If you live anywhere in the eastern United States other than peninsular Florida, you’re probably familiar with the Six-spotted Tiger Beetle. You may know it as the Zippy Green Beetle, Emerald Beetle, “those bright green bugs,” or a variety of other names. They land on patios, sidewalks, and driveways in the sun, disappearing in a flash as soon as you walk near them. In my youth in Pennsylvania and now in Michigan, they are one of the true signs of summer. The first one usuall

Imagine that you are a world-renowned organ transplant surgeon. To relieve stress, your husband suggests a holiday in Manitoba, looking for amphibians. Your husband is obviously a wise man. More than a bit of winter’s snow is still on the ground, but large pools of water have collected in low spots throughout the sub-boreal forest. You hear a phalanx of ducks quacking in the distance, but you gradually come to realize the ducks are much closer, not to mention invisible. The q

There is no wrong way to appreciate nature, provided that your method of affection doesn’t harm the thing you love. The simplest, and arguably purest, way to fall in love with the natural world is to wallow in its beauty. Admire it for what it does to your senses. Full stop. No textbooks needed. That flower smells wonderful. That birdsong is soothing. That waterfall is beautiful. When a patch of Field Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) started blooming a week ago, I thought to m

I went out birding on Sunday. I’m often asked what “going birding” entails. Do you go into the woods and try to find as many different birds as possible? Yes, that’s frequently a goal. Do you look for that one bird that’s eluded you, the Magnificent High-breasted Warbledoodle? Yup, that can be a big part of it. Do you try to see more birds than you did last year, or more birds than your buddy has? Sure, that can be good fun. Birding is all of that and, often, exactly none of

It rained this morning. Water, or lack thereof, changes everything in an ecosystem. It’s the currency of life in nature. In the desert, plants and animals hoard water like dragons atop heaps of gold and gems. For a cactus or a tortoise it’s a matter of life and death, and surrendering any of your accumulated wealth is usually death. Sea urchins, on the other hand, live in such abundance that they forgo muscles and use precious water as a hydraulic system to get around. Temper

Not far down the trail behind my house are patches of native grasses in assorted hues of winter straw. The Broomsedge is a buttery yellow, the Little Bluestem has a hint of orange thrown in. When the sun gets low, they both put on orange raiment with tone determined by some trigonometry of observation angle and position of the sun that I don’t care to understand. What catches my eye is the tangled tussock of withering straw at the base of each clump. Tidy gardeners call this

Sphagnum bogs bring many things to mind. The thought of a healthy bog conjures images of carnivorous plants, acidic water, gnarly conifers, dragonflies, weird grasses, and, of course, moss. Way, way down on that list, essentially not even on the list, is rodents. At least that was the case until recently, when I was treated to a look inside the daily life of a Meadow Vole. Meadow Vole scavenging under a bird feeder at Sax-Zim Bog, Minnesota. Not the bog the rest of the story

In every broader group of animals or plants it seems there’s always a weirdo. Weirdness is usually a product of adaptation and evolution. Everyone is eating plants, so someone decides to eat animal protein and launches a new species - a few thousand generations later. Everyone lays eggs in trees, so you lay eggs underground. Or you start hatching your eggs inside yourself and giving live birth! Someone is always being weird, and that’s how we ended up with the platypus. The S

More than a century ago, teams of miners would carry a canary or other small bird in a cage as they toiled in mineshafts far beneath the surface. With their small size and higher respiration, canaries would succumb to poisoning from carbon monoxide or other airborne toxins before the humans would even notice it. When the bird croaked, it was time to get out of the mine. The canary acted as a sentinel species, one that detects environmental hazards quicker and more acutely tha

I’ve seen some spectacular wildlife over the years, but the most shocking thing ever was an unexpected beaver. There is no good beaver habitat near my home. The three closest records are all 12 miles away, and at the time of my sighting the closest was 22 miles away. But there it was, standing on the edge of a ditch a mile down the road. We drove past and it plopped into the ditch and squeezed through a culvert under a driveway. That got me thinking, as surprise beavers will