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.
Golden bumblebees work oak flowers in early summer
June 14, 2026
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.
Tent caterpillars emerge into spring leaves
May 30, 2026
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.
