Night herons hunt the summer emergence
June 5, 2026
The sun sets late over the waterways near The Heights, leaving a long dusk that stretches into the blue hours of early summer. This is when the Black-crowned Night Heron begins to move. From the shadows of the sycamores and maples along the water's edge, these stocky, pale gray birds emerge to take their positions in the shallows. Their thick necks are drawn close to their bodies, and their bright red eyes scan the surface for the slightest movement.Early summer brings a surge of life from beneath the water. Mayfly nymphs, dragonfly larvae, midge pupae, and caddisfly cases that have spent months or even years developing in the mud and vegetation of ponds and slow-moving streams are now ready to transform. They rise toward the surface in waves, breaking through the water tension to shed their aquatic skins and emerge as flying adults. This emergence happens most intensely at dusk and into the night, when predatory fish are less likely to see them and when cooler air temperatures help preserve their delicate wings. The timing could not be better for the night herons, who are most active in these same twilight hours.The Black-crowned Night Heron is built for this kind of hunting. Its eyes are positioned to look forward and down, giving it binocular vision to judge distances accurately in low light. When an emerging insect breaks the surface or a larva moves through the shallow water, the heron strikes with startling speed. Its neck, compressed like a spring, shoots forward and the sharp bill pierces the water with barely a splash. The bird swallows its prey immediately and returns to its motionless stance. This is not the patient, slow-motion hunting of a Great Blue Heron in daylight. This is quick, precise work that takes advantage of a brief window of abundance. The aquatic insects are most vulnerable during their emergence, when they must reach the surface, split open their larval cases, and pump fluid into their new wings before they can fly. Those few minutes of transformation are when the night herons feed most successfully.The relationship extends beyond individual hunting success. These nocturnal herons help regulate aquatic insect populations at a critical life stage, and their feeding concentrates nutrients from the water back onto land through their droppings. The insects themselves are completing an ancient cycle, moving energy and minerals from the aquatic environment where they developed into the terrestrial world where they will mate and lay eggs. As the last light fades from the western sky and the first stars appear above the city, listen for the harsh calls of the night herons as they establish their hunting territories. The water around you holds this same emergence, this same patient hunt, this same movement of life between worlds.
Monarchs arrive as milkweed opens
June 24, 2026
Along the weedy margins of Brooklyn's open lots and park edges, the common milkweed is in full leaf now. The broad, paired leaves are a deep matte green, soft on the underside, and the plants stand knee-high or taller in the places where the soil has been disturbed enough to let them take hold. If you find a patch, look at the undersides of the leaves. You may already see what is coming.Monarchs are moving through the region in early summer, and the females are laying. Each egg is a single pale dot, smaller than a pencil tip, pressed to the underside of a milkweed leaf with a small amount of adhesive. A female may lay several hundred eggs over the course of a summer, but she places them one at a time, often one per plant, spreading the risk. When the egg hatches, in three to five days, the larva eats its own eggshell first, then begins on the leaf itself. Common milkweed produces a sticky white latex that contains toxic compounds called cardenolides. Most insects cannot feed on it at all. The monarch caterpillar can, and it sequesters those compounds in its own tissues as it grows. By the time it pupates, it is unpalatable to most birds. The milkweed's defense becomes the caterpillar's defense. The relationship is not mutual in the strict sense — the milkweed gains nothing from the monarch — but the monarch is entirely dependent on plants in this one genus. Remove the milkweed, and there is no workaround.In the same disturbed ground where milkweed grows, horseweed is coming up fast. Horseweed is a native plant, a tall and bristly annual in the aster family that colonizes roadsides, vacant lots, and any ground that has been scraped or compacted. It does not host monarchs. But later in summer, when it flowers, its small white heads will draw a range of small pollinators, and the monarchs that emerge from their chrysalises in August and September will need nectar sources for the long flight south. Horseweed and milkweed share the same ecological address: edges, gaps, disturbed ground, places that are not managed closely enough to be lawns but not wild enough to be forest. In a city like Brooklyn, that kind of ground is exactly where monarchs find what they need.The red milkweed beetle is already on the plants. It is a striking insect, bright red with black spots, and it feeds on milkweed throughout its life cycle. Like the monarch caterpillar, it tolerates the latex and accumulates the toxins. The large milkweed bug does the same, piercing the seed pods to feed on the developing seeds. A single milkweed plant in early summer can be carrying the eggs or larvae of multiple specialist insects at once, each one using the plant's chemistry in its own way. The common eastern bumble bee works the flowers for nectar and pollen without any of that chemical tolerance — it simply avoids the latex by working the open florets where the sticky sap is not exposed.
An osprey hunts the tidal shallows
June 27, 2026
The osprey is the only hawk that hunts by plunging into open water. Most raptors that take fish, like the great blue heron working the channel edge right now, wade or wait at the surface. The osprey drops from height and goes under, sometimes fully submerged, gripping fish with feet that are built for it: two toes forward, two back, and a rough pad surface that holds wet, slick prey. It shakes the water off before it even clears the surface, then repositions the fish headfirst in its feet for the flight back. That repositioning isn't incidental. A fish held sideways creates drag. The osprey corrects for it almost immediately. Watch one carry a fish any distance and you'll see it.Early summer is the best time of year to watch this. The days are at their longest, which means more usable hunting hours, and the tidal shallows here warm quickly through June. That warming matters because of what it does to insects. Mayflies are emerging from the bottom sediments of these channels right now, in the hundreds and thousands. They have spent months underwater as nymphs, and they are coming up to molt, mate, and die within a day or two. That emergence draws fish to the surface in a way that almost nothing else does. Striped bass, white perch, and juvenile bluefish move into shallow water to feed on the insects, and they feed near the surface, where an osprey can reach them. The mayfly emergence is not something the osprey targets directly. It targets the fish that the mayflies concentrate. The insects are doing the work of aggregating the prey.This kind of stacking, where one emergence event creates feeding conditions for something further up the chain, is common in tidal systems. The double-crested cormorant uses it too, diving from the surface into the same channels where fish are feeding. But the osprey and the cormorant aren't really competing for the same fish. The cormorant works subsurface and takes what it can run down underwater. The osprey needs fish close enough to the surface to be visible from above and catchable in a short dive. They are using the same channel at different depths.The black-crowned night heron, which roosts nearby and feeds at the channel margins after dark, is working a different shift entirely. In early summer the nights are short, but the heron's low-light vision and patient stand-and-wait approach let it take fish that have moved into the shallows to feed on invertebrates after sunset. What looks like a single habitat, one stretch of tidal marsh, is actually being used in sequential layers through the day.The osprey is still circling. It has adjusted its position twice, drifting downwind and then correcting back. Its head stays level while its body moves with the air. When it folds and drops, it will happen fast, and it will happen without warning. If you are watching the water below it rather than the bird itself, you will miss the moment entirely. The surface is flat and bright, and somewhere just under it, a fish is feeding.
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