Moist Wasatch Front Footslopes

Ozone levels are forecast to reach unhealthy thresholds for sensitive groups through mid-July, with fine particulate matter already climbing into the moderate range. The mountain rim that encircles the basin acts as a natural trap, concentrating summer smog over the region's waterways during the most critical weeks of breeding season.Ozone stress works through the physiology of plants: it enters leaves through open stomata and damages the tissues within, weakening the trees that anchor riparian corridors. The cottonwoods that stabilize streambanks and provide shade for breeding fish are particularly vulnerable. What stresses the trees cascades through the river — reduced canopy cover, less woody recruitment, warmer water. Eleven impaired waterways are already compromised when their riparian function declines further.

Flame Skimmers (Libellula saturata) have appeared along the Jordan River in the last month — a sighting that carries particular weight given the ecological history of this water. Every segment of the river is officially impaired, listed under the Clean Water Act with mandatory cleanup targets set by the EPA.Dragonfly larvae spend years maturing underwater, filtering and hunting through whatever sediment and chemistry they encounter. The adults we see now are a slow, living record of past conditions — a generation or more of accumulated water quality reflected in their emergence and flight. The presence of this threatened species is cautious evidence that restoration work may finally be reaching the river itself, though confirmation will demand observation over multiple seasons.

Red Swamp Crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) and Virile Crayfish (Orconectes virilis) are now sharing habitat in the Jordan River corridor. Over the past six months, a dozen sightings across the valley tell a quiet story of ecological shift — two crayfish species coexisting in urban waterways where neither is native.Red Swamp Crayfish ranks among the world's most damaging invasive freshwater species, a Gulf Coast native that thrives in warm, disturbed waters. Both species are aggressive foragers that consume aquatic vegetation, small organisms, and detritus, restructuring the food webs they enter. In the thermally enriched, slow channels of an urban river system like this, they find ideal conditions to establish and spread.

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

The cliff swallows are back over Liberty Park's water, their voices sharp and quick in the early morning air. They dart and wheel above the pond surface, where something invisible to us draws them down again and again. The longest days of the year have arrived, and with them the peak of the swallows' nesting season. If you listen closely, you can hear the constant chatter from their mud colonies, built now into the eaves of park structures and tucked under bridge spans throughout the Salt Lake Valley.Each swallow carries a beak full of wet earth back to its gourd-shaped nest, but the real work happens in the air above the water. Aquatic insects are emerging now in steady pulses from the pond and nearby streams. Midges, caddisflies, and mayflies spend months underwater as larvae, then rise to the surface in synchronized emergences that can last for hours. The swallows know this rhythm. They time their nesting to coincide with these daily hatches, when protein-rich insects lift off the water in concentrated clouds. A single emergence can feed an entire colony.The swallows hunt with precision that comes from generations of practice. They read the water's surface for the subtle disturbances that signal insects breaking through. A slight dimple, a momentary sparkle, and the bird adjusts its flight path mid-air. Unlike their barn swallow cousins who hunt higher in the air column, cliff swallows work the interface between water and sky. They snatch insects just as they complete their transformation from aquatic nymph to flying adult. This timing matters. The insects are soft-bodied and vulnerable in these first moments of flight, before their wings harden and their escape patterns develop. For the swallows, it is a harvest that requires split-second coordination between dozens of birds working the same patch of water.The colony's success depends on this abundance. Each pair of cliff swallows feeds four or five nestlings, and each nestling requires hundreds of insects daily during the three weeks before fledging. The parents make continuous trips between the emergence sites and their mud nests, carrying insects back in their throat pouches. The timing of peak emergence matches precisely with the swallows' highest energy demands. When you watch them hunt, you are seeing both an individual bird feeding and an entire ecosystem synchronized to the rhythm of insect metamorphosis.The water holds its own light this morning, reflecting the swallows' quick shadows as they pass. Each dive sends small ripples across the surface, and somewhere below, the next generation of aquatic insects continues its slow development toward another emergence.

The apple trees are thick with bloom across the Millcreek foothills, their branches heavy with clusters of white and pink flowers that catch the morning light. Each blossom opens for just a few days, releasing its brief abundance of nectar and pollen into the late spring air. If you are walking among these trees now, you might hear the low, steady hum that means the golden northern bumble bee has found them too.This threatened native bee emerges from winter dormancy just as the apple blossoms open. The timing is not coincidental. The golden northern bumble bee is among the earliest of the bumble bees to fly, and apple trees provide one of the richest nectar sources available in late spring. A single foraging worker can visit dozens of blossoms in a morning, her fuzzy body picking up pollen as she pushes deep into each flower for the nectar at its base. The pollen sticks to the branched hairs that cover her thorax and legs, creating the dusty yellow coating that marks a successful foraging trip. When she visits the next blossom, some of that pollen brushes onto the flower's stigma, completing the exchange that will produce the apple's fruit.The relationship runs deeper than a simple trade. Apple blossoms bloom for only two weeks, but they bloom reliably, year after year, in the same locations. This predictability matters to a bee species that builds its colony slowly, with queens that must survive the winter alone and workers that don't reach peak numbers until midsummer. The golden northern bumble bee depends on this early season abundance to fuel the colony's growth. Without sufficient protein from apple pollen and energy from apple nectar, the colony cannot produce the new queens that will survive to start colonies the following year. The apple trees, in turn, produce larger, more symmetrical fruit when pollinated by native bees rather than the introduced honeybees that also visit the blossoms. The golden northern bumble bee's size and behavior make it particularly effective at transferring pollen between flowers, even in cool weather when honeybees stay in their hives.But this native bee faces pressures that the apple trees do not. Habitat loss, pesticide exposure, and competition from introduced species have reduced golden northern bumble bee populations across the West. The bee that once foraged widely through mountain meadows and valley orchards now persists in scattered populations, making each remaining foraging site more critical. The apple orchards and backyard trees of the Millcreek area provide essential habitat during the narrow window when queens are establishing new colonies and workers are building the population that will carry the species through another year. Listen for that low hum among the apple blossoms. It carries the sound of an ancient partnership, still unfolding in the warm air of late spring.