Wood frogs lay eggs in vernal pools
June 4, 2026
The hollow between the oaks fills with water each spring, and by early summer it holds something else entirely. Wood frog egg masses float in loose clusters near the surface, each one a translucent globe the size of a softball. The water warms in the long June light, and inside each jelly sphere, dark embryos twist and turn.Wood frogs time their breeding to these temporary pools with precision that seems impossible. The adults emerge from winter refuges in the leaf litter when snow still patches the forest floor, drawn by the first warm nights to water that will vanish by midsummer. The males arrive first, their duck-like quacking filling the darkness as they call from shallow edges. Females follow, heavy with eggs, and the breeding happens quickly. Within days, the adults disperse back to the forest, leaving their offspring to develop in pools that exist on borrowed time.Each egg mass contains between 600 and 1,500 eggs, bound together in a protective gel that swells when it contacts water. The jelly serves multiple purposes. It insulates the developing embryos, keeping them warm during cool spring nights. It contains antimicrobial compounds that ward off fungal infections. And it creates just enough buoyancy to keep the mass floating near the surface, where sunlight can penetrate and algae can grow. These algae form a partnership with the developing tadpoles, producing oxygen that the embryos need while consuming carbon dioxide they release. The relationship begins before the tadpoles even hatch.Vernal pools exist because they dry up. This temporary nature makes them unsuitable for fish, which would otherwise devour wood frog eggs and tadpoles by the thousands. The pools fill with snowmelt and spring rains, warm quickly in the shallow basins, and support explosive growth of zooplankton and aquatic insects. Wood frog tadpoles feed on this abundance, growing rapidly through their larval stage. They must complete metamorphosis and leave the water before the pools dry, usually by late July. Those that develop too slowly die when their world disappears. The race against time has shaped everything about their life cycle, from the timing of breeding to the speed of development to the ability of newly metamorphosed frogs to survive immediately on land.Spring peepers call from the same pools, their high whistles weaving through the wood frogs' lower chorus. But the wood frogs depend on these particular pools in a way the peepers do not. Peepers can breed in permanent ponds and streams if vernal pools are unavailable. Wood frogs cannot. They need the fish-free environment that only temporary water provides. The pools scattered through New Hampshire's forests represent critical habitat, each one a nursery that appears and vanishes with the seasons.The water moves slightly in the evening breeze, and the egg masses bob at the surface like small planets in their own clear atmospheres. If you are walking near water that pools in forest hollows, the sound you hear might be spring peepers still calling in the gathering dusk, their voices thin and bright against the deeper quiet of early summer woods.
Dusted skipper and lupine in early summer
June 24, 2026
The open sandy areas near Concord hold a particular kind of stillness in early summer. The grasses stand thin, the soil between them pale and dry. Sundial lupine grows here in scattered patches, its spikes of blue-purple flowers just beginning to fade at the base while the upper florets still hold color. Look closely at those spikes and you may find something small moving: a dusted skipper, working the flowers or resting on a stem with wings half-open in the heat.The dusted skipper is a small, dark butterfly, the upper wings a deep brown with a faint dusting of gray scales near the body. It is a threatened species in New Hampshire, and its situation here is tied directly to sundial lupine, which is itself threatened across much of its northeastern range. The caterpillars of the dusted skipper feed on lupine and almost nothing else. A female will locate a lupine plant, lay a single egg, and the larva that hatches will construct a shelter by rolling a leaf and fastening it with silk. It feeds, molts, and eventually overwinters in that shelter at the base of the plant, pupating in late spring. The adult that emerges in early summer has only a few weeks to find a mate and start the cycle again before the window closes.This is the window right now. The lupine is in flower, which is when the adults are flying. That timing is not coincidental. The adult skippers do nectar on lupine, but they also use other open-area flowers nearby: spreading dogbane, common yarrow, annual fleabane. The frosted elfin, another threatened butterfly in this landscape, shares the same dependence on lupine for its caterpillars, and the two species can sometimes be found in the same patch. What limits both is the same thing: the lupine itself. Sundial lupine requires open, sunny, well-drained, sandy ground. It does not persist in shade or in dense grass. Across southern New Hampshire, that habitat has been compressed by development and by the natural succession of open land back into scrub and forest. What remains is patchy, and the populations of both butterflies are patchy to match.The sandy openings here are also under pressure from invasive plants. Smooth brome and autumn olive have both established in this area. Smooth brome is an invasive grass that forms dense sod, shading out lupine seedlings and filling the open ground the plant needs. Autumn olive, an invasive shrub, advances the succession of open areas toward dense cover. Neither species kills lupine outright, but both narrow the ground it can hold. The dusted skipper does not adapt to a different host plant. If the lupine goes from a site, the skipper goes with it.The grasshopper sparrow has been recorded in this area, and that tells you something about the structure of the habitat: open, grassy, with bare patches and low vegetation. It is the same structure that suits lupine. The two things are indicators of the same conditions, though they have nothing to do with each other directly. What they share is ground that has stayed open long enough for species with narrow requirements to establish.
Purple pitcher plant traps early summer insects
June 24, 2026
In the boggy margins near Weare, where sphagnum moss holds water like a saturated sponge and the ground gives slightly underfoot, the purple pitcher plant is open for business. Its hollow, fluid-filled leaves sit low among the moss, each one a deep reddish-green tube with a flared lip and a hood that does not close. This is not a snap trap. It works by waiting.The purple pitcher plant grows in nitrogen-poor wetlands, bogs, and wet meadow edges across the northeastern United States, and this is one of its strongholds in New Hampshire, where it is listed as threatened. The plant cannot extract enough nitrogen from the waterlogged, acidic soil beneath it, so it supplements by digesting insects. Each pitcher leaf is partly filled with rainwater and the plant's own secretions. The lip of the pitcher is lined with downward-pointing hairs and coated with a waxy surface that insects cannot grip. A fly or a small beetle lands, loses its footing, and falls in. Once inside, the walls are too slick to climb. The insect drowns. Then the digestion begins, carried out by enzymes the plant secretes into the water, along with bacteria and a small community of invertebrates that live inside the pitcher and break down prey alongside the plant's own chemistry. The plant absorbs the resulting nitrogen directly through the walls of the leaf.Early summer is when this strategy pays off most. Aquatic insects are emerging from nearby wetlands in numbers, and the long days mean more flight hours, more movement, more insects crossing the open ground of the bog. Crane flies, fungus gnats, small beetles, ants caught in the wrong place: these are the plant's most common catches. The pitcher does not distinguish. It attracts insects partly through color and partly through nectar glands around the lip, drawing in visitors that would otherwise have no reason to land on a leaf. If you look closely at a pitcher now, you may see the dark accumulation of past catches in the fluid below, or a small insect working its way toward the lip, not yet in trouble. The pitchers are at their most active this time of year. New leaves have fully formed and filled with fluid. The plant's single flower, which bloomed earlier in spring on a tall separate stalk, is finished, and the plant's energy has shifted entirely to trapping.The bog habitat that supports pitcher plants also supports winterberry holly along its wetter edges and partridgeberry threading through the sphagnum in lower, shadier patches. Wood frogs bred here in spring and have moved into the surrounding forest by now. Common garter snakes move through the margins and will occasionally eat the small frogs. None of these species interact directly with the pitcher plant, but they share the same wet, acidic ground and the same flush of early summer insects. The eastern phoebe hunting from a low perch nearby takes the same crane flies the pitcher plant is catching, by a completely different method. The bog is not a single system with a single logic; it is several overlapping ones, each species extracting what it needs from the same brief abundance.
