There I was, calmly taking a shower, when I realized I was not alone. Sitting on top of a bottle of shampoo waving its antennae and staring at me with its red eyes was a Boisea trivittata. Despite their scientific label, there is nothing trivial about these ubiquitous pests known to us by their common name: boxelder bugs.

As we entered a conifer thicket, we happened upon an animal I was not expecting on dry land – a snail – creeping along the curved trunk of a young fir tree.

For millennia mosses have been used as insulation, diapers, and in many other ways that require absorption. I had to know more.

Their height and orange-brown bark, scaly and large-patterned, drew me to them, but I knew little else about them.

Historically, Trumpeter Swans covered much of North America, but by 1932, a National Park Service survey found only 69 trumpeters in the entire contiguous United States. This spurred a conservation effort that included a feeding program in the Red Rocks National Wildlife Refuge near Dillon, Montana.

An angry phoenix, the new bird appeared stretching its wings, repeatedly slapping the surface as it kept launching its body upright, almost leaping out of the water. All the while, it called out, the trembling sound of a woodwind instrument bouncing off the dense bowl of that valley.

Where initially the herd was scattered throughout the sage along the forest edge, they had now moved toward the road and were gathered together in a tight cluster. They were nervous, gazing toward the trees, ears cocked forward. They paced anxiously, some spinning in circles. I could hear a lot of mewing and a few barked alarms. These are clear signs a predator was near, probably the grizzly bear and cubs I had spotted in the area the day before.

In murder mysteries, the protagonist is often surprised to find a crime. A national park was the last place we expected one.

The canopy opens where a shallow stream crosses the path, revealing two small, silvery blue butterflies flitting about in slow and bouncy patterns. As I find my footing rock-by-rock across the stream, I recall an unusual aspect of the life cycle of these butterflies.

On a warm June day, at our farm in the Mission Valley, I was watching my husband and son play in the yard, honeybees from our two colonies buzzing nearby. Suddenly, my attention was captured by a steady increase in the number of bees on the air, catching and refracting sunlight with their golden bodies.