Field reports

Elfin Skimmer (Nannothemis bella) — North America's smallest dragonfly and a fastidious clean-water specialist — turned up here in early June. It is a striking sighting in this region, where all 47 assessed water bodies within the locale are impaired and none support their designated uses. The insects we see flying above the water are windows into what lives below: dragonfly nymphs spend years underwater developing, so their presence or absence is a direct statement about dissolved oxygen, chemistry, and the substrate conditions that support aquatic life. Recent dragonfly surveys in the area have logged roughly 22 observations across a dozen species over the past two months. The appearance of the Elfin Skimmer alongside this broader dragonfly activity creates a tension worth holding in mind — one small, particular species announcing that something here is clean enough, while the watershed as a whole remains listed as compromised. It suggests the margin between recovery and decline may be thinner than it appears.

A Dragonhunter and a Gray Petaltail appeared on the plateau this spring—both dragonflies that demand clean, cold-flowing water to breed and thrive. The Gray Petaltail is among Earth's oldest dragonfly lineages, one of the relicts of a deep evolutionary past, and it breeds only in the cold seeps that have nearly vanished from this landscape. Yet here they are, still present. Against that resilience sits a harder fact: 10 of 26 local water bodies are officially impaired, their chemistry or flow degraded beyond regulatory standards. For creatures with such exacting requirements, the margin between survival and disappearance narrows with each season. That these two species persist here at all is worth marking—and worth protecting.

Saguaro fruit is dropping. On June 22, while flowers still hung open on the towering cacti, ripe fruit began falling to the ground—a critical food pulse that sustains the desert's animals before the monsoon arrives. Over the past 60 days, hummingbirds have responded in force, with more than 110 sightings recorded across the region. Costa's Hummingbirds were last seen on June 18, their breeding season waning as migrants and other species move in to claim the sugar-rich bounty. White-winged Doves are already on the ground foraging the fallen fruit—the reliable sign of the harvest. For the Tohono O'odham people, this moment marks their new year. The ripening of saguaro fruit has long been the signal to gather, using long saguaro-rib poles to knock more fruit down and call the summer rains. The ecological and cultural calendars align precisely here; what the desert needs and what its people have always practiced remain one and the same.

The common milkweed along the edges of White River State Park is in full leaf now, broad and upright, the stems thick with a white sap that bleeds if you snap one. This is peak summer in central Indiana, the longest days of the year, and the milkweed is doing exactly what monarchs need it to do: growing fast, producing new leaves, staying green and full of the compounds that make it both toxic and essential. A female monarch finding a milkweed patch does not land randomly. She walks the leaves with her forelegs, which carry chemoreceptors sensitive enough to detect the plant's chemistry through contact. She is tasting the leaf before she commits. If the plant is right, she curves her abdomen and deposits a single egg on the underside of a leaf, pale green and ridged, smaller than a pencil eraser. Then she moves on, usually to a different plant, sometimes to a different patch entirely. A single female may lay several hundred eggs over her breeding season, but she spreads them deliberately. One egg per leaf, rarely more. This matters because a caterpillar that hatches has only so much leaf within reach before it needs to move, and if eggs are clustered, caterpillars compete. The eggs hatch in three to five days, depending on temperature. The caterpillar that emerges eats its own eggshell first, then begins on the leaf. It feeds for roughly two weeks, molting through five distinct stages, each one larger and more boldly striped in yellow, black, and white. The milkweed's sap contains cardiac glycosides, compounds that are toxic to most vertebrates. The caterpillar does not detoxify them; it sequesters them, storing them in its own tissues. By the time it pupates, it is chemically defended, and the adult butterfly that emerges carries that protection forward. A bird that eats a monarch and gets sick will avoid the pattern afterward. The warning coloration is not decorative; it is the advertisement of something real. Common milkweed is doing more than feeding monarchs right now. Its flowers, dense pink-purple clusters that bloom just before midsummer, draw a wide range of insects. The brown-belted bumble bee works milkweed flowers regularly, and the western honey bee, an invasive species introduced from Europe, is often present in the same patches. Milkweed flowers have an unusual structure: the pollen is packaged in small paired sacs called pollinia, and an insect visiting the flower can accidentally slip a leg into a groove and pull the whole structure free, carrying it to the next plant. The mechanism is passive on the plant's part, but it is precise enough that pollination depends on insects of a certain size and strength. Small insects sometimes get trapped by it. The monarchs here are part of the eastern population, the one that overwinters in the mountains of central Mexico and moves north through the spring and into summer. The individuals laying eggs on Indianapolis milkweed now are likely two or three generations removed from the butterflies that left Mexico in spring. Each generation breeds and dies farther north, and it is the late-summer generation, not yet born, that will make the full return migration south. That generation will live for eight or nine months rather than the four to six weeks of a summer adult. What triggers the difference is not entirely settled, but shortening days and cooling temperatures in late summer are part of it. If you are near any patch of milkweed right now, it is worth looking at the undersides of the leaves. The eggs are small enough to miss at a glance, but they are there if the monarchs have found this patch. Look for the ridged oval, pale green against the leaf's surface. The plant itself smells faintly sweet where the sap has dried on a broken stem. Somewhere in the warm air above, if you watch long enough, a monarch may drift through, angling low over the vegetation, checking what the summer has left for it.

The rocks along the Tiburon shoreline are wet from the last tide and warming fast in the summer sun. Where the water pulled back, the intertidal zone is exposed: barnacle-crusted granite, mats of green algae, and the dark crevices where striped shore crabs spend the hours when the sea is away from them. Striped shore crabs are flat, quick, and about the size of a closed fist. Their carapace is mottled olive and brown with thin pale lines running across it, which makes them nearly invisible against wet rock until they move. And they do move, constantly, during low tide. They forage along the intertidal margin, turning over small stones, scraping algae, picking apart anything soft enough to eat: dead fish, invertebrates, plant matter, whatever the tide left behind. They are not specialists. They eat what is available, and in summer, with water temperatures rising in the bay and biological productivity near its peak, there is a great deal available. The crabs are most active during the hours after a low tide retreats, working the exposed zone before the water returns. This is not a choice so much as a constraint: they breathe through gills and must stay wet, so they work close to the water's edge and retreat into crevices or beneath rocks when conditions dry out too much or when something larger arrives. That something larger is often a black-crowned night heron, which forages along these same rocks in the low-light hours of early morning and evening. The herons stand still for long intervals, then strike downward with the bill in a single fast movement. Crabs are a regular part of what they take. Brown pelicans work the open water just offshore, diving for fish, but they occasionally land on exposed rocks and will take a crab given the chance. The competition for intertidal prey during summer is real and layered: multiple species reading the same tidal schedule, converging on the same narrow strip of rock at the same time. The crabs are not passive in this. They are fast enough to escape under cover if they have a moment's warning, and their flattened bodies let them press into gaps that a bird's bill cannot follow. The red-tailed hawk is less directly tied to the intertidal zone, but it is present in the hills and open slopes above Tiburon and hunts the transition zones between habitat types. A hawk working the edge where rocky shore meets scrub is watching for movement. A crab caught in the open on a flat rock, away from cover, is exposed in the same way a vole is exposed crossing a gap in the grass. Red-tailed hawks are generalist predators; they take what presents itself. Whether one takes a shore crab opportunistically or simply passes overhead is a matter of timing and distance, but the pressure from above is part of why these crabs stay close to cover even when foraging. The broader intertidal community here includes species the crabs interact with more continuously. Barnacles and mussels are prey for the crabs when small enough to manage. The algae the crabs graze supports its own chain of smaller invertebrates. Striped shore crabs also turn up as prey for larger fish during high tide, when the water covers the rocks and the crabs move into the shallows. Their role shifts depending on the hour and the water level: forager during low tide, prey during high. Summer is when the crabs are breeding. Females carry egg masses beneath their abdomens, held against the body by the curled tail flap. You can see this if you find a female under a rock: a dense, spongy cluster of orange eggs pressed against her underside. She will stay in cover more consistently while brooding, limiting her foraging time. The larvae, when they hatch, are planktonic and will spend weeks drifting before settling back into the intertidal zone. Look down at the rocks nearest the water's edge. If the tide has pulled back in the last hour, watch for movement near the line where wet rock meets dry. The crabs are there, working the margin, pulling back when a shadow crosses the stone.

Along the low edges of Shelby Bottoms, where the sycamores and box elders hold the humidity close to the ground, the light goes out slowly this time of year. The days are as long as they get. And then, in the half hour after the last color leaves the sky, the fireflies begin. The common eastern firefly is the one you are most likely watching. It is the species that appears first in the evening, typically within twenty to forty minutes after sunset, and it is the one producing that familiar slow arc of yellow-green light. The male flies upward in a gentle J-shaped path, flashes once at the top of the arc, then waits. If a female perched in the grass or low vegetation below sees the flash and answers with her own after about two seconds, the male turns toward her and the exchange continues until he finds her. The timing matters. Each firefly species has its own flash interval, its own delay between call and response, and its own characteristic color and duration of light. The common eastern firefly's flash lasts roughly half a second. The gap between flashes is about five to six seconds. These specifics are what allow a female to recognize her own species in a field where several species may be active at once. The light itself is produced in the firefly's abdomen, in a layer of cells that contain two compounds, a substrate and an enzyme, that react together in the presence of oxygen to release energy almost entirely as light rather than heat. The firefly controls the flash by regulating the airflow to those cells through its breathing tubes. What looks like a casual signal from a distance is a precisely timed muscular event. Females of some other firefly species mimic the response flash of different species to lure males and eat them, but the females of the common eastern firefly do not do this. They are waiting for the right interval, the right color, the right duration. The riparian corridors around Shelby Bottoms suit this species well. Common eastern fireflies spend most of their lives as larvae in moist soil and leaf litter, where they hunt earthworms and small invertebrates through the fall, winter, and spring. The adults that are flying now have not eaten since emerging. They live only three to four weeks in their adult form, long enough to find a mate and lay eggs in the soil before dying. The larvae that hatch from those eggs will overwinter underground and pupate next spring, completing a cycle that depends entirely on having damp ground and sufficient organic matter in the soil. Mowed turf, compacted soil, and dry upland sites produce almost no fireflies. The places along the Cumberland River corridor where the leaf litter is deep, where water sits in the low spots after rain, where the understory is open enough to fly through but dense enough to perch in: those are the places. Light pollution affects them. Males navigating by the faint flash of a female in dark grass have difficulty distinguishing her signal from the ambient glow of a lit parking lot or a streetlight filtered through leaves. Research on this is ongoing, but the effect on display behavior is measurable. The firefly populations at Shelby Bottoms benefit from the relative darkness of the greenway corridor, buffered from the surrounding city by the tree canopy and the river. On a clear night away from the main paths, the display can be dense enough that the flashes overlap and stack. If you are outside right now, or near a window, look toward any low-lying vegetated area, especially where the ground stays damp. The flashes appear at roughly the height of your knees to your chest, rising and falling in that slow arc. Watch for the pause after the flash. Somewhere in the grass below, a female may be answering.

The eastern redbuds along the forest edge at Blue Rock are carrying fruit now. The flowers are long gone, replaced by flat, papery seed pods that hang in clusters from the branches like rows of green tags. The leaves have filled in fully, and the tree looks ordinary from a distance, the kind of understory tree you walk past without stopping. But the pods are there, and the cedar waxwings have found them. Cedar waxwings move through the canopy in small, loose flocks. They are compact birds, smooth-plumaged in warm brown and gray, with a black mask across the face and a yellow band at the tip of the tail. The red waxy spots on their secondary wing feathers, the ones that give them their name, are visible only up close. They tend to arrive without much announcement, a high thin seee from somewhere in the canopy, and then suddenly several birds are working the same branch. They pick through the redbud pods efficiently, taking seeds and pulp and moving on. If you watch long enough you may see one pass a food item to the bird beside it. This happens regularly in flocks, a behavior that appears connected to pair bonding, though it is common outside of courtship as well. The eastern redbud is a native understory tree, common on the slopes and hollow edges of this part of Ohio. It blooms early, before the leaves emerge, covering bare branches in pink-purple flowers that are visited by native bees pulling nectar in late winter cold. By summer the flowers are gone and the pods have formed, each one containing several hard, oval seeds. The pods persist on the tree for months, drying and darkening as the season advances. For the waxwings, this is a reliable food source that bridges the gap between the soft fruit they prefer, wild cherries, serviceberries, mulberries, and the berry crops that will come later in summer and fall. Waxwings are among the most fruit-dependent birds in North America. They time their movements and breeding around fruit availability, nesting later in summer than most songbirds so their chicks can be fed on ripe fruit rather than insects. The redbud offers something else, too. Because the pods hang exposed on the outer branches, they are accessible to birds that prefer to forage in the open rather than deep in the foliage. The wood thrush foraging on the forest floor below, or the red-eyed vireo working the interior of the canopy for insects, are not competing for the same resource. The waxwings occupy a foraging zone that is largely their own. Where Morrow's honeysuckle, an invasive shrub present in this area, produces berries later in the season, waxwings will take those too, which makes them occasional agents of its spread. But at this moment, in high summer, it is the redbud pods they are after. The flock does not stay long in any one tree. They move, they call, they settle briefly and move again. If you are standing near a redbud right now, look at the outer canopy, where the pods are most exposed. The birds tend to perch upright at the branch tips, reaching sideways to pull at the pods. Listen for the call, a very high, thin whistle, almost at the edge of hearing, repeated at irregular intervals. It carries well through summer air. The light is long today, the longest days of the year, and the canopy at Blue Rock is fully closed and dark from below. Somewhere in it, a flock of waxwings is moving from tree to tree, and the thin sound of their calls comes down through the leaves.

The Steller's jays are loud this morning in San Juan County. You can hear them before you see them, a hard rasping call from somewhere in the understory, and when you find one, it is usually in an Indian plum, working the branches with its bill. The Indian plum has been fruiting for a few weeks now, and the drupes have moved from green to yellow to a dark, waxy blue-black. The jays know exactly when that shift happens. Indian plum is one of the earliest shrubs to do anything in this forest. It leafs out in late winter, flowers before almost anything else, and by early summer it carries ripe fruit while the bigleaf maples and vine maples around it are still only producing leaves. That early timing matters here. The drupes are small, about the size of a blueberry, and they contain a hard pit surrounded by thin flesh. They are mildly bitter, not the kind of fruit that appeals to every bird, but Steller's jays take them readily. A jay will land on a fruiting branch, grip a drupe in its bill, and swallow it whole. The pit passes through intact. This is how Indian plum moves through the forest, carried by birds and deposited wherever the jay travels next. For the jays, early summer is the most demanding stretch of the year. They are nesting now, and the nestlings require protein, which means the adults are hunting insects steadily, catching beetles and caterpillars and anything else they can find in the canopy. But the adults also need to sustain themselves through long foraging days, and the Indian plum drupes give them a reliable, calorie-dense food source that requires very little effort to find. The shrubs are large and heavily fruited right now, and a jay can harvest a significant amount in a short time. Watch one work through a single branch: it moves methodically, taking drupes in sequence, pausing occasionally to scan, then moving on. The oceanspray nearby is just opening its flowers, drawing insects, and the jay will sometimes drop from the Indian plum to snap something out of the air before returning. The two food sources, fruit and insects, are available within a few meters of each other at the same time, and the jays use both. Steller's jays are also known to cache food, pressing items into bark crevices or burying them under duff. Whether they cache Indian plum drupes the way they cache acorns is less clear, but their habit of moving fruit away from the parent shrub is ecologically significant regardless. Indian plum tends to grow in the shrubby edges of Douglas fir and bigleaf maple forest, in the gaps and margins where light reaches the ground. Jays move between those margins and the denser interior, and seeds deposited in either place have a chance to germinate. Over time this matters for how the shrub distributes itself across the landscape. The Steller's jay is not a bird that sits quietly. Its calls carry through the forest, and it frequently mimics the calls of red-tailed hawks, a behavior that has been observed to flush other birds from feeding areas. Whether that is the intent is hard to say, but the effect is real. This is a bird that is paying attention to everything around it, and right now what it is paying attention to is the Indian plum. If you are near any shrubby forest edge in the islands today, look for the dark blue crest moving through the outer branches of a fruiting shrub, and listen for that rasping call between the quieter sounds of the understory.

Common milkweed is in full leaf near Brigham right now, the broad flat leaves catching the long light of early summer. The plants stand waist-high in open areas, clusters of them in disturbed ground along roadsides and field edges, their pink-purple flower heads just beginning to form. This is the moment monarchs have been moving toward since they left their overwintering sites in central Mexico. Monarchs are arriving here as part of the second generation working northward through the season. The adults that reach southern Wisconsin in early summer are not the same individuals that left Mexico. That first generation hatched in Texas and the Gulf states, developed, and pushed the range northward. The butterflies reaching Brigham now are the offspring of that generation, and they are here specifically because common milkweed is here. The female lands on a leaf, drums the surface briefly with her forelegs, and detects the chemical signature of the plant. If it registers correctly, she curves her abdomen and deposits a single egg on the underside of the leaf, pale green and ridged, about the size of a pinhead. She will lay hundreds of eggs over her lifetime, but never in clusters. One egg per leaf, often one per plant, spread across a patch. The reason for this is the plant itself. Common milkweed produces cardenolides, compounds that disrupt the heart function of most animals that eat it. The monarch caterpillar has proteins in its cell membranes that are shaped differently from those of other insects, so the toxin passes through without binding. The caterpillar sequesters the cardenolides in its own tissue, and that chemical defense carries through metamorphosis into the adult butterfly. A blue jay that catches and eats a monarch will vomit within minutes. After one or two such experiences, most jays avoid the orange-and-black pattern entirely. The egg on the underside of a milkweed leaf is already committed to this system before it hatches. The milkweed supports more than monarchs. Red milkweed beetles are present on these plants right now, their bright red wing covers making them easy to spot against the green leaves. They feed on the plant and sequester the same cardenolides by the same mechanism, a separate lineage that arrived at the same solution. Two-spotted bumble bees work the flower heads when they open, collecting both pollen and nectar. The flowers have a complex structure that traps visiting insects momentarily, coating their legs with pollen masses called pollinia before releasing them. The bees carry these pollinia to the next plant. Common milkweed depends almost entirely on bees of sufficient size to trigger that mechanism, and bumble bees are among the most reliable visitors. The monarch egg will hatch in three to five days, depending on temperature. The caterpillar that emerges feeds only on milkweed, moving through five growth stages over roughly two weeks. It pupates on or near the plant, forming the green chrysalis with its row of gold dots, and emerges as an adult after about ten days. The adults from this generation will feed on nectar from whatever flowers are available, including wild quinine and the invasive oxeye daisy and red clover that are blooming across open ground near Brigham right now. They will mate, lay eggs, and die before the season turns. It is their offspring, the generation that hatches in late summer, that will make the migration south. If you're near any open ground or a field edge, look for the milkweed. The leaves are broad, slightly waxy, and if you pinch one it bleeds white latex immediately. Turn a few leaves over and look at the undersides near the midrib. The eggs are small enough to miss if you're moving, but they are there. Somewhere nearby, a monarch is working the patch, pausing on each plant long enough to assess it, then moving on or stopping to lay. The wings open and close slowly in the heat.

Out over the 64th Street Grassland, the barn swallows are working. Not perched, not resting — moving, continuously, in long arcing passes that drop low over the grass and wheel back up toward the tree line. Early summer is the most demanding period of the year for them, and the air here is full of what they need. Barn swallows are aerial insectivores, which means they catch everything they eat on the wing. They do not hover or wait. They fly through concentrations of insects and take them one at a time, bill snapping shut mid-air, and then they continue. A pair with nestlings will make several hundred feeding trips per day. The nest — a half-cup of mud and grass, fixed to a beam or rafter in a barn or outbuilding — holds four or five chicks that are growing fast and need protein in volume. Both adults feed them, and both adults spend the longest days of the year doing almost nothing else. What makes early summer the right moment for this is the insects. Aquatic insects are emerging from the standing water and slow streams near Geneva Township in numbers that peak right now. Mayflies crawl out of the water as winged adults after spending a year or more as aquatic larvae. Caddisflies do the same, rising from stream gravel and pond margins. Midges and other small flies emerge in masses from the surface, sometimes thick enough to be visible as a haze over the water at dusk. These are not random events. Each species has its own emergence window, triggered by water temperature and day length, and early summer stacks several of them at once. For the swallows, this is the richest stretch of the year. Barn swallows are built for this kind of foraging. The tail is long and deeply forked, which gives them fine control at speed — they can redirect quickly when an insect changes course, and they can fly efficiently for hours without tiring. The bill is short and wide, which opens into a broad gape, better for intercepting insects in flight than for picking them off a surface. When you watch one hunting low over a field, the flight path looks irregular, but it is tracking real things: a midge column, a rising caddisfly, a cluster of gnats near a wet depression in the grass. The swallow adjusts its line to what the air holds. The grassland itself matters here. Open ground with nearby water is the core of their habitat in this region. The 64th Street Grassland sits within a landscape that still has both. Bobolinks and savannah sparrows nest in the grass below, and killdeer move across the open patches at ground level, but the swallows occupy the airspace above all of it. They are not competing with those birds for food or space. They are using a different part of the same place. The nestlings grow quickly. Within about three weeks of hatching, they are close to adult size and beginning to fledge. The parents' workload through that period is relentless: catch an insect, return to the nest, deliver it, go out again. In the early morning and again in the evening, when insects fly closer to the surface and the air is cooler and denser, the swallows tend to fly lower and faster. If you are out at those hours, the passes can come very close. There is no real rest in this season for them. The chicks that survive to fledge will spend the rest of summer learning to hunt on their own, building the flight skills they will need before the whole population moves south in late summer. But that is weeks away. Right now, the adults are out, the insects are rising, and the air over the grassland is busy with both. Look up and watch one complete a pass — the long glide out, the quick bank, the return — and somewhere in that arc, it has eaten.

Plains coreopsis is flowering now across the open ground near Oklahoma City's central district, its yellow and burgundy heads standing a foot or two above the soil on wiry stems. Where a patch of it grows in full sun, you may hear a low, steady buzzing before you see what's producing it. That sound belongs to the hibiscus turret bee, and this is the center of her summer. The hibiscus turret bee is a stocky, densely furred native bee, roughly the size of a small bumble bee, and she is a specialist. She does not range across whatever flowers happen to be blooming. She targets plants in the mallow family, particularly native hibiscus, but she also works coreopsis heavily during summer, gathering pollen in dense masses on the specialized hairs of her hind legs. She builds her nest in bare or sparsely vegetated soil, and at the entrance she constructs a short turret of soil pellets, a chimney a centimeter or two tall, which gives her her name. The turret may help keep water out during summer rains, or it may serve as a marker. Researchers are not entirely settled on its function, but the structure is distinctive enough that if you find one in a bare patch of ground near flowering plants, you are likely looking at her work. Inside the nest, she provisions individual cells with a mixture of pollen and nectar, lays a single egg on each provision mass, and seals the cell. The larva develops on that stored food without any further attention from the mother. Plains coreopsis is well suited to this relationship. It is a native annual that thrives in disturbed, open ground, exactly the kind of habitat found along roadsides, field margins, and the edges of parks like Will Rogers. It produces pollen in quantity across a long summer bloom period, which aligns with the hibiscus turret bee's active season. The flower's open, flat-faced structure makes pollen accessible without requiring a bee to force its way inside. The bee moves across the disk flowers at the center of each head, vibrating her flight muscles against the anthers in a behavior called buzz pollination, which shakes loose pollen that would otherwise stay packed tight. Not every bee can do this. The western honey bee, which is an invasive species in North America, cannot buzz pollinate and so takes less pollen from coreopsis than native bees like this one. The turret bee's visits are more productive for the plant as a result: more pollen transferred, more seeds set. The American bumble bee, which is listed as threatened, also works coreopsis this way during summer, and the two species can sometimes be found on the same patch of flowers. The bumble bee colony is at peak size now, the queen having started her workers in spring, and the workers are ranging out across whatever bloom is available. The hibiscus turret bee is solitary; there is no colony, no shared labor. Each female provisions her own nest, and the males, which emerge earlier in the season, are no longer part of the picture. What you see on the flowers now is a female at the height of her reproductive effort, moving from head to head, packing pollen, returning to a nest you almost certainly cannot find unless you are watching very carefully where she lands. If you are near a patch of coreopsis right now, stop and watch for a moment. The bee arrives fast, drops onto a flower head, and the buzzing changes pitch slightly as she vibrates against the anthers. She works the disk methodically, a few seconds per flower, then lifts and crosses to the next stem. The yellow pollen accumulates visibly on her legs as she works. When the load is large enough, she heads back toward bare ground somewhere nearby. The whole sequence, from arrival to departure, takes less than a minute. The sun is high and the flowers are fully open, which is when the pollen is most available. The buzzing, once you locate it, is easy to track.

The light is still fading at nine o'clock. In the understory along Bethesda's wooded edges, where flowering dogwood and pawpaw hold the middle layer and the canopy closes overhead, the first flashes appear low to the ground, maybe a foot or two above the grass. They are yellow-green, brief, and arcing slightly upward. By the time full dark settles in, there are dozens of them. These are common eastern fireflies, and what you are watching is a conversation. The males fly and flash; the females wait, perched on vegetation, watching. The male's signal follows a precise pattern: a single flash lasting about half a second, then a pause of roughly six seconds, then another flash. The arc of the flight is part of it too. Females who are ready to mate flash back after a fixed delay, typically about two seconds. That timing is the key. Males scanning the dark learn to read it. A female who answers at the right interval draws the male toward her, and he flashes again, and she answers again, and he homes in. The whole exchange can take several minutes before the male lands. This is peak season for them. The nights are the shortest they will be all year, which means the window for signaling is compressed. But the warmth matters as much as the darkness. Common eastern fireflies are most active when air temperatures stay above roughly 21 degrees Celsius after sunset, and summer nights here hold that heat. The flashing typically begins in the first hour after dark and tapers off by midnight. On a warm, still night with low wind, the signals carry well and the activity is dense. On cooler nights, or nights with rain, it falls away quickly. The light itself is produced in the abdomen, in a specialized organ that runs a chemical reaction involving a compound called luciferin, an enzyme called luciferase, and oxygen. The reaction produces light with almost no heat, which is unusual for a light-producing process. The firefly controls the flash by controlling the oxygen supply to the organ. The precision of the timing, the duration, the interval, is all physiological, controlled by the nervous system. Different firefly species in the same habitat use different flash patterns and different colors, which is how a female tells her own species from others flying nearby. In the same meadow edge, you might have several species active at once, each running a different signal. The larvae spend most of their lives underground or in leaf litter, where they are predators of soft-bodied invertebrates including earthworms and snails. The adult firefly, the one flashing now, does not eat at all, or eats very little. The adult stage is entirely about reproduction. The females of some firefly species mimic the flash responses of other species to lure males and eat them, but common eastern fireflies do not do this. The adults live only a few weeks. Spotted lanternfly, an invasive species now established in this area, feeds heavily on a wide range of woody plants in summer, and its presence has altered some of the understory structure that fireflies depend on. Invasive Amur honeysuckle thickens the shrub layer in ways that can reduce the open, grassy edges where males fly and females perch to watch. These are slow pressures, not sudden ones, but they shape what the habitat looks like over time. If you are outside now, or near a window facing a wooded edge, look low. The males rarely fly more than a few meters off the ground during the early display. The flash lasts less than a second, then the beetle coasts dark for six seconds before flashing again. If you count the interval, you can tell whether what you are seeing is a male searching or a female answering. The females tend to flash from a fixed point; the males move. Watch one long enough and you can see the arc of the flight between flashes, a faint shape moving through the dark.

The milkweed plants along the edges of Redwood City's open areas are at full summer growth right now, their broad leaves thick and upright in the long afternoon light. If you find one, look closely at the undersides. You may see a small clutch of pale, ridged eggs the size of a pinhead, or a caterpillar working its way across the leaf surface in alternating bands of white, yellow, and black. Monarchs are laying eggs here now, at the peak of the summer breeding season. A female finds milkweed by landing and pressing the tarsi of her forelegs against the leaf surface. She is tasting it. Milkweed produces cardenolides, a group of toxic steroids that most insects cannot process. The monarch can, and has built its entire life cycle around that fact. Once she confirms the plant, she lays a single egg on the underside of a leaf, often choosing younger, softer growth that a newly hatched caterpillar can manage. She will visit dozens of plants over the course of a day, distributing her eggs widely rather than concentrating them in one spot. When an egg hatches, the caterpillar's first meal is often the egg casing itself. Then it begins on the leaf. It feeds steadily and grows through five distinct stages over roughly two weeks, shedding its skin between each one. The cardenolides it ingests do not harm it. They accumulate in its tissues instead, making the caterpillar unpalatable to most predators. The bold banding is part of this arrangement: the pattern is a signal, and it works because predators that have tried a monarch caterpillar once tend not to try again. A scrub-jay that takes one and spits it out is less likely to take another. The caterpillar does not hide. It feeds in the open. Common milkweed, the species most associated with monarchs in the eastern part of their range, is present in this area in cultivated and naturalized patches. In California, monarchs also use narrowleaf milkweed and showy milkweed, both native to the state. The relationship is specific enough that where milkweed disappears from a landscape, monarchs stop breeding there. The plants have been reduced across much of California by land conversion, herbicide use, and the removal of roadside vegetation. Monarchs in California are listed as threatened, and their breeding populations have declined sharply over the past several decades. The patches that remain, including those near Redwood City, carry real weight in the regional picture. The adult monarchs you may see nectaring right now are not the same individuals that will migrate south in late summer. The ones flying today are summer breeding adults. They will lay eggs, and some of their offspring will eclose as adults in time to make the migration to the California coast, where monarchs overwinter in groves of eucalyptus and Monterey pine. The migratory generation lives longer and does not reproduce until the following spring, when it moves inland again to find milkweed and begin the cycle. The summer generation and the migratory generation are physiologically different, though they are the same species. What determines which type a caterpillar becomes is still not fully resolved. Anna's hummingbirds are working the flowers nearby, and western honey bees, an invasive species established throughout California, are foraging on the same blooms. Neither has much to do with the monarch's breeding, but both are present in the warm air above the same patch of ground. The toyon along the slope is in open flower right now, and its small white clusters are drawing insects from several directions. If there is milkweed near you, the caterpillars, if present, will be visible in daylight, feeding steadily on the leaf surface. The plant itself has a faint, slightly bitter smell where the stem is broken. The caterpillar feeding on it does not smell like much at all. What you notice is the movement: a slow, deliberate chewing that works across the leaf from one edge inward, leaving a clean margin behind.

Along the scrubby slopes and dry edges of San Francisco's South of Market open spaces, the orange bush monkeyflower is in full flower. The blooms are trumpet-shaped, two-lipped, and a deep burnt orange that holds its color even in the flat midday light. Each flower opens wide enough to admit a bee, and that is precisely what it is built for. The orange bush monkeyflower is a woody shrub native to California's coastal ranges and foothills, and it is well-suited to the dry, fog-cooled summers of this part of the city. It blooms through the longest days of the year, when soil moisture has dropped and most other plants have pulled back. The flowers are arranged so that a visiting bee, landing on the lower lip, is positioned directly beneath the anthers. Pollen falls onto the bee's back and thorax as it works its way toward the nectar at the base of the tube. The stigma, the part of the flower that receives pollen, is positioned near the entrance and is touch-sensitive: it closes within seconds of contact. This is a physical mechanism, not a slow process. When a bee brushes the stigma coming in, it closes. When the bee leaves and the stigma reopens, it is ready for pollen from the next visitor. Bumble bees are the primary pollinators here. They are large enough to make full contact with both the anthers and the stigma in a single visit, and they are strong fliers in the cool marine air that moves through San Francisco in summer. They visit the monkeyflower repeatedly across a foraging bout, carrying pollen from plant to plant. The bumble bee is not simply collecting; it is working. It grips the lower lip, pushes into the tube, and vibrates its flight muscles against the anthers to shake loose pollen, a behavior called buzz pollination. The sound is audible: a higher, shorter burst than the bee's normal flight tone. If you are near a flowering shrub right now, listen for it. It is distinct from the steady hum of a bee in flight. The monkeyflower offers both nectar and pollen to its visitors. Nectar fuels the bees directly. Pollen is gathered into the corbiculae, the pollen baskets on the bee's hind legs, and carried back to the colony to feed larvae. In return, the plant gets cross-pollination: pollen moved between individual plants, which increases genetic variation in the seed set. Neither species is doing the other a favor in any deliberate sense. The bee is feeding itself and its colony. The plant is structured to use that behavior. The relationship holds because both parties gain something from the same interaction. Coyote brush grows nearby, its young leaves bright and sticky in the summer heat. California blackberry is leafing out along wetter margins. These plants will support other pollinators later in the season, but right now the monkeyflower is the primary flowering resource in this dry scrub community. Bumble bee colonies are at or near their peak size in early summer, with the most foragers in the field. The overlap between colony demand and monkeyflower bloom is not coincidental: the bees follow available forage, and the monkeyflower's bloom window corresponds to the period of highest bee activity. Seaside buckwheat and California fuchsia will carry the late-summer nectar supply forward as the monkeyflower finishes, giving bumble bee colonies resources through the season until new queens disperse in fall. The scrub here sits within a dense urban area, and the patches where monkeyflower grows are small and discontinuous. Bumble bees range widely, sometimes more than a kilometer from the colony, so they can move between isolated patches. But the invasive fennel now established in parts of this area competes for the same dry disturbed ground the monkeyflower prefers, and poison hemlock has taken hold along some edges. Both are invasive species that reduce the area available for native flowering plants. The monkeyflower persists where it has space and sun. Stand near one of the shrubs for a moment. The flowers are at about waist height on most plants, and the orange is warm against the gray-green of the foliage. A bumble bee moves between them, unhurried and deliberate, pausing at each flower long enough to work it. Listen for that brief, higher buzz when it presses into the tube.

The common milkweed patches near Westfield Center are in full bloom right now. The flower clusters are dense and rounded, each one packed with small pink-purple florets that smell faintly sweet in the heat of midday. Look closely at any milkweed stem and you may find what you're looking for: a monarch caterpillar, banded in yellow, black, and white, working its way through the plant with steady, methodical biting. Monarchs lay their eggs on common milkweed and nothing else. The caterpillar that hatches has one food source, and this is it. What makes this relationship so specific is chemistry. Common milkweed produces cardenolides, a class of compounds that are toxic to most animals. The monarch caterpillar not only tolerates them but sequesters them in its own tissues, which makes the caterpillar itself unpalatable to most predators. Blue jays, which are foraging through the shrubs and trees nearby right now, have learned through experience to avoid monarchs. A jay that eats one typically vomits and does not repeat the mistake. The caterpillar's bold banding is the signal that enforces that lesson. The timing of the caterpillar's peak feeding stage and the milkweed's flowering is not coincidental. Monarch adults arrive in this part of Massachusetts in early summer, when milkweed plants are mature enough to support larvae but still actively growing. The flowers themselves are part of the caterpillar's diet. Early instars tend to feed on the undersides of leaves, where the leaf tissue is thinner and easier to chew. But by the third, fourth, and fifth instars, a caterpillar will consume entire leaves, flower buds, and open florets. The flowers are high in sugar and protein relative to the leaves, and a caterpillar in its final instar before pupation can consume a full milkweed leaf in under an hour. What you see on a milkweed plant in early summer is not just feeding; it is a caterpillar building the fat and protein reserves it will need to complete metamorphosis and, if it is a late-summer individual, to fuel a migration of more than a thousand miles. Common milkweed does more than feed monarchs. The flowers produce nectar that draws a wide range of insects, including native bees, wasps, and beetles, some of which are also pollinators. The plant's pollination mechanism is unusual. Pollen is packaged in small sacs called pollinia, which attach to the legs of visiting insects and are carried to other flowers. The plant depends on insects large enough to pull the pollinia free, which is why smaller insects sometimes get trapped in the flower's grooves and die there. American goldfinches, which are present along the reservoir edge nearby, will return to milkweed later in summer to pull the silky fibers from the seed pods for nest lining. The plant is used at multiple stages, by multiple species, for different purposes. The monarch itself is under real pressure. Its population has declined sharply over recent decades, driven by habitat loss along its migration corridor and the reduction of milkweed in agricultural landscapes where herbicide use eliminated much of the plant that once grew along field edges. The patches near Westfield Center represent exactly the kind of rough, open, disturbed ground where common milkweed establishes well: roadsides, field margins, areas where the soil has been turned or the canopy is thin. These are not pristine habitats, but they are functional ones. If you are near a milkweed patch right now, the smell of the flowers carries a short distance in warm air. Bend close to one of the flower clusters and you can see the individual florets, each with a small raised corona. Run your eye down the stem to where the leaves attach, and check the underside of a leaf for the pale, ridged sphere of an egg, or the small striped body of a young caterpillar just beginning to feed. The milkweed is at its peak, and the window for this particular stage does not stay open long.

Along the slow freshwater margins near Bidart, where reed stems catch the morning light and the water barely moves, the European pond turtle is doing something it does only a few weeks each year. It has hauled itself out of the water and is sitting still, absorbing heat from above and below. The shell is dark and domed, the legs splayed, the neck stretched toward the sun. It looks motionless, but it is working. The European pond turtle is the only freshwater turtle native to France, and the population along this stretch of the Basque coast is part of a range that has contracted sharply across the Iberian Peninsula, where the species is now critically threatened. What you see when you see one basking is a cold-blooded animal managing its internal temperature with precision. Turtles cannot generate heat through metabolism the way mammals do. They depend on external sources, and in early summer, when the days are longest and the sun angle is highest, the hours available for thermoregulation reach their annual peak. A turtle that reaches full operating temperature can digest food faster, move faster, and, critically at this time of year, carry out the physiological work of reproduction. The basking is not incidental to the nesting season. It is part of it. Females are gravid now, carrying eggs that need to be laid in warm, loose soil before the summer progresses further. The nesting behavior of this species is particular: females leave the water entirely, sometimes traveling considerable distances overland to find suitable sites, typically open, south-facing ground with soil that is soft enough to excavate but stable enough to hold a nest cavity. They dig with their hind feet, deposit a clutch of roughly six to twelve hard-shelled eggs, cover the nest carefully, and return to the water. The eggs are left entirely to the warmth of the soil. Incubation takes two to three months, and the temperature during that period influences not just development speed but the sex ratio of the hatchlings, with warmer nests producing more females. The nest site a female chooses now shapes the composition of the next generation. This makes the availability of suitable open ground near the water as important to the population as the water itself. Habitat loss along wetland edges, including encroachment by invasive shrubs like groundsel tree, which has established itself in this area, reduces the patches of bare or sparsely vegetated ground that nesting females require. Pond turtles in this region face pressure from multiple directions. Nest predation by foxes and wild boar is significant. Juveniles, which are small enough to be taken by herons and large fish, have low survival rates in their first years. Adults are long-lived, sometimes reaching fifty years or more, and populations can persist for decades even when recruitment is poor, which makes it easy to miss the slow erosion happening beneath the surface of what looks like a stable group. The gray herons recorded nearby at La Cabane du Marquis are capable predators of young turtles; an adult heron standing motionless at a water margin is watching for exactly the kind of movement a small turtle makes. Adult pond turtles are largely beyond the reach of most predators, their shell providing enough protection that the main threats to them are habitat degradation and road mortality when females cross paved surfaces during the nesting dispersal. If you are near still or slow-moving fresh water right now, look at any log, root mass, or exposed bank that catches full sun. A basking turtle holds its position for a long time, and at a distance the shell can read as a stone or a knot of wood. The giveaway is usually the neck, extended and angled upward. The water around it is still.

At Decker Lake in early summer, the water surface breaks in small rings — fish rising to take insects that have just hatched from the bottom. This is one of the more productive moments in the aquatic calendar here, when mayflies and caddisflies complete their underwater phase and emerge into the air by the thousands. The fish know it. And above the fish, so do the double-crested cormorants. Cormorants are not subtle hunters. A bird sitting on a piling or a low branch near the water's edge will drop in with little ceremony, disappear beneath the surface, and begin working. They dive with their feet, not their wings, kicking hard to pursue fish in open water or along the bottom. Their feathers are only partially waterproof, which sounds like a disadvantage but allows them to dive with less buoyancy to fight against. The tradeoff is that they must dry out afterward, which is why you see them standing with wings spread wide, sometimes for long minutes, in what looks like deliberate stillness. They are not posturing. They are drying. The double-crested cormorant is listed as threatened in Utah, and the seven birds recorded around this area represent a small but real presence at a productive lake. What draws them here in early summer is a cascade of events that begins underwater. Aquatic insects — mayflies, caddisflies, midges — spend most of their lives as larvae on the lake bottom or clinging to submerged vegetation and debris. When water temperatures rise and day length peaks, they transform and rise. The emergence can be dense enough to film the water's surface with wings. Fish, particularly the small cyprinids and silversides that make up the forage base in lakes like Decker, move into the shallows and toward the surface to feed on the emerging insects. They concentrate. And concentrated fish are exactly what a cormorant is looking for. The bird is not responding to the insect hatch directly; it is responding to what the hatch does to the fish. The insects reorganize the water column, and the cormorant follows that reorganization down. Other birds are working the same emergence from different angles. Forster's terns hover and plunge-dive at the surface, taking insects and small fish from the top inch of water. California gulls pick off anything that floats or flutters near the surface. Clark's grebes dive in the open water, their long necks adapted for a quick stabbing strike at fish rather than a sustained underwater chase. The flame skimmer dragonflies patrolling the margins are themselves former aquatic insects, now hunting the ones that are still emerging. Each of these species is pulling from the same brief abundance, but at different depths and by different methods, so they do not simply compete with one another. The cormorant, working deepest, has the water column largely to itself. The spotted sandpiper picking its way along the bank, bobbing as it goes, is after the same insects at the water's edge — the ones that crawl out onto wet mud before their wings dry and harden. American avocets sweep the shallows with their upturned bills. White-faced ibis probe the soft margins. The aquatic insect emergence is not a single event; it is a resource that radiates outward from the water in stages, and the birds present at Decker Lake in early summer are arranged along those stages, from the mud at the edge to the open water ten feet down. If you are near the water now, watch for a cormorant sitting low on a post or a rock, wings held open. The feathers will look dark and slightly ruffled rather than smooth. That bird has been diving recently, and it will go back in. The rings the fish leave when they rise are small and quick, easy to miss if you are not looking for them. They appear and close in a second or two, a few inches across, and then the surface is flat again.

Look up. Over the open ground at SGL 198, chimney swifts are cutting arcs across the sky, chattering as they go. That high, thin chipping call is almost continuous when a group is working the air above a field or water. The birds themselves are small and dark, with a stiff, flickering wingbeat unlike any swallow — they look as though they are beating both wings alternately rather than together, though they are not. What they are doing up there, right now, is feeding. And what they are feeding on is the early summer emergence of aquatic insects. Mayflies and caddisflies spend most of their lives underwater. Mayfly nymphs live in stream gravel and leaf litter for months, sometimes more than a year, grazing on algae and organic debris. Caddisfly larvae build cases from sand grains or plant fragments and do the same. Then, in early summer, they transform and leave the water. Mayflies emerge as winged adults that cannot feed at all — their mouthparts are vestigial, their digestive systems reduced. They have hours or days to find a mate and deposit eggs before they die. Caddisflies live a little longer as adults but are similarly driven by the narrow window of their emergence. Both emerge in large numbers over short periods, which concentrates them in the air above streams and ponds at predictable times. Chimney swifts find them there. A swift forages entirely on the wing. It drinks on the wing, skimming a water surface. It collects nesting material on the wing, snapping dead twigs from treetops as it passes. During nesting season, the adults must catch enough insects not only to sustain themselves but to carry back to nestlings in whatever chimney or hollow tree they have claimed. Swifts compress multiple insects into a mass in their throat pouch before returning to the nest. A single feeding trip can deliver dozens of small insects at once. The aquatic emergence matters because it produces exactly what the birds need: large numbers of soft-bodied, protein-rich insects concentrated in open airspace over water, reliably, at the time of year when nestlings are growing fastest. The swifts at SGL 198 are working the open fields and edges near the strip mine areas, which likely drain into small streams and wet areas. Those drainages, even modest ones, produce mayflies and caddisflies. The birds range widely from their nest sites — several kilometers is unremarkable — so a swift nesting in a chimney in Ashville may be foraging over water a mile or more away. Other aerial insectivores are doing the same thing. Eastern phoebes and eastern wood-pewees are both present here, taking insects in sallying flights from exposed perches at the forest edge. They are working a different layer of the same emergence, catching insects closer to vegetation rather than high in open air. The resource is large enough that the birds partition it by flight style and hunting height without much direct competition. One thing worth knowing about chimney swifts is that their dependence on chimneys is relatively recent. Before European settlement, they nested in large hollow trees. As old-growth forest was cleared, they shifted to brick chimneys, which are now declining in number as buildings are renovated or demolished and new construction uses flue liners that swifts cannot grip. Populations have dropped significantly over the past several decades. The birds you see overhead are using whatever structures remain available within range, and the open foraging habitat at SGL 198 — with its fields, edges, and adjacent water — is part of what makes a landscape usable for them. The chattering is easy to hear if the birds are still overhead. It carries well even at height. If you watch one bird long enough to track it through a full arc, you may catch the moment it closes on something — a slight check in the wingbeat, a fractional adjustment in the line of flight. Then it continues, already looking for the next one.

Butterfly milkweed is blooming in the Milwaukee area right now, its flat-topped clusters of small orange flowers open in the sun. The plant grows low, rarely more than a foot or two tall, in dry and well-drained spots: roadsides, prairie remnants, open patches where the soil is thin. If you are near one of those places, look for a butterfly that is larger than it first appears, orange and black with white-edged wings, moving deliberately from plant to plant. That is a female monarch, and she is not here for the flowers. Monarchs will drink nectar from many plants, but they can only reproduce on milkweeds. Butterfly milkweed is one of the species they use, and in this region it flowers in early summer, which is when the first females are arriving from the south. A female lands on a milkweed stem, walks it slowly, pressing the underside of a leaf with her forelegs. She is tasting it. Her feet carry chemoreceptors that can detect the compounds in milkweed tissue, and she is confirming that the plant is the right species before she commits. If it is, she curves her abdomen beneath the leaf and deposits a single egg, pale green and ribbed, about the size of a pinhead. Then she moves to the next plant, the next leaf. She will lay hundreds of eggs over the course of her adult life, almost never more than one per plant, spreading the risk across the landscape. The egg hatches in three to five days. The caterpillar that emerges eats milkweed and nothing else. Butterfly milkweed, like all milkweeds, produces latex, a sticky white sap loaded with cardenolides, which are compounds toxic to most insects and vertebrates. Monarch caterpillars are not affected by them. They feed on the leaves, accumulate the cardenolides in their own tissue, and carry that chemical defense through metamorphosis into adulthood. A bird that eats a monarch gets sick. Most birds that have had that experience avoid the orange and black pattern afterward. The defense depends entirely on access to milkweed during the larval stage, which is why the female's host-finding behavior matters as much as it does. No milkweed, no caterpillars. Butterfly milkweed is a native plant that has become less common across the Midwest as grasslands and open habitats have been reduced or taken over by invasive species. Dame's rocket, an invasive that is blooming in purple and white drifts along roadsides and disturbed edges throughout this area right now, occupies some of the same disturbed ground where butterfly milkweed might otherwise establish. The competition is not direct, but the pattern is familiar: native plants that need open soil and full sun lose ground when that habitat fills in, whether with invasives or with woody vegetation. Butterfly milkweed persists where it has been planted in gardens, in restored prairie patches, and in the drier margins of parks. Monarchs find it in all of those places. The relationship between monarchs and milkweed is often described as simple, but the timing makes it complicated. Monarchs that overwintered in Mexico began moving north in spring, breeding as they went. The females arriving here now are likely the daughters or granddaughters of those overwintering adults, raised on milkweed further south and then continuing the northward movement. They need milkweed to be available when they arrive, which means the plant's flowering schedule and the insects' migration schedule have to align. In a year with a warm early spring, milkweed may flower earlier than usual. In a cool year, it may lag. The monarchs adjust somewhat, but the window is not unlimited. Somewhere nearby, if the light is good and the air is warm, a monarch may be working the edges of a sunny patch right now, pausing on each milkweed plant just long enough to check it before moving on. The orange of the butterfly and the orange of the milkweed flowers are close enough in color that the two can be hard to separate at a distance. Watch for movement: the slight, deliberate shift from stem to stem that distinguishes an egg-laying female from a butterfly simply feeding.

The light is still warm at eight in the evening in Perth's bushland in summer. The longest days push sunset late, and the heat that built through the afternoon sits in the leaf litter, rising off the sandy soil in waves you can feel at ankle height. This is when the quenda comes out. The quenda is a southern brown bandicoot, a small marsupial about the size of a rabbit, with a pointed snout, coarse brown fur, and back feet built for digging. It is threatened across its range, and the Perth bushland is one of the places where it still holds on. It is not a grazer or a browser. It is a digger and a hunter. The quenda moves through the understorey with its nose pressed close to the ground, reading the soil. When it detects something beneath the surface, it drives its snout down and excavates a small conical hole, a few centimetres across, with a speed that looks almost mechanical. Then it moves on. In good habitat, the ground behind a foraging quenda is pocked with these small diggings, each one the record of a successful find. What it finds is invertebrates. Beetle larvae, earthworms, fungi, the occasional spider or centipede. In summer, the soil community is active. Insects are breeding, larvae are developing underground, and the warm nights push invertebrate movement closer to the surface. The quenda is well suited to exploit this. Its long claws break compacted soil easily, and its snout is sensitive enough to locate prey that is not moving and not visible. It works by smell and by feel. The late dusk of summer suits it: enough light to navigate, enough warmth to keep the invertebrates accessible, and a window of activity before the larger predators that hunt by sound and movement are fully active. The quenda's digging does more than feed it. Each small excavation turns over the soil, mixing organic material downward and exposing the mineral layer beneath. In the jarrah and banksia woodland around Perth, this kind of low-level disturbance is part of how the soil stays aerated and how fungal spores get redistributed. The quenda feeds on hypogeal fungi, the kind that fruit underground, and carries spores through the landscape in its gut. Those spores are later deposited elsewhere, sometimes far from where they were consumed. The acorn banksia and firewood banksia that grow here depend on mycorrhizal fungi in the soil to take up phosphorus from the nutrient-poor sand. The quenda, moving through the understorey at dusk, is part of that system. Its foraging and the health of the banksia canopy are connected through the soil. The laughing kookaburra, an invasive species introduced to Western Australia from the east, is active at this hour too, and it takes small vertebrates, lizards, and the occasional young marsupial. The presence of kookaburras in Perth bushland is one of several pressures the quenda contends with, alongside fox predation and habitat fragmentation. But at dusk, in intact scrub with dense understorey, the quenda moves in cover. It is not often seen. If you are near low banksia scrub or regenerating bush right now, look for the small conical diggings in exposed sandy soil. They are easier to find than the animal that made them. The ghost fungus grows on dead wood in this bushland, and in the long summer evenings it is faintly visible after dark, a pale luminescence on the bark of old logs. The quenda passes these without interest. It is looking for something that moves, or something that smells like it recently did. The sky above the canopy is still blue at the horizon. The air smells of warm eucalyptus resin and dry sand. Somewhere in the understorey, a small animal is pushing its nose into the ground.

Along the wet meadow edges near Morristown, the purple milkweed is in flower. The blooms come in tight, rounded clusters, deep rose-pink, held up on stems that reach waist height or a little above. This is one of the less common milkweeds in the region — it favors moist, partially shaded ground, the kind of transitional habitat where a woodland gives way to open air — and right now it is carrying more than just flowers. Look closely at the stems and you will find the red milkweed beetle. The beetle is hard to miss once you know to look. It is about the size of a large raisin, bright red-orange with black spots, and it moves slowly and deliberately along the milkweed stem. That color is not incidental. Milkweed plants, including purple milkweed, produce cardenolides: toxic compounds that accumulate in any insect that feeds on the plant. The beetle feeds on milkweed almost exclusively, sequestering those toxins in its own body. The red and black pattern advertises that fact to potential predators. Birds that have learned the lesson leave it alone. The beetle's antennae are worth noting too: they are divided so that each eye is split into an upper and lower half, one pair above the antennae and one below, giving it nearly full-circle vision from a stationary position on the stem. Purple milkweed is a threatened plant in New Jersey, present in scattered patches but not reliably common anywhere. The red milkweed beetle is tied to it and to other milkweeds almost completely. The female chews a groove around the base of a milkweed stem before she lays her eggs there. That groove interrupts the flow of latex — the sticky white sap that milkweed produces as a defense against feeding insects — so that when the eggs hatch and the larvae chew down into the stem, they are not fouled by it. The larvae then tunnel into the root, feeding through the rest of summer and into fall, overwintering underground, and emerging as adults the following year. The adult beetles you see feeding on stems and flowers now are the result of last year's eggs. They are feeding on leaf tissue, on flower parts, and probably on the latex itself in small amounts, moving slowly enough that you can watch them work. Common milkweed grows nearby in sunnier spots, and poke milkweed appears in shadier ground, and the red milkweed beetle uses both. But purple milkweed's early summer flowering puts it in synchrony with peak beetle activity right now, and the plant's relative scarcity in this landscape makes each patch matter more. Brown-belted bumble bees are also working these flowers — milkweed blooms require a strong insect to trip the pollen mechanism, and bumble bees are effective at it. The beetle feeds on the flowers too, but it is not an efficient pollinator; it takes without reliably delivering. That is a common dynamic on milkweed, where the plant hosts a community of insects with very different relationships to its reproductive success. If you are near a patch of milkweed right now, the beetles are almost certainly there. They do not startle easily. You can get close enough to see the divided eyes, the deliberate movement of the mouthparts, the way the insect pauses on a stem and seems to assess its position before moving again. The flowers smell faintly sweet, a smell that carries a few feet in still air. That smell is part of how the plant recruits pollinators, and it is probably part of how the beetle locates the plant from a distance. Stand near it for a moment and you may catch it too.

The milkweed along the roadsides and field edges near Wexford is fully leafed out now, the broad leaves a deep, waxy green in the early summer light. This is what a female monarch has been looking for since she arrived from the south. She doesn't stop at every plant. She lands, drums the leaf surface briefly with her forelegs, and moves on, or she stays. That tapping is how she tastes the plant, detecting the chemical signature of milkweed before she commits to laying. Monarchs are the only butterfly in this region that can complete their life cycle on milkweed, and common milkweed is the plant most available to them here. The relationship is specific and tight. Milkweed produces cardenolides, a class of toxic compounds that make the leaves unpalatable to most insects and dangerous to vertebrates. Monarchs have a tolerance for these compounds that other butterflies lack. A female will lay a single egg on the underside of a leaf, usually a young leaf near the top of the plant where the cardenolide concentration is slightly lower. She may lay hundreds of eggs over the course of a few weeks, rarely more than one per plant, spreading the clutch across as many milkweed stems as she can find. The egg hatches in three to five days. The caterpillar's first meal is often the eggshell itself, then the leaf. As it feeds and grows through five instars, it accumulates the cardenolides in its own tissue. By the time it pupates, the toxins are concentrated enough that a bird that eats it will become nauseated. Most birds learn quickly. The bright yellow, black, and white banding of the caterpillar is not camouflage; it is a signal that this animal costs something to eat. The adult butterfly carries those same compounds, which is why the orange and black wings are worth recognizing. The great spangled fritillary, also flying now near Wexford, shares some of that orange coloration, though it is a different animal entirely with different habits and a different larval host. The visual overlap is real but loose. What the milkweed gets from the monarch is less obvious, but the plant does produce nectar in the flower clusters that are beginning to open now, and monarchs, like other butterflies, visit those flowers. Milkweed pollen is packaged in sticky masses called pollinia that attach to the legs of visiting insects and are carried to the next flower. Monarchs are among the insects that move this pollen, though they are not the primary pollinators. The plant's reproductive success doesn't depend on them the way the monarch's does on the plant. The pressure on this relationship comes partly from habitat. Common milkweed grows in disturbed ground, field margins, roadsides, and patches of open land between woodlots. Near Wexford, that open ground is also where invasive plants like purple crownvetch and Morrow's honeysuckle establish themselves, both of which are present in this area now. Crownvetch, an invasive ground cover, spreads in dense mats across the same roadsides and disturbed edges where milkweed would otherwise grow, reducing the area available to it. Milkweed is resilient and spreads by both seed and underground rhizome, but it competes for the same light and soil. Fewer milkweed plants in the landscape means fewer places for a female monarch to lay, fewer caterpillars to complete their cycle, fewer adults to make the fall migration south. If you're near an open edge or a field margin right now, look for milkweed in the knee-high vegetation. The leaves are large and paired, the stems thick, and if you look closely at the undersides of the upper leaves, you may find a pale yellow egg no larger than a pinhead. The female that laid it may still be nearby, moving from stem to stem with that deliberate, unhurried flight, tapping and tasting before she decides.

Along the dry washes and canyon edges near Tucson, the desert willow is in full bloom right now. Its flowers are large and trumpet-shaped, pink to lavender with yellow streaking inside the throat, and they open in flushes through the longest days of summer. The tree itself is not a true willow — it belongs to a different family entirely, one more closely related to catalpa — but it grows where willows often do, in the sandy beds of intermittent streams where water moves underground even when the surface is dry. In this heat, with the air shimmering off bare gravel, the flowers are one of the more reliable nectar sources in the landscape. Queen butterflies are working those flowers right now. They are large and richly colored, deep mahogany-orange with black borders and small white spots along the wing edges. If you are near any flowering desert willow, watch for them — they move deliberately from bloom to bloom, hovering briefly before landing and extending their proboscis into the flower tube. The queen is closely related to the monarch, similar enough in appearance that the two are sometimes confused, but the queen's wings lack the monarch's bold black veining across the orange field. Queens are year-round residents in the Sonoran Desert, not migrants, and summer is their breeding peak. The adults feeding now are building the energy reserves that will support egg-laying through the hottest weeks of the year. The desert willow's flower shape is not incidental to this relationship. The trumpet is wide enough to admit a large butterfly, and the yellow-streaked interior guides visitors toward the nectaries at the base of the tube. When a queen lands and pushes its head into the flower, it contacts the anthers and picks up pollen on its body. Queens visit many flowers in sequence, and that movement carries pollen between individual trees. Desert willow depends heavily on large pollinators — hummingbirds work the same flowers, and black-chinned hummingbirds are present in this area now — but butterflies like the queen are consistent visitors through the summer months when hummingbird activity can be less predictable. The tree blooms repeatedly through summer, producing new flower clusters as old ones drop, which keeps the relationship active for weeks rather than days. Queens also have a relationship with a different set of plants entirely, and it runs parallel to the pollination story without overlapping it. The caterpillars feed on milkweeds, and the adults seek out milkweed and related plants not just to lay eggs but to obtain alkaloids called pyrrolizidines, which the butterflies sequester in their bodies. Males use these compounds in courtship; the chemicals signal something about the male's quality or persistence. This is separate from what is happening at the desert willow flowers, but it means the adult butterflies are navigating a landscape of multiple plant relationships simultaneously — nectaring here, seeking out milkweed there, all within the same summer afternoon. Creosote bush is also flowering nearby, its small yellow blooms open in the same heat. The Mediterranean mantis, an invasive species established in the Sonoran Desert, is present in this area and hunts among flowering vegetation, ambushing visiting insects including butterflies. It is worth knowing that not every visit to a flower ends in a successful departure. The queens that complete their rounds and move on are the ones building the next generation. The light this time of year comes down hard and direct at midday, and the desert willow's canopy, thin and feathery, does not cast much shade. The flowers show up clearly against that bright sky. If one is blooming near you, watch the flowers for a minute. The wings of a feeding queen open and close slowly while it drinks, the mahogany color catching the full sun.

Listen for a sound like two stones knocked together, a rapid kik-kik-kik-kik that drops off at the end. That is the Virginia rail, calling from somewhere in the cattails and sedges at the wetland edge near Cambridge Village. You probably will not see it. That is characteristic of this bird. The rail moves through dense emergent vegetation with a laterally compressed body built for exactly this kind of travel, slipping between stems that would stop a larger bird entirely. The call is the main evidence of its presence, and right now, in early summer, it is calling often. The Virginia rail is a small, rust-breasted wading bird, roughly the size of a robin but longer-legged and longer-billed, with a bill that curves slightly downward and works well for probing soft substrate. It is not a rare species across its range, but here in northern Vermont it sits near the upper edge of where it regularly breeds, and a nesting bird at this latitude is notable enough that local observers document it carefully. The wetland margins near Cambridge Village offer what it needs: shallow water with emergent vegetation, soft mud, and the aquatic insect emergence that peaks in early summer. The rail forages by wading slowly through the shallows, picking invertebrates from the water surface and probing into mud for worms, beetles, and small snails. It also takes aquatic insects, and the timing of its breeding season aligns with the period when those insects are most available. Nesting happens low in the marsh, with the cup of woven plant material built just above the waterline, often anchored to standing stems of sedge or cattail. Star sedge grows in patches through the wet margins here, and northern blue flag is in bloom along the shallower edges, its purple flowers visible above the water. Both provide the structural cover the rail depends on. The female lays somewhere between six and thirteen eggs, and both parents incubate. The chicks are precocial, covered in black down at hatching, and able to leave the nest within days, though they stay close to the adults and are fed by them for several weeks. During this period, the adults are particularly vocal, and the grunting pig-like call the rail also produces, lower and more conversational than the kik call, is a way of keeping the family group in contact through vegetation that makes visual contact nearly impossible. The wetland that supports the rail is also working for other species right now. American toads are finishing their breeding season in the shallower pools. Common garter snakes move through the wet margins, hunting the same invertebrates and small amphibians the rail takes. Barn swallows are hunting insects over open water nearby, taking the same emergence from the air that the rail takes from below. Common yellowthroats are singing from the shrubby edges, and song sparrows are nesting in the transition zone between wet and dry ground. The rail occupies a specific position in all this: the interior of the marsh, the densest and wettest part, which most other birds avoid. Tufted vetch, an invasive plant, has established along some of the drier margins here, and while it does not reach into the rail's core habitat, it competes with native plants in the transition zones that buffer the wetland from surrounding land. If you stand at the edge of the marsh now, the light in early summer is long and the vegetation is at full height. The green false hellebore stands tall in the wet areas, its broad pleated leaves catching the afternoon light. The air over the water smells of wet soil and plant matter, the particular smell of a marsh in full production. Somewhere in the cattails, closer than you might expect, the rail is moving. The kik-kik-kik starts up again, and then stops.