forehead rather than the full black cap of the breeding season, and young birds are grayer above with a gray crown and more mottling. Common and Forster's Terns are smaller still, with slighter bills, and neither carries the shaggy nape. The tern makes its living on small schooling fish, northern anchovy above all, along with sardine, topsmelt and jack mackerel. It hunts by fluttering over the water on long pale wings and plunging headfirst to seize a fish in the bill, usually within ten miles of shore and often within sight of it. How many chicks a colony raises in a given year tracks the anchovy closely. The bird goes where the fish are. That is what brings it to Oregon. After the breeding season ends, Elegant Terns spread up and down the coast following anchovy schools, and most turn back south by October. In an ordinary year the northward push stops in northern California. In warm-water years it reaches Oregon, Washington and sometimes British Columbia, and Oregon's fish and wildlife department lists the species as a regular post-breeding visitor to this coast, roosting with gulls on spits, sandbars and mudflats near bay mouths, which is exactly the setting at Garibaldi. The water off this coast is warm this year. Buoys off Tillamook and at Astoria Canyon read 59 to 61 degrees in early September, against a mid-September norm near 55 degrees for this stretch of coast, inside a marine heatwave that has covered the California Current through the summer. NOAA reporting this year has anchovies and sardines shifting north with the warm water.

An Eared Grebe (*Podiceps nigricollis*) has been sitting on the water at Morse Park, on the shore of Morse Reservoir in Noblesville, since at least the second week of September. Birders have reported a single bird there thirteen times, most recently on September 14. This is a western bird. Eared Grebes nest on prairie marshes and shallow alkaline lakes from the Dakotas west to the Sierra, and most of them never come this far east. In central Indiana the small grebe that usually shows up on the reservoirs in fall is the Horned Grebe, and by mid-September the two look alike enough that the differences matter. Both have shed their breeding colors; the Eared Grebe's black neck and gold ear tufts are gone by now. What is left is a dusky little diver with a peaked crown. The peak sits at the center of the head on an Eared Grebe and toward the back on a Horned Grebe. The Eared Grebe's forehead rises steeply, its neck is thinner, and its bill is finer, with the lower edge angled slightly upward so the whole bill looks tipped up. Its face is the best mark at a distance: on a Horned Grebe the white cheek and neck are clean and bright, with a straight border against the dark cap; on an Eared Grebe the gray bleeds down into the cheek and the neck stays gray rather than white. An Eared Grebe also rides with its rear end cocked up out of the water, which a Horned Grebe does not do. How this species spends its autumn is unlike almost any other bird. From late summer into November nearly the whole North American population, close to 99 percent of it, flies to two salt lakes, Mono Lake in California and Great Salt Lake in Utah, to feed on brine shrimp and alkali flies. There each bird more than doubles its weight, from around 260 grams to over 600, while its digestive organs swell and its chest muscles shrink by about half. The birds become flightless for three to four months while they fatten, then rebuild the flight muscles and leave for the Gulf of California and the Salton Sea. Because a version of this cycle repeats several times a year, the Eared Grebe spends roughly nine to ten months of each year unable to fly, longer than any other bird that still flies at all. The bird at Morse Park is not doing any of that. There are no brine shrimp in a freshwater reservoir, so it is diving with its feet for what the impoundment offers: small fish, insect larvae, and small crustaceans. It flew here and will have to fly on, so its chest muscles are intact. It is a bird that peeled away from the movement toward the salt lakes, or was never headed there, and settled on the largest open water it could find in a county of till-plain farmland and subdivisions. Morse Reservoir is a dammed stretch of Cicero Creek, and to a grebe that is what matters: deep enough to dive in, wide enough to be seen from and to leave from. Anyone checking from the park should look for a lone, low-floating bird well out from shore, smaller than a coot, diving often and staying down long. If it is still around, the face pattern and the tipped-up bill will settle the identification.

Severe drought now covers nearly nine-tenths of El Paso County, and it got there in about six weeks. In the second week of June the U.S. Drought Monitor had none of the county in severe drought or worse. By mid-June 12 percent was. By the first week of July it was 58 percent, by the end of July 93 percent, and by the middle of August 97 percent. Extreme drought, the next category up, went from none at the end of June to 65 percent of the county in the week of August 11. The latest map, for the week of September 8, puts 90 percent of the county in severe drought or worse and 40 percent in extreme drought. The retreat of the extreme category since mid-August is the only movement toward wet. County-wide August rain came to about 2.1 inches, half an inch under the 1901-2000 average, enough to pull part of the county back from extreme to severe but not enough to move the severe line. September has added nothing. Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, 12 kilometers from the grasslands, has measured no precipitation this month against a normal of 0.63 inches, and its average daily high over the past 30 days was 86.9 degrees, 7.4 degrees above the 1991-2020 normal for those dates. The timing lands on the grasses that define this ground. Blue grama, sideoats grama, big bluestem and little bluestem are all recorded across Bluestem Prairie Open Space, and all four are warm-season grasses that flower and fill seed from July into September. The drought set in during the first week of July, at the start of that window. These grasses answer dry soil by letting the leaves brown and drawing sugars and nitrogen down into the crown and roots, where the buds for next year's tillers sit. Seed heads that had already started can finish on stored reserves. New tillers and root growth stall. Blue grama's production on the shortgrass steppe tracks growing-season rainfall far more than temperature, so a summer that turned dry in early July is a summer of short growth no matter how warm it ran. From the trail this reads as a prairie that cured early. Warm-season grasses brown every fall, and this year the drought pushed that turn ahead of the calendar. The open question is next spring. Regrowth after rain comes slower where the crown reserves were spent getting through the dry spell, and how much of that happened here depends on what falls between now and the first hard freeze.

Half of Gunnison County is now in exceptional drought, the most severe category the U.S. Drought Monitor uses. In the week of September 8 the share of the county rated exceptional jumped from about 22 percent to just over 50 percent. The other half of the county is in extreme drought. For the first time this year, none of the county is rated any better than extreme. The severity had been flat for most of the summer. From mid-August through the end of the month, about 80 percent of the county sat in extreme drought or worse and about 22 percent in exceptional. The first week of September pushed the extreme-or-worse figure to 91 percent. The second week took it to 100 and more than doubled the exceptional share. Two weeks did what the previous two months had not. The Drought Monitor's own description of the exceptional category is exceptional and widespread crop and pasture losses, with shortages of water in reservoirs, streams and wells creating water emergencies. Statewide this season, 64 percent of Colorado's pasture and rangeland is rated in poor or very poor condition, against a five-year average of 23 percent. That is a statewide number, not a Gunnison Basin one, but the basin's hay meadows and upland sagebrush are inside it. The shortfall starts high above the basin. The Butte snow station, at 10,190 feet about 24 miles from Gunnison, has recorded 18.6 inches of precipitation since the water year began last October, 74 percent of its median for the date. Cochetopa Pass, at 10,020 feet about 32 miles out, has recorded 11.7 inches, 70 percent of median. Those are precipitation totals, not snow on the ground; both stations are bare in September as they always are. Tomichi Creek runs on that mountain water. It peaks in late May or early June and recedes through the summer, with several small irrigation diversions drawing from it along the way. The gauge on Tomichi Creek at Gunnison read about 20 cubic feet per second this week, on a creek that still has a month or more of recession ahead of it before winter. Brown trout are the fish most exposed to a thin September flow in this reach. They spawn in fall, from September into December, once the water cools into roughly the 41 to 54 degree range, and they need enough depth and current to reach clean gravel and keep a nest of eggs watered and silt-free through the winter. A creek reduced to shallow riffles and separated pools blocks that movement and leaves whatever gravel is used at risk of drying out. Water near the Gunnison gauges was running around 54 degrees this week, which is comfortable for trout. The trouble with a small volume of water is not that it is warm now; it is that it heats and cools faster across a day and loses its buffer against low oxygen. The case-building caddisflies logged along these streams through August do the coarse work of shredding the leaves that are beginning to fall into the channel now, and they need cool, continuously moving water over gravel to do it. Satellite passes this week show no cluster of fire detections within 30 miles of Gunnison, only a single weak nighttime pixel near Crested Butte that could be almost anything. The sagebrush is going into dormancy dry, with grasses and forbs beneath it cured, and that is the fuel that carries fire through sagebrush country. The next Drought Monitor map comes out September 18.

The water year closes in two weeks, and the tally for the headwaters above these forests is close to set. The three snow-survey stations that measure what falls on the high country here, Burro Mountain 11 kilometers away at 9,290 feet, Bison Lake 24 kilometers out at 10,950 feet, and Trapper Lake 42 kilometers out at 9,750 feet, have taken in 78, 79 and 70 percent of their median precipitation for the year so far. All three are bare of snow, and the accumulation season at these sites does not begin until late October. Barring a wet last half of September, those numbers stand. In Garfield County, this same week last year, extreme drought covered the whole county and none of it was in the exceptional category, the most severe one on the map. Exceptional drought stayed absent through the winter, appeared across a quarter of the county in the last week of March, spread to three-quarters by late April, and held near half the county from late May through August. As of the week of September 8 it covers 34 percent of the county. Ninety-seven percent remains in extreme drought or worse, as it has for nine weeks running. A dry year following a dry year matters more to the trees here than either year alone. Engelmann spruce fight off spruce beetle with resin, and a tree's ability to produce it depends on water. Tree-ring reconstructions of past outbreaks in northwestern Colorado spruce forests, published in the journal Ecology by Hart, Veblen and colleagues, found that outbreak timing tracked drought more closely than it tracked temperature. Experiments on Engelmann spruce found photosynthesis falling off once stem water potential dropped past a threshold under both short and chronic water stress. A spruce that spent last summer drawing down its reserves enters this one with less to spend. Aspen fail differently: severe drought cavitates the vessels that carry water from root to leaf, and the stands most exposed are the low, south-facing ones. Weakened aspen then draw poplar borers, aspen bark beetle and Cytospora canker. The fire season followed the same curve. The Dry Creek Fire burned 315 acres south of Rifle in late June. The Elk Knob Fire, a lightning holdover in the Flat Tops Wilderness, was contained August 19. The Derby Fire near the Flat Tops prompted evacuation notices around August 20. By mid-September the whole of the White River National Forest was under Stage 1 fire restrictions, which bar campfires anywhere outside developed sites, with the Forest Supervisor noting that conditions remain dry, particularly at the higher elevations. Satellite fire-detection systems, which flag heat signatures from active burns, have shown no such detections within 50 miles in the past five days. In the creeks, the USGS streamgauge on Elk Creek at New Castle read 1.33 cubic feet per second this morning, down from 16.5 a month ago. That gauge sits at the valley mouth around 6,800 feet, below irrigation headgates that stay open on the Western Slope through October; it reads what is left of the creek after diversions, not the headwater flow itself. Brook trout in the Flat Tops drainages spawn once water drops below 9 degrees Celsius in October, and their eggs need groundwater moving up through clean gravel to stay oxygenated. Low fall water can cut fish off from those sites and starve the gravel of flow. Native cutthroat trout, logged on iNaturalist last October along Mitchell Creek near Glenwood Springs, run a narrower thermal window, with mortality setting in above roughly 19.6 degrees Celsius. The Middle Colorado Watershed Council, based in this stretch of the Colorado River valley, tracks streamflow, forest condition and fire risk across this drainage.

A wryneck stopped at Beddington Farmlands last week, one bird, reported on 10 September among the grassland, scrub and lakes being built back on the old sewage-farm ground beside the Wandle. It drew a steady line of birders, which is the usual reception for this species in Britain now. The wryneck (Jynx torquilla) is a woodpecker that does not act like one. It is a little larger than a sparrow and slimmer than a song thrush, grey-brown all over, barred and mottled so finely that a bird sitting still reads as a piece of bark. A dark stripe runs from the crown down the back. The tail is square and grey, and its feathers are soft rather than the stiff props a great spotted woodpecker braces itself with, so a wryneck does not climb trunks. The bill is short and pointed, made for probing soil, not chiselling wood. Look for it low: on a path edge, a bare patch, the foot of a bramble. It moves with slow, jerky hops, flicks its tail and keeps turning its head. When cornered it twists its neck round in a slow, snake-like writhe, and that habit gave it its name. It lives almost entirely on ants. Photographs at Swiss nests found ants in 95 percent of feeds, and most of what the birds carried in was not workers but larvae and pupae, dug straight out of the nest chamber. It reaches them with a sticky tongue that extends something like ten centimetres beyond the bill on a bird under twenty centimetres long. The ants it takes most in Europe belong to genera such as Lasius and Tetramorium, colonies that sit in warm, dry, bare ground or under short turf, which is why a wryneck's whole life turns on the presence of open ground it can get its tongue into. On migration it will use almost any open place with a few bushes, including ground with no trees at all. Beddington, with its rough grassland, scrub edges and the disturbed earth of ongoing restoration, offers that kind of ground, though the record does not say what the bird was doing there. Nearly every wryneck seen in Britain now is a passage bird. They move between breeding grounds in Scandinavia and wintering grounds in Africa, and they turn up here on easterly winds, mostly in September, mostly on the east coast, with a scatter inland like this one. The British Trust for Ornithology puts the annual total at around 360 birds. Two centuries ago the wryneck bred across southern England. The last English pair nested in 1985, a few hung on in Scotland into the early 2000s, and the species is now considered extinct as a British breeder. The leading explanation is a loss of the bare ground and short vegetation its ants need, along with intensified farming and pesticides, but the case is not closed; the bird has also fallen steeply across western and central Europe while holding on in the east and south, and some researchers suspect the problem lies partly on the African wintering grounds. A single bird hopping through a restoration site in September is what the species now looks like here: passing, briefly, on ground that happens to be open.

Garganey are back on the Mula-Mutha at Kavdi Pat, the stretch of river about fifteen kilometers downstream of Pune where the road from Hadapsar ends in paddy fields at the water. Five were counted there on September 8. They are the first of the wintering ducks to reach this reach of river, and they are on schedule; Garganey (Spatula querquedula) are among the earliest ducks to arrive in India each autumn and among the last to leave, with some staying on peninsular wetlands into May. Anyone going to look for them should not expect the bird on the field guide plate. The drake's white stripe curving from the eye down the back of the head and his pale grey flanks belong to breeding plumage, and he is not wearing it now. After nesting the males moult into a drab eclipse plumage and keep it well into the winter. In September the whole flock reads as streaky brown ducks. The drake keeps a slightly stronger head pattern and a whitish chin, and when he stretches or flies he shows a pale blue-grey forewing. That forewing is the mark. Common Teal, the other small brown duck on this water in autumn, flies on a dark forewing with a green speculum. On the water the Garganey is a little larger than a teal and carries a heavier, all-grey bill. Its head is more strongly striped: a pale eyebrow over a dark eye-stripe, a pale patch at the base of the bill, and a clean whitish throat with no streaking. Indian Spot-billed Ducks share this river all year and are easy to separate, roughly twice the bulk, with a black bill tipped yellow and a red spot at its base. Garganey are dabblers. They feed swimming with the head under, picking from the surface, or upending in water a few inches deep, and they take seeds, pondweed, roots and shoots along with worms, snails, crustaceans and insect larvae. They often feed at night and rest through the day, so a daytime count can miss birds tucked into the reeds. The birds reaching Pune have migrated in from breeding grounds well to the north, arriving early as Garganey typically do. What they find at Kavdi Pat is a low-gradient stretch of river where the channel spreads into shallow pools, sandbars, mudflats and reed beds as the monsoon flow drops. As the river recedes through October and November, the shallows fill with algae, sedge, small fish and insects, and the ducks and waders gather in numbers. Five Garganey in the second week of September is the beginning of that season.

Sonoran Desert Tortoises (Gopherus morafkai) have been out on the ground across the Tucson basin from mid-August into the second week of September, most of them in the Avra Valley west of the city and a smaller set on the rocky slopes below the Catalinas. This is the one stretch of the year when the odds of meeting one on a trail are good. The animal spends most of its life underground or under rock, and it comes out mainly in daylight during the monsoon, when the rain has greened up the forage and filled the shallow pools it drinks from. It is a domed, high-backed tortoise the color of the caliche it digs into, with a shell somewhat narrower and more pear-shaped than the Mojave desert tortoise's. The two species are split by the Colorado River and do not overlap here, so any wild tortoise on this side of the river is the Sonoran one. It favors steep, rocky ground and the bajadas below it, not open valley floor, and it shelters in burrows it digs itself, in caliche caves, and in rock crevices. The tortoise drinks from puddles a finger deep by putting its nostrils to the surface and pulsing its throat to pull the water in. It also scrapes basins in the soil to catch rain and remembers where they are, walking directly to them when a storm passes. What it takes in goes into a bladder that can hold water for extended periods and release it back into the bloodstream as the body needs it. When a rain finally comes after a long dry spell, a tortoise drinks heavily, voids the concentrated urine it has been carrying, and stores fresh water in its place. In a hard drought an adult can go a long time without drinking. It eats plants only, leaning on annual wildflowers first and then grasses and cactus, with prickly pear fruit taken whenever it is ripe. September is also hatching season. Eggs laid in early summer, buried in the floor of burrows, hatch in September and October, though some clutches hold over and hatch in spring. A hatchling is about the size of a silver dollar and soft-shelled for years. Only a small fraction reach adulthood. Those that do mature between 13 and 20 years old and can live 50 to 80 years, which means a tortoise crossing a trail this week may have been crossing the same slope since before the surrounding subdivisions were built. Breeding peaks in August and September as well, so two adults seen together right now are likely a courting pair. iNaturalist flags the species as threatened, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reviewed it and found in 2022 that federal listing was not warranted, and it does not appear on the current federal list for this area. The pressures on it are the same either way. Buffelgrass, an introduced African grass now widespread around Tucson, burns hot enough to kill saguaros and palo verdes on slopes that never evolved with fire. The tortoise needs an unburned desertscrub slope with rock to hide in and annuals to eat after rain. Anyone who finds one should leave it where it is. A tortoise picked up or frightened may void its bladder, and in a dry year that is the water it was counting on to get through to the next storm.

A Yellow-legged Hornet (*Vespa velutina*) was photographed near Waldshut, on the German bank of the Rhine, in the last week of August. This is the introduced Asian hornet that Swiss cantons have been asking the public to report, and Waldshut is a short flight across the river from the Unterland woods around Bülach, Eglisau and Kloten. The native European Hornet (Vespa crabro) is the thing it gets confused with, and size does not separate them. Colour does. The Yellow-legged Hornet is a dark insect. Its thorax is velvety black. Its abdomen is mostly black, with a single broad orange band on the fourth segment and a thin orange line nearer the waist. Its legs are dark down to the middle and then bright yellow to the tips. The European Hornet, by contrast, is a warm-coloured insect. Its thorax is reddish-brown. Its abdomen is largely yellow, with black markings on the front segments. Its legs are brown all the way down. The leg tips are the quickest check. Yellow feet on a dark hornet mean the Asian species. The colony is an annual structure. A mated queen wakes in March and builds a small paper nest in a sheltered spot, often on or in a building; the primary nest the City of Zürich removed in Witikon last year was in a shutter box. Once the first workers emerge in June the colony usually moves to a second, much larger nest high in a tree, often above ten metres, which can reach 60 centimetres across and hold around 2,000 workers at once. Mid-September is when these colonies are at their largest and are producing males and next year's queens. The big nests are almost impossible to see against summer foliage. Most of them are only found after the leaves drop in October and November, and by then the new queens have usually already flown. Those queens spend the winter alone in soil, in rotting logs and stumps, or under loose bark, exactly the material a broadleaf forest floor supplies. Everything else in the nest dies with the frost. The hornet earns its reputation at beehives. Workers hover at the hive entrance and snatch foragers coming home with pollen or nectar, drop them to the ground and paralyse them. Bees under this pressure stop leaving the hive, honey yields fall, and winter losses rise. It is not only a bee predator, though. A study of 16 nests in southwest France found honeybees made up about 38 percent of prey, flies about 30 percent and social wasps about 20 percent, with 159 prey species in all; colonies in forest took more wasps and colonies in towns took more honeybees. Bumblebees and solitary bees were a very small share. A single colony is estimated to take roughly 11 kilograms of insects over a season. The regional picture comes from the cantonal authorities rather than from this one sighting, and the figures below reflect how much reporting effort has gone into finding and logging nests, not necessarily how the population itself is changing. Canton Zürich received about 100 reports through the national platform in 2025. The City of Zürich removed a primary nest in Witikon and a secondary nest at a forest edge in Schwamendingen last year, and by mid-July this year had already logged four primary nests. A nest was also found in the Eigental reserve near Kloten, and the canton says it is now drawing up criteria for which nests to destroy first in sensitive habitats. Canton Aargau, further along the Rhine, had sightings of the hornet as early as 2022 and 2023. Anyone who sees a dark hornet with yellow feet on the Swiss side can report it, with a photo, at asiatischehornisse.ch; on the Baden-Württemberg side, the state nature conservation administration runs a reporting portal. Spring is when the small primary nests on buildings are easiest to find and remove, but the coming weeks of leaf fall are when the big canopy nests finally show themselves.

Early September is the part of the year the California red-legged frog (Rana draytonii) spends away from water. Breeding ran from November into April. By now most adults have left the ponds and moved into the surrounding hills, sitting out the dry months under rocks, in leaf litter, in animal burrows, or down in the cracks of a pond bottom that has already dried. A frog can travel a mile overland in wet weather and settle two miles from where it bred. The sightings logged this month, from the park canyons of San Francisco down the Pacifica shore around Sharp Park and north across the Golden Gate into the Mount Tamalpais hills, are single frogs in refuge, not a gathering at any one pond. It is the largest frog native to California, up to four and a half inches from snout to rump. The back is reddish brown to olive with irregular dark blotches. A raised ridge of skin runs along each side from behind the eye to the hip. A dark mask crosses the face above a pale stripe on the upper lip. Turn one over, or catch it mid-leap, and the belly and the undersides of the hind legs are washed in red; that is the name. Young frogs may show yellow there instead of red, with heavier spotting on the back. Two other frogs share these hills. The Sierran treefrog is a fraction of the size, two inches at most, with toe pads and no side ridges, and it owns the loud two-part ribbit of the movie soundtracks. The red-legged frog's own call is a low, stuttering grunt that carries poorly. The American bullfrog is the one to look at hard. It is bigger, green about the snout, with a very large eardrum behind the eye, and it lacks both the side ridges and the pale lip stripe. Its call is the deep jug-o-rum. The bullfrog matters for more than identification. It was introduced to California, it breeds over a longer season, and its tadpoles eat red-legged frog eggs and tadpoles. In one study, red-legged frog larvae sharing a pond with bullfrog tadpoles survived at under five percent, against thirty to forty percent where bullfrogs were absent — the proposed mechanism is direct predation by bullfrog tadpoles and juveniles on red-legged frog eggs and larvae, plus competition for the same shallow-water habitat. Not every study finds that pattern; some point out that bullfrogs tend to turn up where ponds have already been altered, so the two effects are hard to pull apart. Bullfrogs were logged through the same weeks this summer around Mill Valley and Lake Lagunitas, in the same Marin hills as one of this month's red-legged frog records. Whether the two share any particular pond is not something the records show. What the red-legged frog needs from a pond is specific. Eggs go into shallow water at the vegetated edge in loose clusters and hatch within two weeks. The tadpoles then take three and a half to seven months to become frogs, so a breeding pond has to hold water from winter into summer. It also has to stay cool. The frog cannot survive water above 29 degrees Celsius (about 84 F), and ponds with willows and cattails standing over deep water do best. The emergent plants do double duty: they hide tadpoles from herons and fish, and they warm the shallows enough to grow the algae the tadpoles feed on. The species is listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, and mapped critical habitat overlaps the Peninsula. Anyone who finds one of these frogs this fall, under a board or beside a seep well away from open water, is seeing the non-breeding phase that can take up as much as eleven months of its year.

A Yellow-legged Hornet (Vespa velutina nigrithorax) was photographed on Henri Schoofslaan in Auderghem on September 8, a few streets from the edge of the Forêt de Soignes. It's the invasive Asian hornet known for preying on honeybees, and iNaturalist records show it turning up repeatedly across the wider Brussels region this year: well over a hundred sightings logged in the past twelve months alone, spanning communes from Auderghem, Ixelles and Watermael-Boitsfort to Tervuren, Wemmel and Leuven. That pattern of records doesn't establish population size or trend — sightings track observer effort as much as anything — but it does show the species is being found widely and repeatedly around the forest, not just this once. Telling it from the native European Hornet takes one look at the color. The European Hornet is a big yellow wasp with black bars and a reddish-brown head and thorax. The Yellow-legged Hornet is the reverse: velvet black or dark brown, each abdominal segment edged with a thin yellow line, a single broad orange band toward the tail, an orange face, and legs that end in bright yellow as if dipped in paint. It usually runs a little smaller. The yellow feet are the mark most people catch first. September is when its colonies are as large as they will get. A nest at this point holds a few thousand individuals, and the workers are provisioning larvae at full tilt. This is the month for the behavior beekeepers dread: workers hang in the air in front of a hive entrance, pick off single bees returning heavy with pollen, then cut away head, wings and legs and carry the thorax home. Honeybees are not the whole diet, though. Nests studied in southwest France took honeybees for about 38 percent of their prey, flies for about 30 percent and other social wasps for about 20 percent, with more than 150 prey species in all. Colonies near forest leaned harder on native wasps; colonies in town leaned on honeybees. A single nest can take roughly eleven kilograms of insects in a season, which is why the concern extends to native pollinators and not just to hives. The nest itself is usually invisible right now. A queen starts small in spring, low in a shrub or under a roof edge, and by summer the colony shifts to a large paper nest high in a tree canopy. In beech and oak stands like the Soignes those only show once the leaves drop in October and November, by which point the colony is already producing next year's queens. Workers and the old queen die with the cold. Only the mated young queens overwinter, each one capable of founding a new nest in spring. Brussels handles this through Bruxelles Environnement, which trains a referent in each commune to take sighting and nest reports. A hornet hovering at a hive, or a large grey nest appearing in a bare canopy this fall, is what to report.

A Connecticut Warbler (Oporornis agilis) turned up on September 11 on a restricted-access property along Posquiello Creekside Road, a single bird working the ground cover. It is one of the least-seen warblers in the East. Most birders who have one on their list found it this way, on a fall stopover in the Northeast, and never on its breeding grounds in the tamarack and spruce bogs and jack pine stands of the boreal forest. It is a plump, short-tailed warbler with a gray hood, an olive back and a yellow belly. The mark that catches the eye first is the eye-ring: complete, white and bold. The legs are long and pink, the bill is heavy and spike-like, and the feathers under the tail run nearly to its tip. Mourning Warbler is the lookalike. It is slimmer, its eye-ring is broken or missing, and a male in spring carries black on the breast where the Connecticut is plain gray. Nashville Warbler has a similar eye-ring but a yellow throat, is much smaller, and feeds up in the trees. The surest tell is how it moves. A Connecticut Warbler walks. It paces slowly along the ground or a low branch, bobbing its short tail, and flips dead leaves to get at the insects underneath, the way an Ovenbird does. Nearly every other warbler hops. On stopover it keeps to the bottom of the understory: weedy field edges against woods, thickets, tangles of goldenrod and jewelweed. Whoever is looking for one is looking at the ground, not the canopy, and usually waiting a long time. The bird's migration runs in a loop. In spring it comes north through the middle of the continent. In fall it swings east to southern New England and the Atlantic coast, and from there it flies out over open ocean. In 2017, researchers fitted geolocators to birds breeding in Manitoba and later recovered four of them. The tracks they read showed roughly 48 hours nonstop over the Atlantic, some 1,700 to 2,400 kilometers, to Cuba or Hispaniola. The birds then spent about a week on the ground there. From there they crossed another 800 kilometers of water to Venezuela and continued on to wintering grounds in the Amazon basin. The bulk of the species passes through the Northeast in the second half of September. A bird on the Hudson on the 11th is on the early side of that window, feeding in the leaf litter before the long overwater leg.

A Green Snaketail (*Ophiogomphus cecilia*) was recorded twice on August 27 in the Bolina valley in Katowice, the two sightings a few hundred metres apart on the stretch of stream and old mine ponds between Giszowiec and Janów-Nikiszowiec. It is a dragonfly of sandy lowland rivers, and the ground it was seen over is about as far from that as Upper Silesia gets. The adult is hard to mistake once seen well. It is a large dragonfly, 50 to 60 millimetres long, with an apple-green face, green eyes and a green thorax marked with thin black lines. The abdomen is black with a broken run of yellow triangles down the top and widens slightly toward the tip into a modest club. The eyes do not meet on top of the head; a small ridge sits between them, which is the mark of the clubtail family. Freshly emerged animals show no green at all and take on the colour only as they mature. Males hold perches on sunlit stones, sandbanks and bare branches over shallow, fast water and patrol short beats low over the surface. They avoid shaded banks. The larva is where the species' needs are set. It is a burrower, built with a flat, shovel-like lower lip and digging front legs, and it spends two to four years buried in the sand or fine gravel of a flowing river bed, taking whatever small invertebrates pass. It digs in almost the moment it touches bottom, at any current speed. That is why the species drops out of rivers that are straightened, dredged, lined with concrete or smothered in silt: whatever the water chemistry, there is nothing left to burrow into. The EU protects it under the Habitats Directive, and the loss of sandy river beds is the main threat named in its accounts. The Bolina is a regulated and polluted stream for most of its length. The ponds strung along it, Staw Bolina among them, formed out of mining, and the greatest variety of life on the stream is found at its headwaters and around those ponds, which is where both records sit. Whether a river dragonfly is breeding anywhere in that system is a question two sightings cannot answer. Adults of this species regularly wander several kilometres from the river they emerged in, into sunny clearings and along heated paths, before returning to water to breed. August 27 sits inside the normal June-to-September flight season, a few weeks past the late-July to mid-August peak. So a dragonfly whose whole early life depends on clean, loose river sand was flying over a valley that mining shaped. Anyone walking the paths around the Bolina ponds on a sunny September afternoon can still look for a green-fronted dragonfly the length of a finger, sitting flat on bare ground or a stone, and know what it takes to make one.

Elegant Terns are on Tillamook Bay this week. Twenty-nine were counted on the bay on September 6, and observers have kept reporting them in the days since. For a bird that nests almost entirely on one small island in the Gulf of California, the northern Oregon coast is a long way from home, and September is exactly when the species gets here. The Elegant Tern (Thalasseus elegans) is the smallest of the three crested, orange-billed terns that show up on this coast, and the easiest way to pick one out is to stand it next to the others. Caspian Terns, the big ones that have been rasping over the bay all summer, carry a heavy blood-orange bill and show mostly dark undersides to the outer wing. Royal Terns sit in between in size and bill weight. An Elegant Tern is slim and long-winged, with a thin yellow-orange bill that droops a little at the tip, a shaggy black crest that by fall has pulled back to leave the forehead white, a deeply forked tail, and pale underwings tipped in black. On a tideflat the Elegants tend to stand in their own tight knot a short distance from the Caspians rather than mixing in. In the air they flutter on narrow wings and drop straight into the water after small fish. Those fish explain the whole story. Elegant Terns feed heavily on northern anchovy, and once the breeding season ends on Isla Rasa the birds scatter along the coast in both directions, following the schools. Each autumn a pulse of anchovy moves north up the California Current, and Brown Pelicans, Heermann's Gulls and Elegant Terns ride along behind it. How far north the terns push varies from year to year with where the fish are. Their movement tracks anchovy availability, which itself shifts with ocean conditions off Baja California. Brown Pelicans and Heermann's Gulls are on the bay this same week, the same company the terns keep down south. Elegant Terns remain an uncommon enough visitor here that the reports were flagged when they came in. The place to look is the sandbars and tideflats at low tide, where the flock loafs between feeding runs, and the channels and nearshore surf where single birds hover and plunge. A slender, drooping bill and a nearly white underwing are the two marks that settle it.

Two Henslow's Sparrows were reported in the tallgrass prairie at Peck Farm Park in Geneva on September 7, part of a handful of early-September checklists from the Geneva Park District's 385-acre park, in an area generally described as the western edge of the morainal country. Henslow's Sparrow (Centronyx henslowii) is a bird more people have read about than seen. It spends nearly all its time on the ground inside dense grass, walking and hopping rather than flying. When flushed it flies low for a few yards and drops back into cover. Its song is a dry two-syllable "tsi-lick," delivered from a low grass stem, often called the weakest song of any North American songbird. Anyone trying to pick one out from the other small sparrows in the same grass should look at the head. Henslow's is stocky and short-tailed with a flat-looking, oversized head washed olive-green on the face and nape, and the breast is streaked dark. Grasshopper Sparrow, its closest lookalike, is paler and buffier with a clean unstreaked breast. Savannah Sparrow shows crisp streaking on white underparts and a yellow patch in front of the eye that neither of the others has. What the birds at Peck Farm are doing is fueling up. Henslow's Sparrow breeds in Illinois. It needs large tracts of grass left unmowed and unburned long enough to build a thick mat of dead stems and litter, and the state's breeders have mostly left by late August. Birds still in northern Illinois in September are almost certainly migrants passing through at night toward wintering grounds on the southeastern coastal plain. In September they are still eating mostly insects, crickets and short-horned grasshoppers above all, plus beetles and caterpillars. The shift to a seed diet of wiregrass, sedge, ragweed and smartweed comes in winter, farther south. The litter layer is the whole story for this bird. It nests low in the grass under standing dead stems from prior years, and it will not use a field that was burned or hayed the same season. That puts it in tension with prairie management, because tallgrass prairie needs fire to keep shrubs and trees out. Studies of burned grasslands show Henslow's numbers dip the first summer after a burn, peak in the second and third years as the thatch rebuilds, and fall off again by the fourth as the stand gets too rank. The answer managers have settled on is to burn in rotation, a third of the ground at a time, so some patch is always in the two-to-three-year sweet spot. The Geneva Park District manages roughly 300 acres of prairie across its properties and burns about 100 acres every 18 months, which is that rotation in practice. Rangewide, the species lost enormous ground through the twentieth century as prairie and hayfield went under the plow, and estimates from Partners in Flight put its global population at roughly 410,000 birds, though figures vary by source. Since the early 1990s, idle grassland set aside under the Conservation Reserve Program has driven local increases across parts of the Midwest. Some Bird Conservation Network surveys in the Chicago region have suggested an increase over the past fifteen years, though the trend is not consistent across all survey sites and sizeable populations remain confined to large grasslands. The prairie at Peck Farm is far smaller than that. It is a place a migrant can drop into for a few days on the way south, and that depends on the grass being there, thick and unburned that season, when the bird arrives.

Severe drought arrived in Cumberland County in the middle of August and has not let go. On the August 4 drought map, none of the county was in severe drought. One week later, just under a third of it was, and that share has held flat at 31.59 percent for four straight weekly updates through September 7. Moderate drought or worse now covers 68.91 percent of the county, up again this week, and the whole county is at least abnormally dry. No part of it has reached extreme drought. The rain is not coming to fix it. The Portland Jetport station, four kilometers from this stretch of coast, has recorded a tenth of an inch so far in September against a 1991-2020 normal of 0.62 inches for the same days. Overnight lows there are running a couple of degrees above normal. Last summer the county came through its third-driest June-to-August on record, so this is dry ground going dry again. The place that shows it first is the small water. The Stroudwater, the Nonesuch, the Spurwink and the little Presumpscot tributaries that feed Scarborough Marsh are low-gradient, shallow streams with thin groundwater reserves. When base flow drops, they stop running and start pooling. The riffles that normally stir air into the water go dry or shrink to a trickle. The pools left behind warm faster in the afternoon sun, and warm water holds less oxygen. Brook trout, a coldwater fish recorded in South Portland this spring, run into trouble near 21 degrees Celsius and avoid water below about 4 milligrams per liter of oxygen, a number a stagnant September pool can approach. Early September adds a second load on top of the first. Leaves are beginning to drop into the channels. In a stream that is flowing, that litter gets torn apart and carried downstream by caddisflies, stoneflies and mayfly larvae, the shredders that do most of the work in a forested headwater. In a stream that has stopped moving, breakdown falls mostly to bacteria and fungi. The leaves rot in place and pull oxygen out of the same pools the heat is already squeezing. The bedrock underneath most of this lowland is old metavolcanic and metasedimentary rock with almost no limestone, so the streams have little chemical capacity to buffer anything that concentrates as the water shrinks. The trees are the other place to look. True fall color comes on gradually, at about the same time each year for a given species, and moves through the whole canopy. Drought damage looks different. It shows up weeks early, patchy, one branch or one side of the tree first, with scorched brown leaf margins and leaves dropping before they finish turning. On red maple and red oak that is browning from the leaf tips inward. On white pine it is rust-colored branch tips where needles have died. A maple that goes brown and drops in early September has not had an early autumn. It has sealed off leaves it can no longer afford to keep, and the nutrients in those leaves are lost rather than drawn back into the wood. What breaks the pattern is rain, enough of it to reconnect the pools and put the riffles back to work before the water cools on its own schedule. Until then the streams of this lowland are running a deficit that started in August and is compounding into September.

A single American Golden-Plover (Pluvialis dominica) has been working the farm ground along West Sherwood Road west of Fowlerville for the past several days, seen again on September 7. It is a long way from any shoreline, and that is the point. This is a shorebird that prefers dirt to water: plowed fields, sod, short pasture, anywhere the vegetation is low enough that a bird can see what is moving on the ground in front of it. Watch it for a minute and the method is plain. It runs a few steps, stops dead, scans, then darts forward to pick something off the soil, much the way a robin hunts a lawn. It is finding prey by eye, not by probing, which is why it wants bare or close-cropped ground rather than the mudflats other shorebirds crowd onto. In a September field that means beetles, grasshoppers, ants, flies, spiders and earthworms turned up by tillage or exposed on short turf. By this date the bird has mostly shed its summer look. The black face and belly and the gold-spangled back that give the species its name are gone or going; adults are patchy and buff-gray, and a juvenile wears crisp, evenly scaled plumage with a fine gold speckle across the back. In that drab state the bird to rule out is the Black-bellied Plover, which also stops in fields on migration. The golden-plover is smaller and slimmer, with a noticeably finer bill and a smaller head, and its folded wingtips extend well past the tail. If it lifts, the difference is settled at once: Black-bellied shows a black patch in each wingpit in every plumage, golden-plover's underwing is plain gray, and its rump and tail are dark like its back rather than pale. This bird is partway through one of the longest journeys any shorebird makes. It nested this summer on Arctic tundra somewhere between Baffin Island and the Bering Sea. It will winter on the pampas of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. The route is a loop rather than an out-and-back: in fall most of the population stages along the Atlantic coast of Canada and New England and then flies nonstop over the western Atlantic to the north coast of South America, a single overwater leg of roughly 2,400 to 3,100 miles with nowhere to land, rest or feed. In spring they come back up through the middle of the continent, through the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley, feeding in open fields much like this one. The full circuit runs on the order of 20,000 miles a year. A field in Livingston County is an inland refueling stop on the southbound leg, after the tundra and before the coast. Adults leave the Arctic first, in July and August, and juveniles follow from late August into October, so the timing here fits either a late adult still heading south overland or a first-year bird on its first passage, fattening on Michigan insects before a flight that will not touch ground again until Venezuela or the Guianas.

Black Storks are passing over the Sierra de Alpujata. On September 3, watchers at the Mirador de las Águilas above Mijas logged them on half a dozen checklists, never more than two at a time, riding thermals off the ridge on their way southwest. That is right on schedule. September is the peak month for the species at the Strait of Gibraltar, and this lookout, which exists to count soaring birds on the autumn passage, sits roughly a hundred kilometers up the coast from the crossing at Tarifa. Overhead, a Black Stork (Ciconia nigra) is easy to mistake for its common cousin until the light hits it. Both are the same size, about a meter tall with a wingspan near a meter and a half, and both fly with neck and legs stretched straight out, which is what separates any stork from a heron. The White Stork is white with black flight feathers. The Black Stork is the reverse: black head, neck, back and wings, with a green and purple gloss in good sun, and white confined to the belly and undertail, so the bird reads as dark with a pale patch behind the legs. Where White Storks cross in flocks of dozens or hundreds, Black Storks come singly, in pairs, or in small loose groups, which is why two at a time is a typical count here. The habits are as different as the plumage. White Storks stride through open pasture and follow tractors; Black Storks are shy, wading slowly through shallow rivers and marshes, usually alone, hunting by eye. The bird walks head-down through the water or stands with wings outstretched, then lunges with the long bill. Fish make up most of the diet in the breeding season, with frogs, eels, salamanders, small reptiles and the occasional small mammal filling in. Iberian pairs are unusual among Black Storks in that many nest on cliffs, boulders and overhanging ledges in mountain country rather than in big forest trees, and they are wary enough that finding and monitoring those nests is hard work. The birds crossing the Málaga sierras now have a reason to hug the ridges. A stork is a soarer, not a flapper. It climbs on a column of warm air rising off a sun-heated slope, glides to the next, and climbs again. Cold sea makes no thermals, so the last thing a three-kilogram bird wants is to leave land early. The coastal ranges, Alpujata, Sierra Bermeja, then the hills above Tarifa, work as stepping stones that deliver it to the narrowest point of the Strait with height to spare for the fourteen-kilometer jump. Those that cross keep going to the West Sahel, wintering on wetlands in Mali and Nigeria. Not every Iberian Black Stork makes the trip anymore. Since at least the early 2000s a growing number have stayed to winter in Spain and Portugal, most of them on rice fields, reservoirs and ponds. Spain lists the species as Vulnerable in its national catalogue of threatened species, and the pressures named are the ones that hit its feeding water: altered river flows, drought, over-extraction and pollution, all a long way from a dry ridge like this one. Counters at the Mirador de las Águilas have tallied nearly 900 Black Storks since 2008, a small share of the soaring traffic on this flyway but a steady one. A dark stork over the ridge in the first weeks of September is exactly what the lookout was built to catch.

Two Hudsonian Godwits (Limosa haemastica) have been working the mud at the north end of the East Pond at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, reported there repeatedly through September 7. They are plain gray-brown birds at this season, nothing like the chestnut of the field-guide breeding shots, and from the shoreline they read as a tall, long-necked shorebird with a very long, slightly upturned bill that is pink at the base. Size is the quickest handle: bigger than the Willets around them, smaller and grayer than a Marbled Godwit. If one flushes, the identification settles itself. A Hudsonian flashes black underwings, a black tail and a white rump; a Marbled Godwit flashes solid cinnamon, and a Willet shows a bold black-and-white stripe across the whole wing. The reason this pair is interesting has to do with where the rest of the species is right now. Hudsonian Godwits breed on the edge of the boreal zone, with a large population centered on the southern shore of Hudson Bay. In late summer they gather on James Bay to fatten, then most of them leave on a nonstop flight over the Atlantic toward South America, wintering on tidal mudflats in Argentina and Chile. The migration runs as an ellipse: north through the middle of the continent in spring, south over open ocean in fall. The Atlantic Coast sits off to the side of that southbound line, and the species turns up here mainly when northeasterly winds push birds inshore. Whatever brought these two down, a stop at Jamaica Bay is a chance to refuel before a flight that, for most of their kind, is measured in thousands of miles without landing. What they are doing on the mud is feeding by touch. The bill looks stiff, but the tip flexes, and the bird drives it into soft sediment, feels for something moving, clamps down, then steps forward and probes again, dowitcher-fashion, sometimes with the head under water. The catch is worms, amphipods, small crabs, snails and insect larvae living in the top few inches of mud. The East Pond is not tidal flat. It is an impoundment, and the National Park Service drains it into the bay each year from July into September specifically to expose mud for southbound shorebirds and to give them somewhere to feed and rest while the tide covers the flats out in the bay. September is the tail end of that drawdown window, which is why the north end of the pond is one of the most watched pieces of mud in New York City right now. Anyone who gets there in the next week or two has a fair chance of picking out the two gray godwits among the yellowlegs and dowitchers, and of seeing a bird that is normally far offshore at this time of year, standing in Queens.

Two eastern diamondback rattlesnakes (*Crotalus adamanteus*) have been logged around Stuart in the past two weeks, one north toward Jensen Beach on September 4 and one south near Port Salerno on August 30. This is the largest venomous snake in North America, and the pine flatwoods and palmetto country along the Treasure Coast is the habitat it is built for. An adult runs three to six feet, thick-bodied, tan to gray, with a row of dark diamonds down the back, each one outlined in pale scales. A dark band crosses the eye toward the corner of the jaw, bordered above and below by light stripes. The rattle settles most questions: cottonmouths and banded water snakes have none, and the pygmy rattlesnake, which does, rarely reaches two feet. In Florida this snake lives mainly on rabbits. It finds a rabbit run by scent, coils beside it, and waits, sometimes a week in the same coil. Heat-sensing pits between eye and nostril pick out a warm body in the dark, the strike reaches about two-thirds of its body length, and then it lets go and follows the scent trail to the dead animal. On an ordinary day it moves thirty feet or less. Late summer into fall changes that. Mating season in Florida runs from August into the cooler months, and males give up the sit-and-wait routine to travel, tracking females by pheromone trail and wrestling other males in a ritualized contest the loser simply leaves. That travel carries them across roads and through yards, and it is when most of them die. Early September is the stretch of the year when a diamondback is most likely to be seen crossing open ground. Females mated now give birth six to seven months later, usually ten to fourteen live young, and a female breeds only every two or three years. It does not dig. For shelter from cold and from fire it borrows gopher tortoise burrows, armadillo holes, stump holes and root channels, and rests in palmetto thickets between. Flatwoods naturally burn every one to four years; that fire keeps the palmetto low and the ground between the pines open, which is what the rabbits need and therefore what the snake needs. Left unburned much past that, the understory closes into gallberry and palmetto. Savannas Preserve State Park and Atlantic Ridge Preserve State Park, both managed for biodiversity, are the large tracts of that fire-kept flatwoods in this corridor. Florida holds roughly half of what remains of this snake's range, and the state's own status assessment records it as gone from some urbanized parts of the southeastern peninsula, naming the loss of gopher tortoise burrows among the causes. iNaturalist flags the species as threatened; it carries no federal listing. Anyone who meets one on a trail this month can give it the room it wants. It is a patient animal, and it was almost certainly there first.

Severe drought now covers just under half of Kennebec County. A week ago it covered under seven percent. The U.S. Drought Monitor map for the week ending September 7 moved most of the county from moderate to severe drought in a single step, and the way it got there matters: the county was merely abnormally dry in mid-July, went to moderate drought across nearly all of its area by the first week of August, then sat at that level for three straight weeks before tipping over. Moderate drought or worse now covers 98 percent of the county, every acre of it is at least abnormally dry, and none of it has reached extreme drought. A jump like that is less a new weather event than a running deficit finally crossing a line; the dryness underneath it has been building since early August. What gives it teeth here is the calendar. The Sebasticook River, which passes Burnham and Clinton on its way to the Kennebec at Winslow, carries the largest alewife run in the country, roughly a few million adults a year over the Benton Falls fish lift since the Fort Halifax dam came out in 2008, with a peak of 5.7 million in 2018. Those adults spawned in Unity Pond and Sebasticook Lake in May and June and went back to sea. Their young have spent the summer in the lakes, growing from something that looks like a mosquito larva into a silver fish one to three inches long, feeding on zooplankton and, in the process, carrying phosphorus out of lakes that both already sit on the state's impaired-waters list. Late August through September is when the young fish leave, and they leave in pulses. The Maine Department of Marine Resources describes fall rainstorms as the trigger that sends them out of the lake outlets in dense schools toward Benton Falls and the sea. A dry September removes that cue. Maine fish-passage programs name drought as one of the main hazards for exactly this size class at exactly this season, because juveniles that never get the signal stay in warm, food-limited lake water longer, and juveniles that do move through low water bunch up at every constriction, where eels, herons, mink, otters and eagles already hunt them each fall. Whether this year's cohort is running on schedule is not something anyone has counted; the fish lift tallies adults in spring, not juveniles in fall. What can be said is that the county crossed into severe drought in the same week the young alewives would normally be starting to go. Anyone who wants to see the run should watch the lake outlets and the tailrace at Burnham after the next real rain, and look for a moving raft of finger-length fish, not scattered individuals. Sebasticook Regional Land Trust, which started as Friends of Unity Wetlands and later absorbed the Sebasticook River Watershed Association, runs paddles above the Burnham dam and bird walks at Unity Pond, and its Moulton's Mill Preserve in Unity sits on Twenty-five Mile Stream, one of the feeders of this system.