Field Notes

When most people think of the threatened or endangered species of Montana, they tend to focus on the iconic animals of the West: the grizzly bear, the wolf or the Canadian lynx. But there's far less attention placed on the rarest Montana mammal and the only ferret species endemic to North America.

Braving horseflies the size of quarters and the searing afternoon sun, I ramble on a steep hillside like a bear, gorging for her long winter's nap. What could inspire such action? Huckleberries, of course. A recent trip to Glacier Park proved I wasn't alone in my obsession.

Bats are wonderful, mysterious creatures: they swoop gracefully through the night, and sometimes through our nightmares. We fear what we don't understand, and most of us know little about bats. They behave in strange ways: only breeding when it's rainy, giving birth upside down, and sharing as a group the responsibility of nursing young. However, these seemingly unusual activities make them very interesting creatures as well.

Last summer I was helping teach a geology field camp near Dillon. On our way back to the Birch Creek Outdoor Education Center each day, after long hours in the August sun spent identifying and mapping incredible exposures of rock, we would drive past a few crumbling cabins beneath an unweathered cliff face footed by large piles of scree.

If you take a walk through fields this time of year, you can't help but notice what looks like gobs of frothy white spit on the stems of grasses and weeds. If you brush away the spit, you'll find a bright green froghopper or spit bug with shiny black eyes. In a few weeks it'll have wings and hind legs that can propel it great distances - hence the name frog hopper. But at this stage of its life, all it can do is crawl. And since its body is soft and subject to drying out, it needs a way to protect itself from enemies and the sun. It does so with spit. But the spit doesn't come from the bug's mouth.

August had just begun when a friend delivered my first hand-me-down squash of the summer: a round, green variegated giant that had reached the size of a jack-o-lantern seemingly overnight, just the way squash like to do.

In the summer, folks come home from work at their jobs and hang out in their yards - they mow the lawn or weed the garden or have barbecues. I don't cook much, but just before dark I like to have a couple of friends over. We get out the beach chairs, face them toward the garden and get ready for my favorite summer evening entertainment. We watch my evening primroses open. It's positively thrilling. They’re yellow evening primroses – oenotherea flava. During the day, the flower buds are tightly closed, forming little cones, but each evening the buds burst and four beautiful pale yellow petals unfurl in about sixty seconds. It's like watching Disney time-lapse photography. The flowers then stay open all night, but are closed up again before noon the next day. Why are the flowers opening at night and how do they know when it's getting dark?

I feel the stress from the week lift off my shoulders as I breathe in the scent of ponderosa pine. Today, I have no papers to write, tests to take, or meetings to attend. This is my time to relax in the Montana wilderness. Even though I know that spending time in nature always makes me feel better, I don’t always take the time to immerse myself in it.

I know that gully. It’s full of secrets, hidden under the downfall, in the hawthorne trees, or in woodpecker holes that riddle the twisted old aspens. I love looking for treasures there: the signs of birds or animals or insects who find a home there or respite from the heat of a prairie summer. ... But I did not do it.

Nectarless orchids are masters of mimicry and can appear and smell identical to other nectar-rich orchids. Thus, they draw pollinators into their flower, and then the forced pollination begins. Certain orchids shoot sticky balls of pollen at their pollinators. Others are known to intoxicate the pollinators so that they fall into a chamber inside, and in taking the path out, they become covered in pollen.