Natural Connections Emily Stone

I heard it first, since I knew what to expect. I pointed eagerly toward a featureless place in the bushes. Peent. The brand-new birder with me strained to pick that one sound out of the thicket. Peent. We waited; breaths held. Peent.
Nature has invented some pretty interesting courtship behavior over the eons, and American woodcocks are a lovely example. Somewhere in the bushes, a female woodcock pretends not to watch the male’s strenuous antics. If he passes muster, she will let him approach her, bobbing with his wings raised, to seal the deal. That’s it, though. She goes off to build a nest and he keeps displaying.
I’m not sure what traits woodcocks are looking for in a partner, but I want to hang out with someone who goes looking for woodcocks!

What if we stopped calling trees, water, minerals, fruits, fish, soil, and everything else Natural Resources and started using the term Earthly Gifts? This was one of the first questions posed by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer at a talk last month in La Crosse, WI. Kimmerer is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
I’ve been thinking about Robin’s words…and finding her ideas echoed elsewhere. Kathleen Dean Moore is another of my favorite authors, who, like Kimmerer, won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. They both encourage us to appreciate gifts from the Earth. Moore wrote, “to turn the gift in your hands, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it…” 
Here are a few of the Earthly Gifts I’ve received recently. Please admire them with me, and then reflect on a few of your own.

With soggy skies above and soggy snow below, my recent hike on the North Country Trail was not inspiring a love for spring. But with my head bent to watch my footing, I noticed a sprinkling of debris coated the surface of the softening snow. Suddenly one of the little specks vanished. Crouching down for a better look, I discovered that most of the sprinkles were tiny, leaping springtails known as snow fleas. I dug out my macro camera.

Birds can collide with windows in any season, but I’ve always noticed an increasing number of those sickening thuds in spring. As waves of migrating birds head north, we see both a huge increase in the number of individuals, and an increase in birds who are new to the neighborhood and more likely to be hoodwinked by windows.
Now that warm days are turning even window washing and yardwork into attractive tasks because they give us excuses to get outside, it’s a good time to think about making your windows better for birds.
Re-published from 2021

As a naturalist, I get the strangest emails. I try not to check them at home, but when my phone buzzed and the subject said “June bug on steroids?” it was worth interrupting my evening chores. “The past couple nights I’ve heard something hit our window at night when we have lights on and each time I’ve thought ‘that sounded like a June bug… but BIGGER.’” wrote a Museum member. 
Chuckling, I wrote her back, “Looks like a predaceous diving beetle! That’s their normal size!”

“To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing,” wrote Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. In this week’s Natural Connections, we’ll explore some of the vocabulary of winter tree identification, and the beautiful ecology it helps us to see.