Taconic Mountains

Rutland County received 3 inches of precipitation in August 2026, 1 inch below normal for the month. This ranks as the 28th driest August in 132 years of county records, placing the month in the drier half of the historical distribution.

No part of Rutland County, VT is classified in drought as of the week of September 15-21, 2026. The region remains free of drought conditions across all categories from the past three months, indicating adequate water availability heading into fall.

Golden Northern Bumble Bees were observed at North Pawlet on 2026-09-16. This species is flagged as threatened by state natural resource databases. Mid-September timing aligns with late-season foraging before winter dormancy for this ground-nesting native bee.

A monarch was observed in West Pawlet on 2026-09-18. Monarchs are in their fall migration corridor through the northeastern region at this time of year, heading south toward Mexican overwintering grounds. The species is proposed for federal threatened listing and continues to show presence in the Taconic Mountains.

A permitted wastewater discharger in Pawlet, Vermont is currently listed by EPA's compliance database in Significant Non-Compliance with its Clean Water Act permit, the agency's most serious ongoing violation status. The record confirms the flag itself but not the underlying detail, so it isn't possible to say here which pollutant is over limit, by how much, or for how long the Pawlet facility has been out of compliance. The facility sits in the Mettawee River and Indian River watershed, part of the broader Taconic Mountains, a watershed that already carries documented problems. A segment of the Mettawee and an unnamed Indian River tributary are listed as impaired under the Clean Water Act's Section 303(d) and still await a cleanup plan, while Flower Brook, a Mettawee tributary, is impaired but already has a completed cleanup plan on file. These are two separate facts on the record, not proof that the discharge is causing or worsening the impairments; no water quality monitoring from the past month was available within 20 kilometers of the facility, so there's no current reading to confirm whether the stream itself is degraded right now. The timing of that data gap matters. Late summer brings warm, low water that holds less dissolved oxygen and offers less dilution for any nutrient or organic loading, right as fish and aquatic insects are mid-emergence and least able to tolerate additional stress. Until the specifics of the violation are made public and fresh monitoring data comes in, the watershed's fate under these conditions remains an open question rather than a documented harm.

Wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is flowering in force across the region this week — 23 sightings in the past sixty days, running from Bennington and Rutland counties in Vermont down into Warren County in New York, including roadsides and trailheads along the Appalachian Trail corridor and through Green Mountain National Forest. The plant is at its peak seeding period now, when flat-topped yellow flower heads produce thousands of seeds that colonize disturbed ground, extending its range a little further with each growing season. What makes wild parsnip worth knowing on sight is its sap. Skin contact followed by sunlight triggers a phototoxic burn — blistering, streaky scarring that people often mistake for poison ivy until damage is already done. Introduced from Europe and once cultivated as a root vegetable, it has been naturalized in the Northeast for centuries, but roadside mowing practices scatter seeds along managed corridors deep into otherwise intact forest, accelerating spread into places that were once safer from it.

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.