Field Notes

It’s early summer time in the Northern Rockies, a time for some bears to go into a hibernation-like state. Yes, you heard that right: bears that hibernate in the summer. What kind of bears are these, you might ask? They are the waterbears, also known as tardigrades .

As winter faded into spring and the last remnants of snow remained in shadowy patches atop higher peaks, I wandered into the Rattlesnake Wilderness, outside of Missoula, Montana. The air was filled with male songbirds singing to attract a mate for the season. The crackling call of the corvid, the rasp of the chickadee, and the delicate honk of the red-breasted nuthatch were giving way to the springtime calls of warblers and thrushes.

On a sunny June day, I was standing among a group of budding naturalists, sketching the bark of a cottonwood tree. Suddenly, I heard a series of quiet gasps and more than a few titters ripple through our small crowd. Someone had spotted a cow moose and her calf crossing the path just a few feet away from us. We all turned to watch them on their route to the Bitterroot River.

There are poems on the wing upon the mountainsides – fraught with beauty and peril. A female bunting with grass in her mouth is one such poem. In May, lazuli buntings return to the mountains and valleys of Montana. Lazuli – stone of azure, jewel of the sky. As spring ripens into summer, the males with their blue hoods and russet breast bands sing from atop shrubs and trees, and begin the rite of passion.

Throughout the human history of traipsing the earth in search of edibles, mushrooms have undoubtedly been the least understood and most feared flora in the forests of the world. Early Greeks and Romans thought most mushrooms were sinister, evil things. They associated them with dark, damp areas of decay and often depicted mushrooms in the company of snakes or toads, two key ingredients in witches’ cauldrons.

Spring has hit western Montana in full force. Days are longer than nights, temperatures are warming, and the snow is gone for the lower elevations. Animals that live here throughout the year, but become quiescent during the long, cold winters, are once again warm, active, and searching for their first meals of the spring. Such an animal is the Rocky Mountain wood tick, one of approximately 825 species of ticks known in the world, which as a group feeds solely on the blood of terrestrial

While glancing out my window the other day, I noticed a killdeer in my neighbor’s unpaved gravel driveway. I was reminded of the first time that I noticed a killdeer when I was a child. As I was walking up our gravel driveway, my attention was drawn to a killdeer in distress. The bird appeared to have a broken wing. Insistently and loudly repeating its name in call, it staggered forward, hugging the ground, with one of its wings distended as if broken.

I consider myself to be a fairly normal human. Ten fingers, ten toes, two ears. Made up of thousands of different cells. Oh, and of all the cells in and on my body, the human cells are outnumbered tenfold by bacterial cells. Wait, did we get that right? Ten times more bacterial cells than human cells share the human body? Yes, that is indeed the average. Like many other relationships that have evolved over time between species, humans and bacteria form a symbiosis, or “living together,” that is

"Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit." - Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, September 1851

Except when mating and nesting, bohemian and cedar waxwings are simply highly social birds. They seek food and water supplies large enough for the entire flock. They will sometimes dispatch a few birds at a time out of a larger flock to a food source, rather than allow a frenzied competition of individuals.