On a pleasant summer morning in Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier, the terrain at North Branch Nature Center is teeming with endangered animals: children running wild in nature.

The preschoolers visit a woodland stream to collect rocks, search for salamanders, and compete in “frog olympics.” The older kids head for a forest trail where they’ll explore the mysteries of an old stone wall and a long-abandoned homestead. And a group of children and teens with disabilities, some using wheelchairs, navigate the trails on a guided botany outing.

The nature preserve buzzes with kids in floppy hats and neon-colored Crocs, kids lugging oversized backpacks and snazzy water bottles, and kids running in circles and laughing for no apparent reason other than the joy of being a child in summertime.

And not a phone in sight.

The scene is reminiscent of a time long gone for most adults: when we experienced the world before tech commandeered so much of our time and attention. Anxious psychologists, social scientists, and other thinkers warn us regularly about this shift from what is tangible in the world toward what is delivered to us by way of glowing screens. Even our tech overlords now profess to help us manage the contagion they themselves have unleashed. And this is to say nothing of what will come from AI.

Phones of course get much of the blame for the human drift from plants, animals, and the sublime outdoors. But as a field naturalist who works and plays in nature, and who writes about it, I’ve come to realize that this threat to our well-being is far more tangled and pernicious than phones, social media, and various online distractions. The forces in play in this retreat from the living world, thousands of years in the making, range from the raw power of the free market to the formidable trajectory of human evolution. Except that now the stakes are huge. After all, to defect from nature is to abandon much of what it means to be human.

I do not know to what extent a disembodied life is our destiny, or to what extent we might change course. Nobody knows. I nonetheless have ideas and hope, not as a social scientist or evolutionary biologist, but as a naturalist who finds joy, virtue, and purpose in the natural world, equipped with little more than my senses, some childlike curiosity, and, yeah, an iPhone 15.

The Best of Tech, The Worst of Tech

Before I describe the evolution of this retreat into the screens, and how we might respond to it, an essential point: This is no polemic on technology. I seek not to bury our screens, only to undermine their grip on us. My enthusiasm for adding more nature to our lives also embraces virtues not directly of this Earth: literature, art, music, liberty, genuine conversation, actual community, or even the act of sitting around and doing nothing. I will argue, however, that in the digital age the human bond to nature is imperiled in ways that those other virtues are not.

Long ago, those other virtues didn’t exist. Nature was our only template. No wonder that some of the first known figurative artwork, painted at least 45,000 years ago on cave walls in Indonesia, depicted animals: wild pigs and dwarf buffalos in a hunting scene with human figures. It’s not like our ancestral cave dwellers had Taylor Swift, cat videos, or Jesus Christ to watch, share, or turn into art. Nature was it — we were nature.

But human evolution would of course go on to feature fire, language, warfare, agriculture, music, books, religion, commerce, governance, demagoguery, football, junk food, newspapers, radio, television, and the halcyon days of the internet — all of it competing for our attention. I’ve basically got no quarrel with that. We moved into cities and therefore farther from nature. We no longer needed to hunt our dinners and gather our breakfasts. We listened not for predators, but to radio dramas, live jazz, and audiobooks. We watched not our clan enemies, but The Ed Sullivan Show, soap operas, The Simpsons, Home Shopping Network, The Sopranos, and Substack content.

Before the internet (and before good cable), we baby boomers used to say, “TV rots your brain.” And so it might be convenient to suggest that the brain-rotting now has many new screens, including the one in our pocket. That would be true. And yet my iPhone brings me music, maps for my fieldwork, baseball box scores, texts from friends, a respectable camera, and the weather. Beethoven’s Ninth performed live will change your life; on my phone through good speakers or earbuds, it remains a magnificent symphony. And although I myself prefer not to read news, email, books, or much of anything on my phone, plenty of people do — and it brings them meaning and purpose. So it’s clear that much of what we read or experience in our highly evolved lives — from your personal health data to Heather Cox Richardson — has migrated well to our phones and to other screens.

That’s not the case for nature on little screens, or on big ones. To be sure, nature on a screen can entice and inform us, but it’s nonetheless a special victim of our retreat from the living world. And the reason for this is far more consequential than, say, your inability to smell a rose or catch a firefly with your iPhone. The reason has almost everything to do with the fertile frontier of the human mind.

The Seduction of Our Senses

In their heyday, radio and television were agents of knowledge, entertainment, propaganda, and ultimately commerce. Whether the program was the Grand Ole Opry or Meet the Press, the medium was out to sell us something. And to help merchants know what we liked and disliked, and what we might buy, there was the market research firm known simply as Nielsen.

During much of the 20th century, Nielsen’s mission was to understand the habits of consumers. The company tracked product sales to discover what we liked to buy in drugstores, what radio stations we listened to, what TV shows we watched, and whether we preferred oatmeal or corn flakes. As an instrument of commerce, Nielsen helped businesses understand — and increasingly shape — how we spent our time and money. It was a seed of the algorithm.

By today’s standards, Nielsen’s methods were blunt instruments. Sure, the company installed devices on home televisions and radios that recorded which station was on at any moment. But Nielsen knew little else about a given household’s proclivities, its likes and dislikes, its everyday habits, and secret urges. The Nielsen Surveys and the Nielsen Ratings revealed more about us in the aggregate than as individuals.

It’s all rather quaint and crude compared to Big Tech’s resolute incursion into our minds. In the competition for our money and attention, digital platforms now know too much about us: what we love, what we hate, what we read, our desires, our politics, our impulses, and whatever gives us an online dopamine hit. Instead of relying on a Nielsen telephone survey or a meter attached to our computers and gadgets, Big Tech is hot-wired to our brains. Whatever we click, watch, like, share, skip, search for, or linger over, the algorithms learn more about how to seize and hold our attention, to keep us online and scrolling. Nature doesn’t stand a chance.

Okay, that’s an overstatement. Nature doesn’t really seek a chance at our attention. Nature doesn’t give a damn about us. It doesn’t want to kill us or court us — it simply exists (except when we kill it). Birds sing not to us, but to one another. Butterflies seek not our affections, but sunlight and mates. An orchid is lovely not to seduce us, but to lure bees and flies and other pollinators. And even if an orchid were specifically evolved to court us, unlike music or poetry, it would never be as seductive on a screen as it is in the wild. Nature online simply isn’t as good as the real thing.

Big Tech doesn’t need an orchid or a sunset to be seductive to us. It only needs to know our minds. Its algorithms appeal not merely to any broad demographic (like the results of Nielsen surveys), but specifically to you as an individual in order to seize your attention and your time. Except that you and I are not pollinators. We are prey. And all too often, we are easy prey.

Earlier this spring, here in Montpelier, when our middle school let out for the day, I noticed a 30-something man in my neighborhood walking away from school with a little girl who I assumed was his daughter. The problem was that he was fixated on his phone while the girl walked 10 feet behind him. Maybe something at work distracted his attention. Perhaps he was reviewing his daughter’s homework for that night. Or maybe he was reading the day’s headlines. Whatever the case, and whatever else causes so many people to turn to their phones while driving, waiting in line, walking the dog, or seated with family in a restaurant, it’s likely that the distraction has little or nothing to do with the natural world. Even allowing for our urban and suburban migration over the past century, nature simply isn’t that important anymore to the people and corporations shaping human culture.

The Relegation of Nature

Our bond with nature was once commensurate with faith, education, the arts, governance, and other pillars of culture and society. That bond is by no means dissolved; I believe it’s still in all of us. And yet nature has become more of a destination or novelty than an integrated facet of what it means to be human. In our drift from nature, the human experience has increasingly become a fusillade of celebrity, demagoguery, commerce, distraction, and other instruments of artifice. We know corporate logos better than the names of trees lining our neighborhoods. Our children spend more time with their phones than with frogs, flowers, fritillaries, or even their friends.

Look around the news. Few major newspapers (The Guardian in the U.K. is a notable exception) have a nature beat with reporters regularly covering the virtues of our encountering animals, plants, fungi, and the wild places around us. When newspapers do bring us the natural world, they tend to report on unusual or imperiled species far afield. That’s fine and essential. But for every 10 articles about the depravities of politicians, the glitter of celebrities, the intricacies of football, or even the virtues of art and books, couldn’t we have just one about when the songbirds are migrating through, why butterflies seem scarce, or where to discover wildflowers close to home? I’ll tell you what: forget one in 10. I’d settle for one article about human experience in nature for every 20 about everything else.

The relegation of nature is evident here at Substack, where I seem to be the platform’s highest-ranked general nature writer. As of late August, I’m ranked 21st in Substack’s Climate & Environment category. All the “bestsellers” above me and most publications ranked below me focus on global warming policy, power generation, public lands, animal justice, weather, or some other worthy niche topic. Plenty of other nature writers publish on Substack, but are somewhat lost in the Climate & Environment category. Substack maintains official categories on Business, Finance, and Crypto, and yet Climate & Environment is basically the platform’s only place for general nature writers.

I cite my ranking not to boast or to gripe — Substack is good for us — but rather to point out that classic nature writing, not about environmental issues, is too often relegated or overlooked in the mass media and other places where people share ideas. I also recognize that this could reflect a sagging level of public interest in nature. Maybe people care more about finance and crypto than birds and butterflies. But maybe that’s because they don’t have as much opportunity to read about the birds and butterflies where they live. To be clear, we humans have not entirely forsaken nature, but it seems to be losing its status in the public square.

Or even in ostensibly loftier places. This past spring, Pope Leo XIV issued his encyclical on artificial intelligence. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” which is Latin for the grandeur of humanity, the letter is in large part about the common good, meaningful work, social justice, and individual freedom. Whether or not you abide its references to God, “Magnifica Humanitas” is at its core a document about human dignity. And yet among the encyclical’s 40,000 words (Pope Leo needs better editors), there is little discussion of how our bond with nature is good for the mind, body, and soul — about how it makes us human. Not a word about plants, birds, insects, mountains, forests, meadows, lakes, or streams. Nature as experience, adding grandeur to humanity, gets only passing mentions. (But see my postscript on Laudato Sí.)

The Orchid and Hope

Whatever our faith, all of us have one thing in common: our one home. Climate and environment aren’t issues — they’re where we live. And they’re what we’ve damaged. In the long struggle for existence, humans, corporations, and governments have always exploited two things: nature and people. In the name of growth and prosperity, our cultures have destroyed forests, prairies, and wetlands; pillaged and depleted the seas; and committed unspeakable crimes against one another. Still, we know restraint. We’ve gone on to adopt laws, however late and imperfect, designed to limit pollution, outlaw slavery, and curb abuses of human labor, including child labor.

But exploitation is hardly limited to nature and labor. Big Tech is now coming for our minds. Our time and attention online are its frontiers, its commodities. And in too many ways, we’re defenseless, especially our children. The force of the algorithm turns us away from the embodied life, from genuine experience, from the living world, ever toward the glowing screens. In the middle of a maelstrom, it’s hard to see what’s happening — let alone do something about it. But we can do something about it.

We can apply moral codes and laws to Big Tech’s assault on the sanctity of the human mind. I have little faith in what passes for governance here in the U.S. Therefore my remedies, although no substitute for laws, are personal and close to home, including writing for you here at Chasing Nature. For any of us, it’s as simple as going outside with a field guide and learning a couple of trees in the neighborhood, a few birds in the park, or just one butterfly in the garden. Pause with a child at a flower and explain its miracles. By all means, spend less time with your phone (I’ll write soon on my own strategies). And support any nature center, library, school, or club bringing children and adults closer to the living world.

Among those children running wild at North Branch Nature Center, the orchid has a genuine chance against the algorithm. Seated in the wonderful chaos of children chasing everything from frogs to flowers that morning, I asked one of the center’s teacher-naturalists, Annie Jackson, about her work and her sense of optimism.

“I don’t see kids on their phones all summer long,” she told me. “It restores my hope.”

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Postscripts

• I am somewhat remiss in not mentioning above “Laudato Sí,” Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical “on care for our common home,” which is more in tune with the human bond to the natural world. His encyclical covers rampant development, consumerism, environmental destruction, global warming, and our estrangement from nature. “When we speak of the ‘environment’, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it,” Francis wrote. “Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live.” In, “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope In Leo does indeed reference “Laudata Sí.”

• For more on major news media’s flawed coverage of the natural world, here are two critiques I’ve written: one pokes fun at The New York Times and the other takes issue with The New Yorker’s idea of the “digital sublime.”

• My gratitude goes to , who writes and reviewed a draft of this essay.

• More gratitude to Annie Jackson, Ana Maria Arroyo, and the staff at my favorite eco-organization, North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, Vermont, where I volunteer with friends every Tuesday. You can help NBNC bring people closer to nature by giving to its mission. Or if you subscribe to my mission here at Chasing Nature this month, I’ll donate half your fee to North Branch Nature Center. Thanks!

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• iPhone image above via Wikimedia Commons and Rafael Fernandez (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Maybe we should kill off the pupfish — the Devils Hole Pupfish, which is reputed to be the rarest fish on Earth.

It would be a quick extinction. We’d drain the only pool in the world where this endangered species survives: a bedrock cavern in the U.S. state of Nevada. And we’d live-stream the killing on YouTube.

Only then might oblivion no longer be an abstraction. The last wild Devils Hole Pupfish, an inch long, iridescent blue or green, flopping on hot desert limestone, would gasp … and then gasp no more. We’d witness something that happens all too often but that we never actually see: extinction.

And then we might realize the profound power we humans have, every day, to decide what lives, what dies, and which species might vanish forever. Now abusing that power is the government of the United States.

The Trump administration is slated in September to expand its assault on imperiled plants and animals by undermining the very law designed to protect them: the Endangered Species Act. But this latest threat to songbirds, butterflies, salamanders, and so many other species also represents something greater: an assault on what it means to be human.

To understand that, you need not know the policy or judicial details of the administration’s animosity toward the Endangered Species Act (I’ll link below to an excellent summary). Instead, first recognize that in the grand scheme of things, extinction isn’t really that unusual.

Without any help on our part, the universe itself is perfectly capable of wiping out life on Earth. Five mass extinctions happened here before we came along to make a mess of things. And even as humans have taken over, we ourselves are one nuclear mistake, one pandemic, one rogue AI away from extinction, or at the very least mass suffering.

Extinction happens, except that it is ours alone to contemplate. Our knowledge is our burden. The Endangered Species Act is a manifestation of that, a confession that we routinely put the life around us at risk. It recognizes our outsized footprint and asks us to tread more lightly, to do better. More than a gesture to the natural world, the act is a test of our morality.

And now comes an immoral act. The Trump administration has made it easier to degrade or destroy the places where threatened and endangered species live. Its newly contrived reading of “harm” means only a direct assault on wildlife, and not its habitat. By this reasoning, it would be acceptable to wipe out a forest, for example, as long as its imperiled animals aren’t cut by chainsaws or buried alive by bulldozers. This of course is absurd. It’s like saying that you yourself would not suffer if your home were bulldozed while you were out back cutting the lawn.

Extinction is rarely as simple or vivid as my thought experiment about the Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). It is instead death by a thousand clearcuts, smokestacks, feedlots, shopping malls, or drained wetlands.

Humans are not gods, but we certainly play them Earth. Our bombs strike down defenseless people. We have the power to alter the climate and overheat a planet. And we decide whether plants, animals, fungi, and other species will live or die. The Endangered Species Act is an imperfect check on those powers. An act of self-awareness, it recognizes that our domain is not over nature but within it.

The farmer, poet, and philosopher Wendell Berry once wrote: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Desecration is not always as obvious as bombs or bigotry or live-streaming the extinction of a pupfish. It masquerades as policy or prosperity or jurisprudence. To desecrate the home of an endangered songbird is to desecrate the songbird; to destroy the habitat of an orchid is to destroy the orchid.

We need not be gods to show restraint. We have laws for that. We protect the pupfish and other species because they exist and because we can. And like the gods, we have the capacity for morality and decency — not only toward one another but toward all that we imperil in Earth’s sacred places.

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Postscripts

• The U.S. now seems to run less by governance than lawsuit. The Trump administration’s new rule on the Endangered Species Act, slated to take effect on September 14, 2026, has been challenged in court. A summary of where things stand comes from Patrick Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law & Graduate School.

• By a recent count, only 77 Devils Hole Pupfish remain in a single limestone cavern on federal land in Nevada’s Mojave Desert. The wild population took a hit during earthquakes in 2024 and 2025. And even though Devils Hole is at least 450 feet deep, the pupfish feed and breed almost entirely on a shallow 215-square-foot rock shelf near the surface. Destroy the shelf, and you could destroy the pupfish. As a safeguard, other pupfish are maintained in captivity. Of course, my pupfish proposal is rhetorical.

• The Wendell Berry line comes from his poem, “How to Be a Poet.”

• Finally, the administration played god when it convened the so-called “God Squad” in March to lift protections afforded to the endangered Rice’s Whale. I wrote about it:

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As we go about the ordinary business of living, a golden insect hunts over the garden, mates beside a roadside ditch, and patrols the supermarket parking lot. Its name rings like that of a god: Pantala, a dragonfly that defies the borders we draw across the living world.

Never mind that Pantala flies around, kills other insects, and has indiscriminate sex. Plenty of dragonflies do that. But Pantala migrates vast distances, even across oceans, and inhabits every continent except Antarctica. Few other animals get around the planet on their own like this.

If it’s not already flying in your neighborhood, Pantala may be soon. (In a note below, I offer tips on finding it.) And even though it hasn’t yet arrived this summer to my small city, I’m content knowing that Pantala is out there in the world. Because here is a species that humans cannot easily drive into decline or extinction. No border wall will block Pantala. No bombs can wipe it out. Not even humanity’s routine assaults on the natural world will destroy this insect.

After all, dragonflies have been around for about 300 million years, a thousand times longer than us. They’ve been places, seen things, and survived mass extinctions and various cataclysms. And when humans are gone from the planet for good, Pantala or its relatives will likely be flying around and thinking something like, “Well, those apes were weird. Wonder what that was all about.” (Or so I like to imagine.)

This insect’s actual common name is Wandering Glider (or Wandering Globetrotter). Its scientific name, Pantala flavescens, basically means, with license on my part, gold on vast wings (or in some derivations the golden explorer). I like to use its genus name as its common name because Pantala is one of the loveliest words I know.

Insects invented flight about 400 million years ago, dragonflies mastered it, and Pantala has taken the idea great distances. Its wide hind wings, wider than those on other dragonflies, make for efficient aerodynamics — more glide, less flap on the winds of the world.

And Pantala rides those winds like few other insects. Most notable in its globetrotting is an autumn migration from India to Africa across the northern Indian Ocean. The flight coincides with prevailing winds (tailwinds for a dragonfly) and monsoon rains, both of which play an outsized role in Pantala’s success on Earth.

Dragonflies lay their eggs in wet places — waterbodies, rivers, or wetlands. And it generally takes a year or more for a dragonfly to go from egg to aquatic nymph to free-flying adult. Pantala does it in only four to six weeks. This rapid development allows Pantala to lay its eggs in the usual places, but also in roadside puddles, rain pools, or other waters that dry up too soon for mere mortal dragonflies to use. And then it can move onward — or its offspring can soon emerge to continue another leg of a long-distance migration.

The vast majority of dragonflies never venture far from their natal waters. Pantala is a roamer, a drifter, an adventurer. When I see it on the wing in my community of Montpelier, I know that someone else might be noticing this same species in Mogadishu or Mumbai or Melbourne.

Pantala flies just the same among the luxury resorts of the Maldives and the refugee camps of Bangladesh, over oil rigs and solar arrays, over small towns of the U.S. and bombed-out buildings of Iran.

To me, Pantala is a messenger, a reminder to think beyond my own borders. Whenever I see it on the wing, this golden insect brings me kinship with a world beautiful and bleak, promising and imperfect, immeasurably vast and yet small and wondrous enough for a two-inch dragonfly to cross an ocean.

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Find Your Pantala (and the Dragonfly That Mistook a Car for a Puddle)

Pantala is now on the wing from Los Angeles to Chicago to Baltimore (and even playing just outside of Peoria). It’s flying in Italy, Russia, Tel Aviv, India, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and lots of places in between. Expect to see more of them soon farther north.

Here in Vermont, for example, Pantala usually appears by early August, probably riding tropical systems that bring heat and humidity (and these dragonflies) into northern tier states and southern Canada. (By the way, they migrate south in fall like hawks.)

You will almost certainly see your first Pantala airborne rather than perched. And those of us who know dragonflies can identify this one simply by the way it carries itself in flight. Look for a golden dragonfly gently tapering in profile and flying a variable but watchable beat along a street or in some natural opening.

A Pantala will also hover over parking lots or in traffic because light reflecting off vehicles can make a Ford, Toyota, or Subaru look like a little pond. I’ve seen females lay eggs on car hoods (very sad).

If you’re seeing golden dragonflies making short sorties and landing often, especially in fields near water, those are probably meadowhawks (in the genus Sympetrum) or other species — and almost certainly not Pantala.

Here is a live iNaturalist map of Pantala sightings around the world since July 1, 2026. (Zoom and click its orange pins.) The map will keep you up to date on where they’re being sighted this summer, which could be most anywhere in a tropical band around the planet and into temperate areas. The map below (not clickable) simply shows more than 30,000 accumulated Pantala sightings worldwide over the past 30 years (note the sightings at sea).

Finally, there is another Pantala in the world — the only other species in the genus — called Spot-winged Glider (Pantala hymenaea). Also a migrant, it’s a dragonfly entirely of the Americas. You’ll often see this species in flight as well, sometimes with its sibling. Look for the spot on each hindwing (visible in flight).

Postscript: Greg Lasley (1941-2021)

The late Greg Lasley left us with spectacular photography from nature, not the least of which includes his two dozen Pantala images. Before he died, Greg gave me permission to use his images, including the shot atop this essay. Here’s my elegy to Greg. We miss him a lot.

Some of you might recall my essay about the parasite, a flatworm that lives entirely inside a bird’s gut and a snail’s body — and basically never sees the light of day. At one point, Erica asks me whether I find hope in the parasite. Spoiler alert: I do.

You’ll also hear some housekeeping, including my request for paying subscribers to send me questions for an AMA — an Ask Me Anything episode. And I provide an update on a series of essays now in the works about technology and humanity’s fading bond with the living world.

Thanks for listening.

Show Notes

• You can read my essay, titled “A Parasite, Clickbait, and Honesty,” either before or after listening (WARNING: there’s a graphic video.)

• For the AMA, send your questions to me at chasingnature@substack.com. That e-mail address works only for paying subscribers.

• If you harbor any interest whatsoever in the human experiment — why we’re here and how we might understand the world — subscribe to Erica Heilman’s RumbleStrip wherever you get your podcasts.

• Inspiration for “The Vulture’s Memoir” comes from Charles Finn, who is, for me, among our most impactful writers. Finn’s poetry breathes with the living world of nature and human companionship. Find him online and buy his books (I own all of them). At the very least, buy On a Benediction of Wind. Finn is originally from Vermont. Although we’ve never met, it turns out I knew his dad. Small state. (Gratitude to for turning me on to Finn.)

• Willow Ptarmigans and Wood Thrush recordings courtesy of Xeno-Canto: https://xeno-canto.org/246551, https://xeno-canto.org/269477, https://xeno-canto.org/503405, https://xeno-canto.org/135138.

• Record-scratch sound effect from Freesound.org by kwahmah_02 / https://freesound.org/s/269476/. (I’m a proud contributor to Freesound.)

• Music is by Dee Davis and the Faerie Godbrothers.

Thanks for listening and reading. I’ll see you soon with another essay.

Among the zillions of wild events now happening in nature, few are as prolific and profound as reproduction. And yet rarely do we get to see it in action.

Although they sing and flash feathers in courtship, birds copulate for but a second or two — a moment called the “cloacal kiss.”

Squirrels, our most familiar backyard mammals, typically breed once or twice a year, with females in estrus for only a few hours on a single day.

Plants breed virtually everywhere — we’re immersed in their wind-borne pollen and spores. But even as we enjoy their flowers, fruits, and pollinators, the reproductive “acts” of plants go largely unseen.

Not so insects. Although they defy generalization, insects are exhibitionists. They copulate early, often, and indiscriminately. You want cheap thrills and debauchery? Quit your job and become an entomologist.

Although Chasing Nature’s paying subscribers will see a gallery of dirty insect pictures below, something more elegant stopped me in my tracks here in Vermont this past Sunday: a St. Lawrence Tiger Moth (Arctia parthenos) laying her eggs on the leaf of a Speckled Alder (Alnus incana). (Actually, the artist, naturalist, and Substacker stopped me in my tracks because she noticed this moth while we were on our way to a stream in search of dragonflies.)

Unless you keep chickens or turtles, you won’t likely see any bird or reptile laying eggs like this. But I’ve seen it many times among moths, butterflies, dragonflies, and other insects, including the time I myself … uh … er … well … “escorted” a female dragonfly as she laid her eggs in a pond.

On July 3, 2007, just below the summit of Vermont’s tallest peak, Mt. Mansfield, I went searching for a dragonfly that, as best we could tell, had never been seen in the state. Ringed Emerald (Somatochlora albicinta), metallic black with green overtones and white rings circling its abdomen, is a prize that ranges well north into the American Arctic.

Soon after I arrived at the summit pond, aptly called Lake of the Clouds, I noticed a candidate dragonfly in flight. So I swung my net in a grand arc. Sure enough, I landed a Ringed Emerald, a female. And while in my hand, she began producing dozens of pale, yellowish eggs from the underside of her abdomen.

A Ringed Emerald normally lays her eggs in flight by tapping the tip of her abdomen to the water’s surface. I could have released her to go about her business. Instead, I escorted her to the pond edge and repeatedly dipped her abdomen into the water. After a few dips, her clutch of eggs had been deposited. I snapped another photo (below) and then set her free.

So what am I to make of all this? I climbed a mountain to find a rare dragonfly. Along the way, I landed in the middle of insect reproduction. Meddling? Chivalry? Hubris? Perhaps. Or maybe: Responsibility.

In the course of my helping to document this insect’s place in the world, I interfered in her life. After being netted, some dragonflies, when set free, will rocket up and out of sight. Instead, I saw to it that those eggs went to their rightful place in the pond. There they would go on to hatch into nymphs and, over the course of a year or more, mature to adult Ringed Emeralds flying and reproducing beneath the summit of Vermont’s tallest peak. A simple gesture on my part. It was the least I could do for a rare insect with so much potential.

This past February, in an essay titled “I Hear the Tree Buds Singing,” I compared the winter buds on trees and shrubs to the Big Bang, each a compressed expression of time and space. Insect eggs aren’t much different. Each one, if it survives, gives rise to an expanding universe of grace, diversity, reproduction, death, and even human experience.

A tiny egg becomes magnificence. Isn’t that enough? Yeah, it’s enough. And every so often, I get to join the drama.

For Paying Subscribers: “Dirty” Nature Images

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Dear Subscriber,

Here in New England, we’re into the “Season of Maximum Flight.” That’s what I call the period from late June into early July, when lots of birds feed fledglings and charismatic insects fly in abundance. I’ve been in the thick of it.

Which is why this solstice letter to paying subscribers is coming to you a bit late. (The Season of Maximum Flight — it’s a legit excuse, right?) Regardless, as gratitude for supporting my work, I bring you those two ornate moths above, a bonus podcast segment about birdwatching, an obscure and ancient animal, some “personal injury” news, and a preview of my ambitious essay now in the works about humanity’s estrangement from nature. All of it in only about five minutes of reading because, hey, it’s the Season of Maximum Flight — we’re busy.

Moth Tapestry

Their names alone evoke diversity and whimsy: Pink-shaded Fern Moth (Callopistria mollissima) and Wavy Chestnut Y Moth (Autographa mappa) — photographed (above) on the same night in June here in Vermont. Although only somewhat related, each species has converged on a tapestry of camouflage. Sure, against wooden clapboards, those two moths stand out. Most anywhere else in the wild, they resemble a patch of lichen, a decaying leaf, or some other curly, decomposing vegetation — the stuff predators (and most of us) overlook. Not me. I like looking at these two moths; they make me happy. So do these:

In a culture drawn to sex and shiny objects, it would seem hard to overlook the Dogbane Leaf Beetle. Along with its rainbow glow, this beetle is promiscuous, polyamorous, and poisonous. It’s a heck of a lifestyle.

Which is why the Dogbane Leaf Beetle came to mind after I noticed a four-part series now running in The New York Times Lifestyle section titled “The Touch Grass Challenge.” Its shocking conclusion: we spend too much time on our phones.

So The Times is encouraging readers this month “to put down your phone and reconnect with the real world.” Week 1’s advice: “Go Outside,” which reduces stress and boosts mood, focus, and memory. “So let’s get outside, together,” The Times reports. “Here’s how to do it.”

Since I’m an expert on going outside, I’ll spare you the particulars of The Times’ 737-word article and tell you, in only two words, how to go outside:

Go outside.

It’s not that difficult. Use either a front door or a back door (or climb out the window if you must).

But before I poke more good-natured fun at the nation’s presumptive paper of record, Week 1’s article is sadly typical of too much news and policy writing on nature: It lacks heart because its writers know little of what swims, slithers, crawls, hops, walks, jumps, flies, or just sits there glowing and mating in nature, even in a city like New York.

Perhaps recognizing this herself, the series’ author quotes scientists who advise readers to “listen to the birds,” “gaze at the curiously shaped clouds drifting overhead,” or notice “a dandelion popping out of the sidewalk.”

Don’t get me wrong. Birds and clouds and dandelions are wonderful — I enjoy them often, and I hope you do as well. But The Times is giving us boilerplate nature, void of beauty, detail, and drama, and unlikely to get phone addicts to turn off and go out.

So before I give you the antics of the Dogbane Leaf Beetle (Chrysochus auratus), here’s a gallery of nature happening right now in three other major American cities (and therefore probably happening near many of you as well).

Meet the Beetles

Not incidentally, you can now find Dogbane Leaf Beetles in Midtown Manhattan, committing larceny within walking distance of The New York Times newsroom. The beetle feeds on dogbane plants (in the genus Apocynum), which defend themselves with heart-stopping chemicals called cardenolides. Unfazed, the beetle eats and sequesters the toxins, later secreting them to ward off attacks by birds, spiders, or other predators. Basically, the Dogbane Leaf Beetle steals the plant’s defense for its own use.

The beetle does all this when it’s not having sex. As adults, Dogbane Leaf Beetles live for about six to eight weeks, nearly every day of which is an orgy. And yet each copulation, which reportedly lasts about 90 minutes, is not entirely indiscriminate. After insemination, neither male nor female rushes off to the next partner. Instead, the male rides around for a while on the female’s back, something known as “post-copulatory mate guarding.” He stays put so that she’ll lay eggs fertilized by his sperm before another male arrives on scene to … you know … do what he just did.

I don’t know about you, but all this from a beetle that glows like Times Square at night might be more reason to get outside than clouds and dandelions, and perhaps even birds (whose copulations last only seconds).

Take Your Time and Keep off the Grass

The Times might have titled its series something other than “The Touch Grass Challenge.” Unless you live in native prairie, the grass most of us touch as lawn isn’t nearly as diverse as most other green places.

Sure, any time spent in nature, even touching grass, is time well spent. The Times suggests 20 minutes per day outside without your phone — either all at once or in two, 10-minute segments. Well, uh, okay. But, c’mon, Americans spend four or more hours a day on average engaged with their phones. You’d think Times readers might spare more than 20 minutes of their days intimately engaged in nature.

The Dogbane Leaf Beetle certainly does.

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For Paying Subscribers: Bonus Beetle Biology, a Map to Dogbane Leaf Beetles, and a Hummingbird with a Similar Glow

Upgrade to see the extra content, including the live map showing more than 18,000 sightings of Dogbane Leaf Beetles across eastern and central North America. You’ll also be supporting my work to bring readers closer to what’s left of the natural world.

Subscriber Options

• The Touch Grass Challenge in The New York Times.

If you’re a field biologist heading to a bog, your first concern isn’t usually a hot-pink flower. Not that the flower doesn’t matter. It does. But first, you must get to the bog without getting yourself lost.

That’s because trails to bogs are rare — at least to most bogs I’ve visited over the past four decades. In the days before GPS, I would bushwhack to bogs with a map and compass. And, sure, if I got too eager chasing a warbler or too distracted by an orchid, I’d sometimes get turned around and lost.

Like the time I went off-course chasing dragonflies at a bog in Saskatchewan. From a remote gravel road, I navigated well enough to the bog, which was lovely, but lost my bearings on the way back. I also lost my nerve. When the road and my truck failed to appear, my heart began to pound and my mind played tricks on common sense: Maybe my compass needle had lost its affinity for north. What if I had the declination wrong? Or maybe my hand-drawn map was no good. “Just keep walking northwest, Bryan,” I kept telling myself, “and you’ll hit the road.” Otherwise, I might be lost for good. Eventually, common sense and magnetic north prevailed. Never was I so happy to see a gravel road.

But that relief has never come close to the euphoria I experience each time I arrive at a bog. And these arrivals have little to do with being lost, found, or any bushwhack. The bushwhacks are usually fine, by the way. And even when they’re not, when the black flies and my aches and pains and mood get the better of me, I would bear far worse to reach a bog. That’s because the moment I arrive at a bog, everything in the world goes right for me. Everything falls into place.

To convey for you this feeling of contentment, I can only hope you yourself experience something similar. Maybe it’s the bliss you feel coming home to the person or family you love, or the sublime you might notice at a moving flourish while listening to music. I suspect you know of others.

At a bog, I find safety and sensuality — a sense of belonging and transcendence alike. And in spring, at many bogs I am greeted by the flowers of Rhodora (Rhododendron canadense).

Among those blooms, whether I’ve come for science or business or pleasure, I find rare birds, butterflies, and dragonflies. Better yet, I find joy, contemplation, and meaning. Yeah, all that from wetlands too often dismissed in the culture as dark, dangerous, and worthless.

Far from worthless, bogs are timeless. Born of the retreat of glaciers here in New England more than 10,000 years ago, bogs are slow-motion ecosystems. Their change is measured in centuries, not years. Wars, fascists, greed, hatred — bogs are not immune to them, but generally outlast them.

And maybe that’s another reason I make the bushwhacks. At a bog, for me, the world stops spinning so fast. It did the same for Henry David Thoreau more than 150 years ago.

“There are no richer parterres to my eyes than … these tender places on the earth’s surface,” Thoreau wrote in his final essay, titled Walking. “Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there — the high blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora — all standing in the quaking sphagnum.”

I now stand beside him, with wet feet at those tender places unchanged. However lovely or arduous the bushwhack, however lost I might find myself in nature or culture, when I arrive at the quaking sphagnum, the Rhodora tells me, yeah, you’ve made it, Bryan. You’re here. You’re alive. You’re home.

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Bonus Images

Postscripts

• Like its botanical kin the azaleas, and unlike some rhododendrons, Rhodora is deciduous, dropping its leaves in autumn. In spring, Rhodora erupts into those blooms before its leaves emerge — a very good look in a bog.

• Granted, in really boggy places, like Maine, Rhodora can show itself along roadsides. Good for anyone who wanders or drives by!

• For the style police among you, yep, contrary to most style manuals, I capitalize the common names of plants, animals, fungi, and other wild things here at Chasing Nature. (Thoreau didn’t capitalize rhodora and other species, nor do most other writers.) Hey, it’s my Substack — I set the rules.

• To my mind, Walking is among Thoreau’s most challenging essays. I had to read it twice before I realized that it’s less about walking than about spirituality, civilization, and a more virtuous form of Manifest Destiny (although he never uses the term). At just over 12,000 words, Walking was published in The Atlantic Monthly in June 1862, shortly after Thoreau died of tuberculosis at age 44.

Given the world’s troubles, I recognize that a droplet at the tip of a bizarre flower isn’t exactly breaking news.

And yet you, dear readers, are among the few people ever to see this droplet, which is the sugary secretion of a parasitic plant called Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe. That’s because, as best I can determine, I’m the first person to photograph this phenomenon in the wild and publish its image.

But this isn’t about me, or even entirely about the droplet, which botanists unceremoniously call “stigmatic exudate.” This is instead about the satisfaction of finding something small, odd, or even common in nature. Mine is a droplet in a bog. Yours may be a triumph closer to home.

The Parasite

But let’s begin with the plant, which itself is rare enough. Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe (Arceuthobium pusillum) isn’t exactly the plant some of you might steal kisses beneath at Christmastime. It’s one of more than a thousand mistletoe species on Earth, all of which are parasites on other plants.

Rather than sending their roots into soil, mistletoes tap through bark into a tree or shrub’s plumbing to extract water and nutrients (it doesn’t always damage or kill the host). And like other plants, mistletoes produce flowers and fruits, which can be food for insects, birds, and other wildlife.

Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe grows on conifers — spruce, tamarack, fir, or pine — but mostly Black Spruce here in Vermont. Neither leafy nor showy, it presents instead as brown shoots, only a centimeter or so in length, along spruce twigs. Finding Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe amounts to searching the spruce needles for a fat brown version of one.

The “Wrong” Flowers

My journey to the droplet began April 4 at a woodland spruce bog that Josh Lincoln, my dear friend and most trusted field companion, knew to be busy with mistletoe. On that chilly day, the bog was calm, more a place of promise than of presence. A Common Raven croaked overhead. Ice floated in bog puddles. Josh and I got to work.

After scrutinizing hundreds of mistletoe shoots, and just as we were about to give up the search, I noticed some fetching yellow specks, bright as fresh highway paint, in a shrubby spruce. These were mistletoe flowers, and yet only half of our journey: they were males. Although Josh and I rejoiced among these odd blooms, our quest was not yet complete.

Dwarf mistletoes are dioecious, which means a given plant is either male or female. Those yellow specks were anthers bearing pollen, each resting on a brown petal like an oyster on its shell. Josh and I found no female plants in flower, and therefore no sugary droplets. We would need to return to the bog another day. (It’s not hard to get Josh and me to a bog any day.)

The Droplets

On April 25, three weeks after our initial visit, the bog was coming to life. The raven still croaked. Leatherleaf flowers, swelling in their buds, dangled like little white bells from their twigs. Two Blue-headed Vireos had arrived to sing their sweet repertoire: swee-up… cheerio … be-seein’-you … see-ya! And Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe males were now in full bloom — lots of them.

“I want droplets,” I said over and over to Josh, who puts up with me like nobody else. (Josh wanted droplets as well.)

The female flowers of various dwarf mistletoe species sometimes produce a tiny, glistening drop of liquid containing the sugars sucrose, fructose, or glucose. Probably a reward for an insect conveying pollen from male flowers, the droplet also seems to help pollen grains germinate and fertilize a female flower’s ovules. Although I had read literature about this, nowhere was I able to find photos or even illustrations of Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe’s droplets. (It’s hard enough to find images of the female flowers, which look nothing like any flower you’re familiar with.)

A bog is a big place with lots of wonderful distractions. Josh and I were basically searching for a translucent poppyseed on a weird plant. It amounted to leaning into what looked like female mistletoe shoots and scrutinizing their tips with a 7-power hand lens. I felt like Sherlock Holmes (without the brainpower). But one thing about us humans: we’re probably more dogged than dogs.

“I’ve got droplets!” I finally shouted across the bog toward Josh. Or, as an academic botanist might say, “I’ve ascertained stigmatic exudate!” As it turned out, so did Josh. And now you do as well.

I went to the bog, twice, not to seek orchids or warblers or butterflies, but to search for a droplet on a odd plant. It became for me a way of purpose and grace.

Purpose and grace may wait as well in the backyard, by the roadside, or in a crack in the pavement. It need not be rare or even beautiful — as long as it means something to you. So seek your orchid, your warbler, your butterfly.

Seek your droplet.

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Bonus Botany

• My more modest aspiration closer to home this spring was to see the flowers of American Beech (Fagus grandifolia). For virtually my entire life (so far), I’d walked among these common trees and never once seen their separate male and female blooms, perhaps because I’m usually looking at songbirds in May. But that’s no excuse. A better excuse would be that beech flowers tend to be high in the canopy. Nonetheless, after considerable and determined searching this month, at long last I found my low-hanging flowers (and soon-to-be fruit). Triumph in the prosaic. Along the way, I reclined in the woods to watch the clouds and the leaves. I do this a lot.

• Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe causes its tree hosts to form growths we call “witches’ brooms” — something Henry David Thoreau described inn 1858 from Walden Pond, 13 years before the mistletoe itself was described to science.

• Mistletoe fruits mature in capsules that explode in fall, shooting sticky seeds onto spruce boughs, where they later germinate and infect the trees twigs. The shoots we see are the tips of a kind of root system in the host plant.

• Confirmation of my mistletoe droplets came from Dr. Daniel Nickrent, an expert on parasitic flowering plants at Cornell University. (Even he’s never seen the droplets.)

• My motivation on mistletoe comes in part from the naturalist and botanist Steven Daniel, who for years has been observing the flowers of Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe, and ultimately joined the club and found droplets this spring. Read Steven’s wonderful article on page 14 of this issue of Mitchelliana, a publication of the New York Flora Association. It includes Steven’s images of the all-but-invisible female mistletoe flowers (along with droplets from a different mistletoe species).

Related Reading

References

• Hawksworth, Frank G.; Wiens, Delbert. 1996. Dwarf mistletoes: Biology, pathology, and systematics. Agricultural Handbook 709. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service. 410 p. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/4699

• Daniel, Steven. 2024. The Strange and Fascinating Dwarf Mistletoe, Arceuthobium pusillum Peck. Mitchelliana. Vol. 35 (2), 14-16.

One day during the 18th century, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, a songbird with the quirky habit of wagging its tail was killed, probably by fine-grain birdshot, and collected in the name of science.

Shipped to Europe, the specimen eventually reached Germany, where the naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin, in 1789, gave the species a misleading scientific name: Motacilla palmarum, which means a tail-wagging bird living among palms.

Two hundred and thirty-seven years later, millions of these songbirds, now going by the common name Palm Warbler, are migrating north through the U.S. and into Canada toward breeding sites far from any palm trees. Along the way, they’re unwittingly bringing tranquility and meaning to a kinetic and damaged world.

With plain plumage and an inelegant song, Palm Warblers lack the cachet of their close relatives — except for their idiosyncratic tail wagging (really more pump than wag). Other birds, including a few warbler species, wag or flick or bob their tails, but no warbler pumps like a Palm. So distinctive and constant is the motion that we birdwatchers can identify a Palm Warbler by its waggling alone.

Like other migratory species, the Palm Warbler is a creature of three distinct worlds: where it winters, where it breeds, and where it navigates in migration. In winter, Palm Warblers range from the southeastern U.S. into Mexico, Central America, and islands of the Caribbean — close enough to actual palms, even though the warblers do fine without them. During the breeding season, Palm Warblers are all but different animals, occupying remote bogs across much of Canada and parts of the northern U.S., where they nest on or just above the mossy bog mat. (Had it instead been shot and collected for science during its nesting season, this songbird could easily have been named Sphagnum Warbler.)

And yet most birdwatchers encounter Palm Warblers only in their third realm — as spring or fall migrants between the tropical and the boreal, when they stop to rest, feed, and pump their tails anywhere from forests to front lawns, from swamps to shopping centers. And once they see a Palm Warbler, many birders typically note it and then move on in search of flashier songbirds.

Not me.

This past week I was visiting family on foreign turf — the suburbs of southeastern Michigan. As much as I love my family, I struggle in their landscape. Wetlands there are filled or half-dead. The relentless din of traffic drowns out the dawn chorus. From every shopping center, I can gaze out in most any direction to see … yet another shopping center.

Still, on my morning walks in the scarcity of green, I gazed at the Palm Warblers passing through. Their seesaw tails remind me that they’ve been to wilder places north and south. We have a kinship, the warblers and me: in our time together in suburbia we do our best to get by on a damaged planet.

A Palm Warbler will always fly toward an uncertain fate, which is true for all of us. And yet even as I head home to Vermont, and warblers move on from suburbia, we will meet again soon enough.

Next week, as I do almost every spring, I’ll make my way to bogs, mostly to search for rare butterflies and dragonflies. At a Vermont bog, there is no din of traffic, no shopping malls, no politics or email. Instead, Rhodora will bloom hot pink, last year’s cranberries will be fat and ripe, and a small songbird, transcending the story imposed on it two and a half centuries ago, will be pumping its tail and singing for a mate.

As a migrant, a Palm Warbler lives entirely nowhere, except where it exists on any given day. And when we meet again at the bog, the warbler and I will renew our kinship. And in many ways, we’ll both be home.

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Extras

• Why the Wagging? A behavior that everyone notices is somewhat mysterious to ornithologists. Some birds wag, flick, or flash their tails (or wings) to flush insect prey. Other hypotheses are more speculative: Ground-dwelling birds (wagtails, pipits, Hermit Thrush, Palm Warbler) might wag to signal a kind of cocky confidence so that predators shouldn’t bother trying. Or it could be a form of social status or sexual signaling. We’re not entirely sure, which is fine.

• Back in 1789, Gmelin could be forgiven for assigning the warbler specimen to the genus Motacilla, the wagtails of Europe, Africa, and Asia, none of which inhabit the Americas. The Palm Warbler has since been moved into the more typical warbler genus Setophaga. The specimen, collected in Santo Domingo and then shipped to Europe, seems to have since been lost (which is why the collection date and collector seem to be unknown).

• Palm Warblers come in two subspecies: The “Western” Palm Warbler, plainer in plumage, nests generally west of Ottawa, Ontario; the “Eastern” Palm Warbler, showing more yellow on its body, nests east of Ottawa.

Reference

• Wilson Jr., W. H. (2020). Palm Warbler (Setophaga palmarum), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.palwar.01 (Thanks, Herb!)

Yet again the conventional wisdom is wrong. Spring isn’t green; it’s countless shades of red. Carmine tints emerging leaves. Ruby dyes early flowers. And scarlet conveys songbird desire.

The green of spring comes soon enough. But if you seek beauty and drama in nature, even perspective on the best and worst of human nature, you’re seeing red.

Among the great apes known as humans, red is a primary color and a social construct. A red carpet bestows honor, the red pill a harsh reality. Red flags are warnings, The Scarlet Letter a mark of shame. Red is what evolution and we ourselves make of it — good, lousy, or otherwise.

Among other animals, red plays a leading role in springtime. Red is the fireworks from the crown of a kinglet seeking a mate, the warning glow of a young Eastern Newt, or the blaze on a moth called The Herald (so named because it flies at the start of a new season).

Where animals flash red to signal either desire or danger, plants use it for survival thanks to pigments known as anthocyanins. They bring blues, purples, and reds to fruits, stems, leaves, and flowers.

Anthocyanin pigments help plants withstand the chill of early spring; they deter wildlife from eating new and tender leaves; and they act as sunscreen against harsh UV light before chlorophyll production ramps up and turns the world light-loving green. But the springtime red in plants does something more for me.

Here in Vermont, our evergreen trees are, well, always green — stability in uncertain times. But red doesn’t run like that. Sure, I want the world to be the benevolent and peaceful red — the red of flowers and feathers and Valentines. But red is also the color of anger, bloodshed, and a certain president’s necktie. It reminds me that nature and culture are beautiful, ugly, complex, and impermanent — basically the story of life on Earth.

Even so, after every winter, no matter how long or cold, how brutal or difficult, there comes a moment when everything goes right. It happens for me in April, when our winter-gray hardwoods turn not to green but first to a subtle, lacy canvas of red — the flowering of Red Maples, one of eastern North America’s most abundant trees.

For me, those reds aren’t colors — they’re feelings. Anthocyanins aren’t pigments — they’re an experience. Whether I’m worthy or not, the red brings me joy. I fall in love with the world yet again. And to receive these rewards, I need not work or travel or plead my case. It’s springtime. All I need to do is look around.

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Postscripts in Red and Other Displays

By the way, red doesn’t corner the market on drama. Green Jays, Yellow Warblers, and Indigo Buntings make as impactful statements as Scarlet Tanagers, Northern Cardinals, or Vermillion Flycatchers.

Finally for Paying Subscribers:

Prologue: My friend Terry Allen died a week ago at her home here in Vermont. She was 78. An artist, journalist, photographer, and rebel, Terry had an enduring sense of beauty, curiosity, and justice. While drafting Terry’s obituary this week, I spent some time perusing her portfolio of journalism and photography — from villages in China to war horrors of El Salvador to anti-ICE rallies in the U.S. Then I came upon the American Robin pictured above, in attack mode, which Terry photographed some years ago through a window from inside her home. She phoned me at the time, wondering what the heck was going on with this robin. Here’s an explanation that Terry might have liked.

At a bog in Alaska, a farm in Iowa, and a mall in Miami, American Robins claim lofty perches and sing as if they own the place. In many ways, they do.

More than an iconic backyard bird, the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is a paragon of versatility, occupying forests, open land, and spaces in between across nearly all of North America. Few songbirds claim such range. The robin does so with a blend of moxie and manifest destiny.

Food figures big in this American success story. Robins do not live by earthworm alone. They’ll eat anything from spiders to dragonflies, from the fruits of poison ivy to the berries of junipers. A study of stomach contents from 1,169 robins found fruits from 50 plant genera and invertebrates from more than 100 families.

That diet demands dexterity. A robin hunting earthworms will pause, watch, cock its head, and studiously adjust its gaze before striking at the sod. But a robin can also run down flying insects or search the forest floor for food by flipping fallen leaves. A robin on the wing can snatch fruit off a twig or vine. And on rare occasions, robins have eaten fish, frog, snake, and skink. So when it comes to their diets, robins are opportunistic — kind of like Americans.

They’re even more opportunistic in real estate. As pioneers, settlers, and developers claimed the continent for homes, farms, and commerce, robins followed in their wake. The American Robin is now a bird of forests, riversides, barnyards, city parks, shopping centers, golf courses, or most any other places altered by humans. The robin is a land-grabber — kind of like certain Americans.

And once it claims turf, the American Robin defends it from predators with an enhanced version of the songbird arsenal: shouting, harassing, or a good thrashing. Confronted with a raccoon, squirrel, crow, hawk, or a human wandering too close to the nest, robins spring into a dance of agitation: they hop from perch to perch, flick their wings, wag their tails, and blurt emphatic, staccato YEEP! and CHUCK! calls. These antics often draw other songbirds into the fray, sort of a coalition of the willing (unlike current American military policy).

Occasionally, robins can make at least glancing contact with a predator or interloper, usually around the head and neck. One robin was reported to have killed a Steller’s Jay by thrashing it with its wings and feet and pecking through its skull. (I think that’s gonna leave a mark.)

The aggression can also come to your window. A robin glimpsing its reflection in the glass sees only another robin intruding on its territory, which was the case with Terry’s robin. These ensuing and unnecessary turf wars can go on for days (kind of like the battle for Greenland) and bloody both robin and window.

In those instances, a robin is at war with itself — kind of like America.

Warranted or not, it’s easy to pick on America. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle only exaggerate and exploit our differences. So, sure, as metaphor, I might see in Terry’s robin a nation divided. Or maybe something greater.

Anyone who knew Terry would tell you that she had an edge — headstrong might be a good way to describe her, even acerbic. But Terry, nothing if not versatile and savvy, could talk the malice out of a soldier or MAGA man. As a journalist, she witnessed trauma in the world. As a potter and photographer, she also captured its beauty. And now she’s gone, a life complete.

It’s spring here in Vermont. On Tuesday, I was out in the rain searching for wildflowers by day and amorous amphibians by night, getting soaked and not minding one bit. As I write, an American Robin sings in my neighborhood.

Sure, the world can be harsh and cruel, but it’s the only world we’ve got — still worth fighting for. So, yeah, in Terry’s image I see a nation at war with itself. I also see an angelic songbird. And maybe I see the breadth of America — not only as it is, but also what it might yet become.

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Postscript

A sampling of Terry’s photography remains at her Substack called Opposable.

Here’s a poem I read last Friday at one of the many Poem City events this month in my home city of Montpelier, Vermont. As if April weren’t wonderful enough, Montpelier’s storefront windows are now postered with poetry and our venues are alive with poets reading their work.

Let’s define power, wealth, success, and fame not by the abuses and exploits of humans, but by the rhythms and harmonies of nature.

Power

We measure power by our capacity for wonder.
Explosions come not from bombs
but from a kinglet’s crown
or a hazelnut’s bloom.
Power is the spider we set free from our home
or the salamander we escort across the road on a rainy night.

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A whale defies intuition. It is vast yet ethereal, slow yet powerful, eerie yet enchanting. A whale is a sublime dream come true.

Sleek and elegant, metallic gray with a pinkish belly, the Rice’s Whale is one of the most endangered whales on Earth. But unlike any dream, this whale could soon become an unwitting test case of morality, extinction, and political power in America.

Having already granted the Rice’s Whale (Balaenoptera ricei) necessary protection in 2019, the U.S. government is now poised to take it away — not because the Rice’s Whale is safe, not because it threatens anyone or anything, but rather because of the Trump administration’s fixation on fossil fuels.

The Department of the Interior next week intends to convene a rare meeting of the so-called “God Squad,” which has the authority to revoke protections afforded to endangered species. The committee’s stated objective is to foster oil and gas exploration and development in the Gulf of Mexico, whose waters are home to the last 50 or so Rice’s Whales in the world.

What’s unusual about this is not only that the God Squad is meeting for the first time in more than three decades. Even more remarkable is that we can watch the machinery of the Rice’s Whale’s potential demise when the God Squad’s meeting is live-streamed on Tuesday, March 31, at 9:30 am Eastern Daylight Time (1:30 pm UTC).

Endangered Morality

Monumental and profound, whales should be easy — an open-book test of the human bond to the natural world. To disregard a whale is to spurn the sublime, to scoff at our dreams. But let’s be honest: Many other imperiled species are too often abstractions lacking the whale’s cachet. We don’t revere them in the same way, or know them as we know our pets or backyard birds or favorite wildflowers. Even though I’m reluctant to rank or compare, the Rice’s Whale has a lot more going for it than, say, the Furbish’s Lousewort. Few of us are in the streets shouting “Save the Lousewort!”

But the U.S. Endangered Species Act recognizes that extinction is a singular event — as much about us as it is about any given species, no matter how odd or obscure. The act makes no judgments on popularity, economics, or politics. So profound is extinction that even the Lousewort, even if we don’t know or care much about it, is our moral obligation.

Here in the U.S., we protect speech, even when it is obscure or objectionable or offensive. It’s a founding principle, making us stronger as a people and a nation. It’s supposed to unite us. And yet protecting plants, animals, and wild places isn’t as foundational to the nation, even as the human bond to nature is all but universal.

Despite the Endangered Species Act’s considerable achievements, its safeguards are hard to secure. They are subject to the rigors of science, which is fine, and the vagaries of politics, which isn’t. In the course of U.S. history, Republicans and Democrats alike have too often failed to protect biological diversity and abundance. But Trump and his enablers are now escalating this longstanding disconnect between biodiversity and governance. And they’re doing so with hypocrisy and irony.

To Imperil a National Symbol and an Ideal

In its published notice to convene the God Squad, formally called the Endangered Species Committee, the Department of the Interior, making no mention of Rice’s Whale, says only that “The Committee is meeting regarding an exemption under the Endangered Species Act with respect to oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities in the Gulf of America.” (Emphasis added.)

But here’s something else to know about Rice’s Whale: It is the only baleen whale in full-time residence offshore of the United States of America. Other whale species simply visit or pass us by. The Rice’s Whale is more American than the Bald Eagle. Its survival depends on no other nation but ours.

That Trump would assault nature comes as no surprise. Even before his war on Iran made him ever more desperate for oil, the president has been determined to open Gulf waters to new oil and gas exploration and extraction. That Trump would assault a whale, an American icon, for oil seems only fitting of his character and presidency.

None of us knows what will happen at Tuesday’s meeting of the God Squad. (The Center for Biological Diversity has gone to court to stop the meeting.) Rice’s Whale, widely believed to be the target, is known to be vulnerable to the vessel collisions, noise and explosions from seismic surveys, and oil spills related to fossil fuel exploration and extraction in the Gulf. (The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 killed a fifth of the Rice’s Whale population.) The God Squad’s marks could be any of five species of threatened or endangered sea turtles in the Gulf or various other listed species. Still, it doesn’t matter which — our obligation is to all of them.

To be honest, I can’t say that my life would be materially depleted if the Rice’s Whale or other species were to suffer or go extinct. For most of us, by any name, the Gulf would still be the Gulf. But it wouldn’t be the same Gulf. It would be ocean depleted of beauty and diversity. And with it would be a nation depleted of identity and integrity.

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Postscripts and References

• March 31, 2006: The “God Squad” Plays God

  As expected, the God Squad did indeed revoke protections for threatened and endangered wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, including the Rice’s Whale. This betrayal of the imperiled was pro forma, live-streamed, and well-rehearsed. And as expected, a coalition of eco-groups has gone to court to stop the move.

• The NOAA Fisheries recovery outline for Rice’s Whale.

• The (701-page) “Biological Opinion on Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Gulf of America Oil and Gas Program.”

• On Monarchs: In the waning days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the Monarch butterfly as a threatened and warranting the protections of the Endangered Species Act. At the time, I explained in an essay and podcast episode how one of the most familiar butterflies on the continent could be imperiled. But I was naive about whether the Trump administration would follow through, respect the law, and issue a final ruling on saving Monarchs by the required deadline. It has not (and has been taken to court over it).

  

PICK your favorite sign of spring: birdsong, baseball, amphibian sex, seed catalogues. Mine is the first plant in flower, which turns out to be an American hoax.

Your own inaugural bloom depends of course on where you live and where you search. Here in Vermont, I had three reliable contenders for first in flower of 2026, each somewhat an iconoclast:

• Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) — This is likely first for many of us in the northern U.S. Although attractive in their own ways, Silver Maple flowers have no petals — they simply flaunt their reproductive parts (pistils and stamens) like fireworks in the vernal winds. They’re also sexually fluid (see postscript for paying subscribers).

• Eastern Dwarf-Mistletoe (Arceuthobium pusillum) — Full disclosure: I was rooting for it. Hard to find, this rare plant is a parasite on twigs and branches of certain conifers, mostly Black Spruce (Picea mariana) in Vermont. And if its peculiar flowers aren’t enough, dwarf-mistletoe will go on to disperse its sticky seeds by firing them like cannonballs at spruce boughs.

• Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) — As it turned out, this was my first plant in bloom in 2026, and is probably first across much of its range in the eastern U.S. and adjacent Canada. Mine was flowering on March 12 in wet woods beside Vermont’s frozen-over Lake Champlain (the banner above). Which makes it odd and amusing that the first native flower of the year for many of us is fetid and deceitful.

Night (and Day) of the Living Dead

Determined, ruthless, and stinky, my triumphant skunk cabbage probably beat the competition to blooming by a week or so. And this is no ordinary flower.

The first thing a skunk cabbage plant shows the world emerges from wet earth like a zombie rising from the grave. It resembles fresh or rotting meat — and it stinks. The ruse features two major parts: a maroon-colored sheath called a spathe, which shrouds a pale knob called a spadix. By any name, the odor (and perhaps its appearance) lures flies, beetles, and other insects normally attracted to carrion. I could smell it from a couple feet away.

The spadix bears a mosaic of tiny flowers — in a sense, a bouquet. Lacking petals as we know them, each little flower on a spadix has a single pistil surrounded by four stamens. That’s it — that’s your first flower of spring awaiting its flies. A letdown? Hardly. There’s more.

During the cold, early stage of its life above ground, the spadix generates heat — something called thermogenesis. Not only can it help the spathe rise through frozen soil, ice, and snow, it enhances vaporization and wafting of the plant’s odor toward pollinators. It also turns the skunk cabbage at this stage into an insect warming hut, probably increasing pollination efficiency and keeping the reproductive parts from freezing. During my visit, the outside temperature was 34°F — inside a spathe: 50°F. As spring progresses, skunk cabbage goes on to develop bumpy fruits in its spadix and grow big leaves (which will never end up as soup or sauerkraut or kimchi).

Lies and Hope

For my first flower of 2026, I could have waited a week or two for the crocuses and snowdrops (neither native to North America) to sprout on the lawn, or for the Silver Maples to erupt in ruby fireworks (below). Instead, I sought out a skunk cabbage and made it an exalted sign of spring.

At the end of a severe winter here in Vermont, with war darkening the springtime, maybe I needed a plant determined enough to rise through snow and ice, even if it goes on to perpetrate a hoax on insects, who receive no nectar (bees do take its pollen).

After all, deception is a way of life on Earth. Opossums feign death to trick predators. Caterpillars can resemble anything from snakes to twigs to bird shit. A plant can stink like carrion to attract pollinators. We humans lie for various selfish reasons: survival, lust, greed, cruelty, power. And now we’re reminded that truth is the first casualty of war.

I’ll take the mendacity of plants. Even if they deceive now and then, plants tell us like no other organisms where we are in the world. Name me the trees in a forest; I’ll tell you what birds likely nest there. Name the plants in a wetland; I’ll predict its butterflies. As someone who has watched birds for half a century, not until I turned my attention to plants did I truly develop a sense of where I am on the long, green path.

Sure, I go off course in nature and too often feel lost in the maelstrom of human culture. It can happen to any of us. But last week, in a time of war, I found my bearings beside a lowly skunk cabbage. Generating heat, beckoning insects, perpetrating a hoax, my first flower of the year was an odd and odorous display of resiliance rising toward the new light of spring.

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Postscripts

• Gratitude goes to , an artist and field naturalist partial to Eastern Skunk Cabbage who writes here on Substack; to Steven Daniel for his image of Eastern Dwarf-Mistletoe’s odd, three-lobed male flowers; to Cody Limber for the IR image; and to Jerry Jenkins for his photograph of skunk cabbage burning through the snowpack (and pointing out that some of the melt around the plant was due to solar heating).

• For Paying Subscribers: My post on the fluidity of maples: “Red Alert: Springtime and sexual identity expressed in maple flowers.”

• Finally, if you’ll be in or around Montpelier, Vermont, on April 3, meet me and friends for Natural Selections, an evening of poetry, prose, and music at North Branch Nature Center (NBNC). I’ll be reading a new essay and a poem or two. Part of Montpelier’s annual Poem City celebration, the event is a fundraiser for NBNC (my favorite nature preserve).

  

  

THE Chasing Nature podcast returns with birdsong and a recitation of my short essay (below) titled “Sunlight and Warfare.” But this episode mostly comes by way of writer and birder , who interviewed me for his podcast Ten Birding Questions, a feature of Nate’s Substack .

Nate and I wander in conversation to cover, among other topics, my birding origin story, birds in decline, why I write, the virtues of Vermont, field guides and gadgets, birdwatching’s carbon problem, why I’m a reluctant participant in holiday bird counts, and the fireworks of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.

A version of my short essay is below. If you click and listen to the episode, you’ll not only hear me read it, but also get bonus birdsong and my lively conversation with Nate, who’s terrific.

Sunlight and Warfare

By Bryan Pfeiffer

IN the new light of March, a chorus rises. Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Common Raven, White-breasted Nuthatch, Northern Cardinal, and lots of other birds sing out at the end of a severe winter: plenty cold, but also now a time of war.

For most of us, the dawn chorus conveys renewal and hope on these lengthening days. Still, the bombs fall. The drones hunt. Children die. And I wonder whether my enjoying nature here in Vermont is somehow a disservice to pain in the world.

Another writer immersed safely in nature at a time of war was Nan Shepherd (1893–1981). A poet, novelist, naturalist, and mountain woman of the Scottish Highlands, Shepherd wrote a classic, The Living Mountain. You’ve probably never heard of it, even as the book belongs in the pantheon with with the likes of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

The Living Mountain chronicles Shepherd’s time during World War II exploring the Cairngorm Mountains of northeast Scotland. Unforgiving, dangerous, and beautiful, the Cairngorms are, as Robert Mcfarlane put it, “Britain’s Arctic.” From those mountains and plateaus, Shepherd writes with intimacy, honesty, and awareness like no other western nature writer of her day, except perhaps Carson, who at the same time, while exploring the barrier islands of North Carolina, was herself beginning to write about nature. (Best I can tell, the two never met.)

In her chapter titled “Air and Light,” Shepherd writes of the ephemeral state of both. Sure, there’s promise in early spring. But cold rain, thick fog, and dirty snow can still make the mountain harsh and unwelcoming, “a monstrous place,” as she put it. And then Shepherd writes:

But even in this scene of grey desolation, if the sun comes out and the wind rises, the eye may suddenly perceive a miracle of beauty. For on the ground the down of a ptarmigan’s breast feather has caught the sun. Light blows through it, so transparent the fugitive spindrift feather has become. It blows away and vanishes.

The light is coming and the bombs are falling. I have no moral clarity about it, other than to grieve, to write, to act. And yet any one of us is little more than a feather in the wind. Nothing is permanent. So spend your time well in the light.

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IF you romp or ski too fast through the winter woods, you will surely miss the little miracles now scattered across the snowpack. If you’re dead-set on finding Snowy Owl or Bobcat, you’ll probably overlook the drama and opportunity at your feet. So slow your pace, open your mind, and scrutinize the snow like a detective. Only then will you discover what falls to earth from the birches. In these lovely bits of tree you’ll find fate and meaning, even poetry and story.

I’ve spent the past week devoted to the tiny fruits and scales of birches, four species in total: Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera), Gray Birch (B. populifolia), Yellow Birch (B. alleghaniensis), and Sweet Birch (B. lenta). Your local birches may vary, but trust me: If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ve got birches, which means you’re probably stepping on this extravaganza on your way to work, in your yard, or at the park.

But before I give you the charm and meaning, here first is a year of birch reproductive biology distilled into a minute of reading:

Birches produce separate clusters of male and female flowers in slender, cylindrical structures known as catkins. An inch or two long, nascent male catkins now show themselves on birch twigs in winter; female catkins emerge from buds with leaves in spring.

The female catkin contains dozens to hundreds of overlapping, three-lobed scales arranged perpendicularly around a central axis (like horizontal shingles surrounding a flagpole). Each scale is attended by three female flowers. Once fertilized, a flower typically produces a single fruit known as a samara, which is a lovely word for a seed with wings.

Birch catkins hold their stacks of scales and samaras together into winter (below). That is, until a bird, a squirrel, snowfall, a strong wind, or someone like me comes along and causes the catkin to break apart, sending scales and samaras to snow and earth.

That’s when we find them and the fun begins. If all goes well for a samara, it will eventually become a birch tree. So it might seem that the samara would be the celebrity of this essay. After all, a seed no bigger than the letter “o” on this page goes on to become something magisterial and more enduring than any one of us (including the heartless men and women in power here in the U.S. who don’t give a damn about trees). A tiny seed becomes a tree — isn’t that enough? (Yeah, it’s enough.)

And yet I’m finding myself more enamored of the three-lobed scales. To be sure, a mature tree is an experience — even the most reluctant tree hugger knows this. And I suspect many of you have your own seminal or profound experiences among trees.

In my case, when it succumbed to disease a half century ago, the American Elm in the backyard of my childhood home became the first great loss of my life. The Giant Sequoias of California’s Yosemite National Park brought me, as a teenager, my first encounter with the sublime. I’ve taken shelter from a torrential rain beneath a huge American Beech, chugged the sap of Sugar Maples, and borne witness to the oldest living trees on earth, the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines, one of which, still living, was a seed about 3,000 years B.C.

In January of 1998, a major ice storm coated and bent birches to earth here in Vermont — their crowns touched the snowpack. In the sunshine after the storm, I wandered up a hillside and into the crystal chandeliers of the Robert Frost’s poem “Birches,” which is about the exuberance of youth and the burdens of being an adult.

Frost writes that a boy swinging on birches lowers the trees temporarily to earth. (Birches are like that — they bend but do not break, and often spring back.) But an ice storm brings the encrusted birches down for good. Frost writes:

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load …

At various points in life, most of us are dragged to the withered bracken. I’ve been there literally as well, among the shattered remains of that ice storm. Sad and surreal, I’ll never forget the experience. But I now know yet another way to swing on birches: among their tiny, fallen scales. Sure, the seeds can become trees. The scales — their work is done; their destiny is to become dust. But not before becoming the subject of my fascination and photography.

More so than samaras, birch scales are fairly distinctive to species. Give me only a tiny scale, and I will name for you (most of the time) the birch species from which it came. Yellow Birch scales are robust and hairy, Sweet Birch slightly smaller and lacking hairs. Paper Birch scales, smaller still, resemble a fleur-de-lis. And Gray Birch…ah, the Gray Birch scales — they’re tiny birds on the wing.

For a week now, birch scales and samaras have been my destinations. They’ve guided me to my city’s central park for Yellow Birch scales, to a mature forest in western Vermont where I went knee-deep in snow to gather scales and samaras of Sweet Birch, to my local nature preserve for those little birds of Gray Birch, and to a singular White Birch in front of a federal building, where I was greeted by a pistol-carrying security guard who wondered what I was collecting off the snow with forceps into a glass vial. (We had a fine conversation about birches and security threats.)

A seed becomes a tree. A scale becomes dust. Along the way, I become both child and adult of that Frost poem. “Earth’s the right place for love,” he writes. “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Still, Frost would like to take leave of earth for a while, as would I, and then return to start anew:

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

And one could do worse than be a lover of samaras and scales.

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Postscripts

• The complete poem “Birches” by Robert Frost.

• The flowers of birch catkins have no petals — only reproductive parts. Absence of petals is a good sign that pollen is spread by wind rather than insects.

• Correction: An early version of my post last week (“I Hear the Tree Buds Singing”) misidentified the top left image, which is in fact the twig of a White Ash.

Save the Date

If you’ll be near Montpelier, Vermont, on April 3, join me and friends for an evening of poetry, prose, and music. Titled “Natural Selections,” it’s a fundraiser for my favorite eco-center, North Branch Nature Center (where I’ve been busy with birches this week). I’ll be reading and showing a few images.

SOME advice for winter: Dress in layers, watch the wind chill, and notice the bud. Far more than an inert bump on a twig, a bud is a compressed expression of time and space, of songbirds in treetops, butterflies in gardens, and bears in a forest.

When it opens and unfurls in spring, the bud is a Big Bang giving rise to an expanding universe of life and experience in nature. So much potential in each bud, so much promise — we too often pass it by. Someone who did not was Emily Dickinson, who wrote: “How soft the fire of the Bud.”

For me, the soft fire begins with variety, advances to knowledge, and expands profoundly by way of imagination. Yeah, all that from a little bud on its twig. I’ll explain.

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THE morning I guided a group of blind and visually impaired folks on a bird walk, it soon became clear that many had done their homework. About two weeks before the outing, I had sent everyone recordings of 10 species we’d likely encounter on the walk. My strategy worked.

Not long after our group took to the trail, a little brown bird sang out from somewhere in a thicket. “That’s a Song Sparrow!” declared one of the birders. (She unwittingly made my day.)

We stopped and listened — not only to the sparrow, but to the way the breeze shook spring’s early leaves. We smelled Balsam Poplar and Vermont mud. And as it sang, I did my best to describe for everyone the sparrow beyond what the rest of us can plainly see. I sought the sense of the sparrow: small, textured, unadorned, perky, curious, neighborly.

Farther along on the walk, it was enough to describe the noisy Yellow-bellied Sapsucker chicks, invisible to everyone in their tree cavity, as hungry, begging, and chitter-chattering. The Louisiana Waterthrush shouting from beside a woodland stream was, apart from its song, furtive and sparrow-like but with a silly walk.

Although it wasn’t in the homework, or even in the woods that morning, at some point one of the birdwatchers asked me to describe a Bohemian Waxwing. This was at first daunting because Bohemian Waxwing is, for me, a bird of extreme beauty and personal sanctity. How might I honor anything so elegant, sculpted, sensuous, and meaningful? What poured out of me nonetheless went something like this:

Well, if you were to nestle a Bohemian Waxwing in your palm, it would feel sincere and above all silky smooth. Were it to shift in your hand, similar to the way it carries itself in the world, the waxwing would be tame and docile, but moving with purpose and dignity. The wispy crest atop its head might caress your fingertips. From there, the silky feeling along your fingers would be broken by a lattice of bright white and loud yellow wing markings. You’d also feel a row of little bumps — the red, waxy droplets that give waxwings their name. Below its belly, basically at the waxwing’s “privates,” is a fluffy patch of sweet cinnamon feathers. And finally, that straight edge on your wrist would be the tail edge, marked as if dipped in screaming yellow paint.

Although faithful to my reply that morning, I’ll admit that my description above is an enhanced version of what I actually said on the spot to the birders. Still, I give you the sense of a waxwing, which of course is much more than the sum of its feathers.

To dwell in the company of any songbird is to reignite your senses. Heck, to spend time with an orchid or dandelion, a salamander or caterpillar, is to know the full capacity of your senses. We can experience so much beyond what we might be looking at in the natural (or not-so-natural) world. If only we take the opportunity.

This notion of “you look but do not see” is of course well-worn and worthy terrain in traditions from the Buddha to Thoreau to Nan Shepherd (see below) to Robin Wall Kimmerer. All of them wrote not only of looking, but of a resonance of body, mind, and environment, our neurons and senses firing away. Those senses are by their very nature subjective. And that’s fine — actually, it’s great. You alone get to experience, however the heck you want, what’s genuine and wild in the world. Nature’s good that way.

Yet there’s some irony in this. Even as humans deplete and destroy wild diversity nearly everywhere, nature does not judge us. What survives our carnage is neither bitter nor vindictive — it just keeps giving, even as we ourselves become depleted by its decline. We are collateral damage of our own making.

Still, finding what you seek in nature remains fairly simple — the visually impaired birders reminded me of that on our walk: go outside, slow down, stop often, sit, recline, listen, smell, taste, touch, and if you are so able, look around. In awareness there is fidelity to yourself and loyalty to the world. Or as Mary Oliver wrote: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

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News for Paying Subscribers

For the good people who make Chasing Nature possible:

• The next episode of the Chasing Nature podcast is an “Ask Me Anything” exclusively for you. Send me your questions about, well, anything: birds, insects, plants, field gear, photography, reading, writing (including my process of thinking, writing, and editing for these essays). Your deadline is February 2. I’ll make us a podcast episode.

• Although it won’t work for all paying subscribers, plenty of you live near enough to Vermont to attend a Chasing Nature gathering this spring or summer. We’ll meet up at a state park or some other preserve for nature walks and a picnic. Watch for details. For subscribers at the Founder level, if you happen to be near my peregrinations this year, I’ll do what I can to meet you for a personal outing. If you’re interested, send me a note with your general whereabouts; perhaps our paths will meet.

• At the end of this post is a rough map of Bohemian Waxwing sightings so far in 2026. If you’re near or in that purple zone, I’ve got insider advice and clickable maps so that you might discover this attractive songbird on your own. Find that perk and more at our Go Wild portal’s Sightings page, another expression of gratitude for your paid subscription.

Postscripts

• Credit where it’s due: I organized that birdwalk some years ago with the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We walked the grounds of the amazing Birds of Vermont Museum. I resolve to revive this walk in 2026.

• Nan Shepherd (1893–1981), poet, novelist, naturalist, and independent mountain woman of the Scottish Highlands, wrote The Living Mountain, which is among the most perceptive and eloquent books of nature, exploration, and experience that I know (and which is much too unknown in the world). I’m re-reading The Living Mountain, which is even better the second time around.

BEFORE I explore a big idea expressed in a tiny patch of yellow on tree bark, let’s first agree on this: a lichen is a metaphor machine.

It would be easy for me in this essay, for example, to go with symbiosis. That’s because a lichen is a collaboration — a union of a fungus and a photosynthetic partner. I’d go on to point out that the Candleflame Lichen (Candelaria concolor) pictured above would not exist without symbiosis. Neither would any one of us.

Another easy metaphor would be change. After all, for two years I’ve been watching this minuscule patch of lichen grow. And I can now confidently report that you’ll find more excitement watching grass grow or paint dry (and certainly now by watching a glacier melt).

But I have yet another metaphor for you, which I’ll get to soon enough. For now, let’s stick with change.

That I even noticed this nano-patch of lichen two years ago is unusual enough. Although it can splatter-paint tree trunks yellow around the world, this was the only Candleflame Lichen I had ever encountered in woods I’d been walking for a decade or so. Perhaps it had twinkled in the clear, angled light of January on a good day for me and the lichen. Or maybe I happened to be tuned more so to tiny things that afternoon — really tiny things. Even though I know its exact tree, a Sugar Maple, on many days I strained to relocate the lichen on its bark in front of my nose.

It is no secret that lichens grow ever so slowly. But how slowly? Although I could have chosen a patch more suitable (bigger) for measurement, this one became my “study site.” I set out to watch this lichen change over time.

The world of course changed a lot during those two years — you need not hear details from me. Our politics and culture move even faster, distract more often, and break nearly everything. The lichen moved nowhere, distracted no one (except me), and kept itself mostly unbroken. I liked that about the lichen.

It also grew. I won’t bore you with scientific rigor here — because there was none: No null hypothesis. No established or randomized sampling dates. No time-lapse photography. Quite simply, N = 2: before and after photos spanning two years, a period including a year of Joe Biden and a year of Donald Trump.

Accordingly, by my measurements, the lichen grew … spoiler alert … a little. Documenting it required only macrophotography. I’ve marked two of the most obvious growth spots in side-by-side images below (with the eye of a needle in 2024 as our measuring gauge).

So what’s the point of all this? Well, at the very least, in two years of growth and change in our culture, some of it wonderful, some of it horrible, and so much of it turbulent, the lichen didn’t do much of anything. It endured. It remained in repose. I liked that as well about the lichen. It’s one reason I walked to it day after day.

Which brings me to this essay’s coda: Destination. Actually, something more than destination. Until I noticed it two years ago, nobody else in the world had ever seen this lichen (or so I can assume). It rested at about eye-level on a maple beside a path in Montpelier, the capital city of Vermont. And yet it was mine— all mine. It still is. And nobody else’s.

Destination need not be great or sublime, iconic or wondrous as, say, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, or the Pyramids of Egypt. It can also be the prosaic just off the beaten path. Nature is a million destinations never experienced by anyone, except perhaps you: a Promethea cocoon on an ash branch, a place where no one else has ever sat in the woods, a monkey-faced bud scar on a Butternut twig, a tiny patch of Candleflame Lichen. Your terra incognita — anywhere.

We live in the epoch of the infinite — the scroll, the feed, the playlist, the possibilities, the 24-hour grudge cycle. My patch of Candleflame Lichen is finite. In this era of upheaval, it is balance. And when I’m feeling lost, the lichen is destination.

So when the world spins much too fast, which is basically always, get yourself to the long, green path, no matter how well-trodden. Find your destination. Make it yours. Visit often.

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This essay was conceived and written by a human being (me) — and not AI.

For Paying Subscribers

This patch of lichen makes an appearance in my essay and buyer’s guide on hand lenses (sometimes called jeweler’s loupes) — your portal to new worlds. I never leave home without my lens. The post is behind the paywall, but open by way of gratitude to Chasing Nature’s paying subscribers.

Postscript

That a lichen might be “do basically nothing” is license on my part. Lichens (their algal or cyanobacterial participants) photosynthesize, in part to provide nutrients for the fungal partner. Lichens can break down their substrates (even rock) and aid in soil formation. They’re essential food for a few animals. They’re sensitive to air pollutants, making them indicators of air quality. And similar to counting growth rings in trees, lichen growth on exposed rock can be used to determine the date the rock emerged from under ice, soil, or some other cover — it’s called Lichenometry.

• Gratitude to my dear friend and colleague Josh Lincoln for lending me his 65mm macro lens for the lichen images.