Taconic Mountains

The ridge caught a haze today that rides in on wind from the west—air quality indices spiked to moderate, the kind of event that often signals distant wildfire smoke drifting up the continent. At elevation, these high slopes have no shelter from whatever the wind carries. The exposed spruce and thin soils here are already scarred from the acid rain years of the 1970s, and today's particulates settle onto landscapes with little margin for recovery.Lichen and lichen-dependent species feel these shifts acutely. The thinner the soil and the more exposed the ridge, the more vulnerable the whole ecosystem becomes to cumulative insult—old injuries and new ones stacking together. The forecast calls for similar conditions tomorrow.

Lilypad Clubtail (Arigomphus furcifer) — a threatened dragonfly — was confirmed in Vermont on May 29th. This species has one of the most demanding life histories in North America: nymphs spend years in vegetated, clean water before finally emerging as adults. A single confirmed sighting is significant, but it also sounds an alarm.Of 27 assessed water bodies within ten miles of this record, six carry impairment designations. The Mettawee River, where the clubtail was likely found or is dependant upon its watershed, is on the state's 303(d) list—a formal acknowledgment that it cannot meet its designated uses without restoration. No total maximum daily load has yet been established to guide that work.The Lilypad Clubtail does not thrive in compromised water. Its presence here is tenuous proof that some refuge remains — but the habitat it requires is becoming less common in its historic range.

Along Herrick Brook in Pawlet, the air above the water is thick with wings. Mayflies are emerging, their adult lives measured in hours, and the flycatchers know it. The oaks and black cherries are in full leaf now, the canopy closed and deep, and the days are as long as they will get. This is the week when aerial insects are most abundant, and three species of flycatcher are working every layer of the air above the brook and the surrounding forest edge.The least flycatcher is the smallest of the three, and the loudest per ounce. Its call is a sharp, emphatic che-BEK, repeated so insistently from the mid-canopy that it can seem like the only sound in the woods. If you are near any shrubby edge or second-growth stand, you are probably hearing one now. The least flycatcher hunts from a low perch, usually six to fifteen feet up, watching the space just above it. When a mayfly or small moth drifts into range, the bird launches, takes it in the bill, and returns to the same branch or one nearby. It does not chase far. The whole sequence takes less than two seconds, and then the bird is back, calling again.Higher up, the great crested flycatcher works the canopy. It is a larger bird, olive-backed with a bright yellow belly and a rusty tail, and its call is a rising, raspy wheep that carries well through the trees. It hunts the same emerging insects but from twenty feet up or more, taking bigger prey when it can: larger mayflies, moths, the occasional dragonfly. Great crested flycatchers are cavity nesters, which ties them closely to mature trees with old woodpecker holes or natural rot pockets. They are nesting now, and the adults are making long, fast loops from the canopy to intercept anything that moves in the open air between the trees.The eastern kingbird operates at the other end of the habitat, out in the open over the water and along the brook margins. It is a striking bird in black and white, with a thin red crown stripe usually hidden unless the bird is agitated. Kingbirds are aggressive and territorial, and they will pursue crows, hawks, even great blue herons that pass too close to a nest site. But their hunting is methodical: a perch on a dead branch or fence wire over open water, a scan of the airspace, a fast angled flight to intercept a flying insect, and a return. They take mayflies heavily during emergence events, and in early summer the brook corridor gives them exactly the combination they need: open water below, exposed perches above, and a continuous hatching of aquatic insects moving up through the light.Mayflies spend most of their lives as aquatic nymphs, sometimes a year or more on the stream bottom, before climbing out of the water, splitting their nymphal skin, and taking flight as winged adults. The adult stage exists only to reproduce. Most mayfly adults do not eat at all. They mate, lay eggs, and die within a day or two, sometimes within hours. This compression of the adult phase into a narrow window is exactly what makes them useful to the flycatchers: the emergence is predictable in timing, concentrated in space near the water, and the insects are relatively slow and abundant. Three species of flycatcher, hunting at different heights and in different microhabitats, are each drawing from the same emergence event without competing directly with each other.The eastern phoebe is also here, hunting low over the water from streamside rocks and root tangles, and barn swallows are working the open air above the meadow edges with a different technique entirely, staying airborne and sweeping continuously rather than returning to a perch. Each of these birds is tracking the same peak. The long days mean more hours of flight activity for the insects and more hunting time for the birds. Nests are full of young right now, and the adults are moving almost constantly.Watch the air just above the water surface, if you are near the brook. The mayflies rise in a loose, drifting column, wings catching the afternoon light.

Tree swallows are working steadily over the water this June, diving and banking to snatch aquatic insects mid-flight — the kind of feeding activity that looks peaceful but is actually a window into the health of the system below. The two river segments where they hunt are listed on the federal impaired-waters list, which means the water quality here is already documented as compromised.Yet the swallows are still here, still nesting, still feeding. The real test will come in July, when the chicks fledge. Chick survival and condition — how heavy they are, how soon they take to the air — is an ecological ledger that reflects what those insects carry in their bodies. Watershed contamination writes itself into prey quality before it shows in the birds. The fledgling count will tell us whether this margin is holding or closing.

The woods near Pawlet hold a quiet urgency in early June. Oak flowers hang in pale green clusters from every branch, releasing clouds of pollen that drift on the warm air. Step into the dappled light beneath these canopies and listen. A low, steady humming rises from the trees.Golden Northern Bumble Bees work the oak catkins with methodical intensity. These threatened bees, fewer each year, move through the white oak and northern red oak flowers like miners extracting treasure. Their bodies, fuzzy and golden-brown, disappear completely inside the drooping male catkins. They emerge dusted head to toe in yellow pollen, their leg baskets packed heavy. The bees vibrate their flight muscles while clinging to the flowers, a technique called buzz pollination that shakes loose more pollen than gentle crawling ever could. The sound carries through the understory, a deep thrumming that speaks of serious work.This partnership runs deeper than simple nectar gathering. Oak trees produce no nectar in their flowers. Instead, they offer protein-rich pollen in massive quantities, and only for a brief window. The timing must be precise. Oak flowers last just days once they open, and the Golden Northern Bumble Bee queens, freshly emerged from winter hibernation, need exactly this kind of high-protein food to fuel egg production. Worker bees mix the pollen with regurgitated honey to create bee bread, the primary food for developing larvae. Without this early season protein source, the colony cannot grow large enough to survive the year. The oaks, in turn, depend on these large, strong-flying bees to carry pollen between trees. Wind does most of the work for oak reproduction, but the bees ensure genetic mixing across greater distances, strengthening the forest's resilience.Watch a Golden Northern Bumble Bee work a northern red oak catkin. She grips the hanging flower cluster with all six legs, pressing her body against the tiny individual flowers. Her wings blur as she buzzes, and pollen explodes around her in golden clouds. She moves systematically from flower to flower, spending perhaps thirty seconds on each catkin before flying to the next. A single foraging trip might take her to dozens of trees across several acres. The pollen she carries will feed not just her own colony but will fertilize oak flowers on trees she visits later, creating the acorns that will sustain everything from wood ducks to white-footed mice through the coming winter. This exchange, repeated thousands of times across the forest, builds the foundation for another year of abundance.The humming continues above you, steady and purposeful. Look up through the oak leaves, just beginning to cast their summer shade, and you might catch the flash of golden fur against green catkins. The longest days of the year are here, and the forest is making the most of them.

The air carries the sound of chewing near Pawlet this morning. If you step close to the black cherry trees along the woodland edge, you can hear it clearly: hundreds of tiny mandibles working through fresh leaves. The eastern tent caterpillars have emerged from their winter eggs just as the canopy reaches full leaf-out, their timing matched to the moment when sugar maples and cherries offer the softest, most nutritious foliage of the year.The white silk tents appear overnight in the crotches of branches, each one housing a colony of caterpillars that hatched from the same egg mass. These are not random gatherings but siblings that will spend their larval lives together, leaving the tent each morning to feed and returning each evening to the safety of their communal shelter. The tent itself serves as more than protection. Its silk walls trap heat from the sun, warming the caterpillars inside and allowing them to become active earlier in cool spring mornings than they could manage alone. When the colony feeds, they move as a group along silk trails they lay down, following pheromone markers that lead them to the best leaves and back home again.This synchronized emergence creates a brief abundance that ripples through the ecosystem. Red-tailed hawks hunt more frequently near infested trees, not for the caterpillars themselves but for the American robins and other songbirds that feast on them. The robins arrive in waves, sometimes dozens of them working a single cherry tree, plucking caterpillars from leaves and tent walls. Ground beetles patrol beneath the trees, capturing caterpillars that fall or descend to pupate. Even the ants benefit, finding protein-rich frass beneath the feeding colonies and sometimes raiding the tents themselves for smaller caterpillars.The trees endure this annual defoliation with surprising resilience. Black cherry and sugar maple have evolved alongside these caterpillars for thousands of years, and both species can refoliate after losing their first flush of leaves. The timing works in the trees' favor too. By late spring, their root systems hold enough stored energy to push out new leaves, and the caterpillars will have pupated and dispersed before the second set of foliage fully develops. The defoliation may even benefit the forest floor plants, allowing more light to reach the mayapples and ferns below during their critical spring growth period.Step closer to one of those cherry trees now. The sound of feeding intensifies as the morning warms, and if you look carefully at the branch tips, you can see the fresh damage where yesterday's solid green has become lace. The caterpillars themselves are easy to spot: blue-black with white stripes and a row of orange spots, moving steadily along the branches in their methodical consumption of spring.