Field reports

River otters are being seen along the East Bay shoreline again this month, at the Albany waterfront on August 27 and off Emeryville five days earlier. Both spots are old fill and riprap pushed out into the bay, which sounds like poor otter ground until you look at what the animal actually needs. A river otter (*Lontra canadensis*) is a long, low member of the weasel family, ten to thirty pounds, with a thick tapering tail that makes up about a third of its length. On this shoreline the animal it gets confused with is the sea otter, and the differences are easy once you know them. A river otter swims belly down, head and back breaking the surface; a sea otter floats on its back. A sea otter is several times heavier, with a short stubby tail, and almost never leaves the water. Any otter hauled out on the rocks at the Bulb or trotting along the Emeryville breakwater is a river otter. They cross land readily and will travel considerable distances overland between one body of water and the next. They eat whatever is easiest to catch: fish first, then crabs and other crustaceans, and on occasion frogs, ducks and eggs. On brackish shorelines studied elsewhere, finfish and crustaceans make up most of the diet, and the animals take readily to man-made structure, using riprap and pilings as latrines. Those latrines, piles of scat full of fish scales and crab shell on a prominent rock, are often the first sign of otters on a stretch of shore, well before anyone sees the animal. The catch with living in salt water is the fur. An otter has no blubber; it stays warm because a dense underfur traps air, and that only works if the coat is kept clean. Otters groom after every meal, and in salt water they need fresh water to rinse with, which is why their haul-outs and dens cluster around creek mouths, seeps and freshwater ponds rather than open rocky shore. Codornices Creek, the one creek in this stretch that runs year round from the Berkeley Hills to the bay, reaches the water at the Albany-Berkeley line just south of the Bulb. Most of its neighbors, Cerrito and Temescal among them, are culverted for much of their length and deliver what little September flow they carry through storm-drain outfalls. A shoreline with a living creek mouth is better otter ground than one without. For most of the twentieth century there were no otters to see here. Fur trapping and the condition of the bay's water are the usual explanation for their absence, and it was after trapping was ended in California and water quality rules took hold that they began turning up around the estuary again, by the 2010s in places where they had been gone for generations. Cesar Chavez Park, stewarded by the Chavez Park Conservancy, sits on the Berkeley waterfront between the two places otters were seen last month, and the rocks along that shore are where to look for tracks and scat.

Eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina) are still on the move in the limestone valleys. Eight were logged between August 8 and August 26, from the farm country west of Reading to the wooded hills toward Boyertown and south into Lancaster County, one of them right in the heart of the valley on August 15. Late summer is the easiest time of year to meet one: a high-domed shell about the size of two cupped hands, dark brown or black with a scatter of yellow and orange marks, working slowly along a field edge, a woods road, or, too often, the shoulder of a paved one. What sets a box turtle apart from every other turtle here is the hinge across the lower shell. When threatened it pulls in head and legs and shuts the plastron up against the upper shell front and back, sealing itself completely. A snapping turtle or a painted turtle can't do that. If it opens up again, get a look at the eyes: males usually have red or orange eyes, females brown. This time of year they are eating what the season drops. Box turtles forage by day and take almost anything, earthworms, slugs and insects early in the summer, then shifting toward fungi and fallen fruit as those come on in late summer and fall. A turtle picking through a patch of mushrooms or under a wild grape or mayapple is doing ordinary early-September work. Seeds pass through it intact, so a turtle that eats fruit in one spot and wanders off carries the next generation of that plant somewhere new. The wandering, though, happens on a small scale. A box turtle spends its life (sixty years is not unusual, and some go well past that) in a home range of a few acres, and it knows that ground. Move one across the county and it will try to walk home. Move it across a road and it will usually try to cross back. That is why the right thing to do with a turtle in the road is to carry it to the side it was already heading toward, and no farther. Later in the fall, as the nights cool, each one digs into loose soil under the leaf litter, often in the same place it used the year before, and waits out the winter in a torpor a few inches underground. A slow animal that lives in a few acres for six decades and has to cross the same roads every year is exactly the kind that can disappear from a patch of woods while still looking common everywhere else. iNaturalist flags the species as threatened; it carries no federal listing. In these valleys, where woodlots sit between fields and subdivisions and every one of them is edged by pavement, the road shoulder is where most people will meet one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.