Mistaken Identity on a Goldenrod Flower 🌼

One Goldenrod, Two Bees, and a Misunderstanding

I was surveying a patch of showy goldenrod in my yard, diligently recording through EwA Buggy each arthropod in a square-meter plot: its size, activity, interactions, survey effort, the weather, leaf damage, you name it. Then I spotted him. He was covered in pollen, looking rather stout, and clinging to a flower head with all six legs as though his life depended on it. A moment later, he launched himself clumsily toward another bloom, apparently ready for a second nectar gulp.

A beautiful, healthy male eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica): big, glossy black, and equipped with enormous eyes that nearly meet at the top of his head. In a later photograph, I caught the other telltale mark, the pale yellowish facial patch on the clypeus that males carry. Male carpenter bees have no stinger, so perhaps they compensate with bravado, patrolling their small territories and investigating anything that moves. This fellow had plainly been working the goldenrod for some time. Pollen dusted him from head to thorax, the kind of golden coating earned through determined, sustained foraging.

Then I understood why he looked so big!

Tucked beneath him, gripping his abdomen with legs and mouthparts, was a second bee. Smaller and fuzzier, it initially looked as though it might simply be riding along, perhaps even held by the carpenter bee himself. It was hard to tell who was who, or what exactly was happening, beneath all those pollen grains. But the longer I watched, the clearer it became that the grip ran the other way entirely. The second bee, a bumblebee, was holding on, and holding tight. Whatever the carpenter bee did, whether feeding, shifting his footing, or even taking off, his passenger remained firmly in place.

My first thought was a territorial dispute, two bees squabbling over a particularly fine patch of goldenrod. But the more I considered it, the less that explanation held up. I do not know of male Bombus defending floral patches against other species in the way male carpenter bees are known to defend territories. So I went looking for other clues.

I got close enough to check for a corbicula, the smooth, shiny pollen basket on the hind tibia that female bumblebees use to carry pollen back to the nest. There was none, only loose grains caught in the bee’s hair, the incidental dusting one would expect on any flower visitor rather than a provisioning load. I also tried to see his face. Males often have longer antennae and species-specific facial markings that can help distinguish them from females or workers, although the view did not allow a definitive identification. Taken together, the clues suggested a male bumblebee, perhaps a common eastern bumblebee (B. impatiens), one of the species still active on goldenrod well into September in the Northeast.

The missing pollen basket turned out to be central to the story. Male bumblebees do not provision nests. Late in the colony cycle, their principal reproductive role is to find and mate with new queens. Bumblebee mating commonly occurs on vegetation or the ground, and males can remain attached for extended periods. In some documented cases, queens have even flown with males still attached.

Nothing here was predation, and the two bees were not reproductively compatible. What I had likely witnessed was a case of mistaken identity, with a determined male bumblebee attempting to mate with a much larger bee from an entirely different genus. He did not let go, even when the carpenter bee took flight with him still attached, an uninvited passenger along for the ride.

It is a good reminder of what a square-meter plot can reveal if you sit with it long enough. I love Buggy for that. It forces me to slow down radically and observe intently. Since I began using it, I have noticed so many details that I once would have walked right past. It is a genuine scientific tool, but also, in its own small way, an enactment of Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Well, I just did.

📷 Eastern Carpenter Bee · Xylocope Orientale (Xylocopa virginica) | © Claire O'Neill; please credit accordingly.

A Little Snap in the Dark 𓆤

Click, Flip, Fly

For some time now, I have made a habit of turning off my outdoor lights early in the evening, so I do not add to the disorientation and disruption faced by the insects that share my yard. There is so much we can do to ease the pressure we put on the natural world, and much of it begins at our own doorstep.

Still, if you leave a light on for even a short while after dusk, you may find a handsome visitor: a plain, hairy, brownish beetle, perhaps about the length of a grain of rice and a half, ambling across the doorstep or lying upside down beneath the bulb. To many eyes it looks like nothing much, just another brown beetle. But look closer. It is a genuinely handsome little animal, dressed in a dense coat of fine hairs that catches the light if you get low enough to see it.

Then it does something no ordinary-looking brown beetle has any business doing. It arches its back, there is an audible click, and it launches itself into the air like a tiddlywink.

It is a click beetle, one of the Elateridae. The one in my yard appears to be Monocrepidius lividus, formerly and still widely known as Conoderus lividus. The click beetles get their name from exactly this trick. A peg-like projection on the underside of the front part of the thorax catches against a matching cavity farther back. When the beetle flexes and releases the mechanism, the sudden snap can flip the whole animal into the air.

It is chiefly a way to right itself after landing on its back, but it can also be an escape move. Nothing startles a would-be predator quite like dinner suddenly popping several inches straight up.

The beetle at the light is an adult, active above ground during the summer months. What we do not see is the longer part of its life. Before it became this small brown acrobat, it spent much of its life underground as a wireworm: a hard, smooth, yellowish larva that looks uncannily like a short length of stiff wire. Like other wireworms, it moves through the soil and feeds below ground, where larvae of some click beetles can become agricultural pests.

But there is something worth pausing on in an insect that spends much of its life as a patient, wire-bodied grub feeling its way through the dark soil, only to spend its brief adult life clicking, flying, and turning up, of all places, in the small circle of light by your door.

Next time one turns up there, give it a little space. You may be lucky enough to see it right itself, with a click and a sudden spring into the dark.

🔎︎ A few papers for the curious

→ Kozlov, M. V., Prosvirov, A. S., & Zvereva, E. L. (2020). Can larvae of forest click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae) feed on live plant roots? Insects, 11(12), 850. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects11120850

→ Bolmin, O., McElrath, T. C., Wissa, A., & Alleyne, M. (2022). Scaling of jumping performance in click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae). Integrative and Comparative Biology, 62(5), 1227-1234. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icac068

→ Wang, Y., Wang, Q., Liu, M., Qin, Y., Cheng, L., Bolmin, O., Alleyne, M., Wissa, A., Baughman, R. H., Vella, D., & Tawfick, S. (2023). Insect-scale jumping robots enabled by a dynamic buckling cascade. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(5), e2210651120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210651120

📷 Monocrepidius lividus | © Claire O'Neill; please credit accordingly.

𖥸 When the Leaf Looked Back

The Fold Is the Curtain

As most Fridays, here I am wandering on the nature trail that surrounds Long Pond. The ecology team is moving between the first and second sites that we survey, phenology, insect monitoring, bird counts. Our Friday mornings are busy! Yvonne and I trail behind Kathleen, Sarah, and Joanne, Yvonne surveying the arthropods on a northern red oak and me moving toward our black cherry. Along the way, a fungus catches my attention, and as I crouch toward it, I notice the sassafras sapling growing beside it. One of its leaves is folded closed along the midrib and held that way. Nothing dramatic, just two sides of a leaf that had decided to meet. It does not seem to be tightly closed, so I gently open it.

Two eyes look back at me, to which I respond with a shout of excitement, inviting Yvonne to join me and rejoice. Those “eyes” (false eyes, actually) belong to the late instar caterpillar of a spicebush swallowtail, papillon carolinien in French, Papilio troilus. It is green above, with a pale yellow line running down each side and rows of small blue dots across its back. On its swollen thorax is a pair of mustard colored false eyespots, each with a black pupil and a tiny white fleck that reads exactly like glare off something wet. From one angle it is a small green snake. From another, a tree frog. The bulge of those painted pupils makes the eyes seem to hold you no matter where you stand.

I had assumed the fold was simply shelter. But then, researching it, I discovered that it is more interesting than that. The caterpillar lies along the midrib and lays down a mat of silk. As the silk dries, it contracts, and the tension pulls the leaf edges up and over. The youngest ones may simply curl a leaf tip; older ones recruit the whole leaf. Inside, the caterpillar rests through the daylight hours, molts, and waits with its head pointed toward the petiole. It comes out to feed after dark.

Which means the eyespots spend most of their working life hidden. Which raises an interesting question: if the eyespots are usually hidden, when do they actually matter? A recent field experiment using artificial caterpillars found that, out on an open leaf, eyespots made no measurable difference to how often birds attacked. Inside a leaf fold, they did. So the fold may not only be a hiding place. It may also be a curtain. Whatever opens the leaf gets the eyes all at once, at close range, in bad light. I was, briefly, that predator.

There is a fungus in my story only because it put me on my knees at the right height. The sapling was lower than waist high, which is where the females prefer to lay in the first place.

It is nearly the end of August, and this caterpillar has already run out of season, although nothing about it looks urgent. Day length is the cue, and for this species the threshold has actually been measured: somewhere around fourteen and a half to fifteen hours of light at our latitude, less as you go south. We dropped below it here in the first half of the month. Whatever happens next has been settled by the light before I ever knelt down.

So it will stop feeding, turn yellow, and walk off the sassafras, several meters if it needs to. Then it will girdle itself to a stem. Not down into the leaf litter, which is where I would have guessed, but onto a slender stem, thinner than a pencil, low among the leaves and just above the ground. In midsummer, a chrysalis formed on a green stem can come out green. This late in the year it will very likely be brown, because the shortening light seems to override whatever the larva's eyes report about the substrate. Eight months on a twig, out in the open, being a dead thing.

I folded the leaf back, left it there, and moved away happy to know that this caterpillar had made it that far and was on its way to pupation. I wished her a safe winter, and him a successful adult life.

🔎︎ More about swallowtails

→ Postema, E. G. (2025). Eyespot peek-a-boo: leaf rolls enhance the antipredator effect of insect eyespots. Journal of Animal Ecology 94: 814-822.

→ Hazel, W. N., & West, D. A. (1983). The effect of larval photoperiod on pupal colour and diapause in swallowtail butterflies. Ecological Entomology 8: 37-42.

→ West, D. A., & Hazel, W. N. (1996). Natural pupation sites of three North American swallowtail butterflies. Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society 50: 297-302. 

→ Stichter, S. (2014). Spicebush Swallowtail. The Butterflies of Massachusetts. 

📷 Spicebush Swallowtail · Papillon Carolinien (Papilio troilus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

Reading the Season at Hatches Harbor

 August 28, 2026 | Survey session of the day at Hatches Harbor

As usual, I documented the phenology of target species, including oaks, birches, Prunus species, and many local herbaceous plants, while also recording arthropod plant interactions. Here are a few lovely field highlights.

I found a couple more of those fantastic caterpillars on sweet goldenrod, beautifully dressed in goldenrod flowers: Wavy-lined Emeralds, along with a plethora of spiders waiting in ambush.

That crab spider, perched in the flower head of a hyssop-leaved thoroughwort, was already in position when I passed by in the morning. Three hours later, on my way back, it was still in exactly the same spot. It had barely moved. Now that’s patience!

It was peeping time too. I lost count of the number of ambush bugs (Phymata) I saw mating on both goldenrod (Solidago species) and goldentop (Euthamia species). One pair was particularly glorious, with the female feeding on a fly while the male was doing his business. 😄

Fowler’s Toads were on the move, a multitude of fruits, including these shining sumac fruits, were ripening, with some already dispersing their seeds, and coppers were flickering low over the ground.

Such a beautiful day to be out, fully in the moment, looking with intention. 🌿

📷 © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly | For the session list of species recorded at that location see here, Pheno Lite records here, and Buggy records here.

Finding My Way Back to Words

Between Two Languages

Some have asked when I started writing.

In my twenties, I wrote. I was drawn to philosophy and even considered entering hypokhâgne, a French preparatory program for the competitive entrance examinations to institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure. My philosophy professor encouraged me to pursue it. I was fortunate to do well academically in both literary subjects and science. That opened doors to some of France’s most selective institutions and gave me a choice of futures to explore.

I was pragmatic. I chose a career in science because I believed it would allow me to make a living and become a self-sufficient, independent woman. Philosophy seemed to demand something else entirely: not only dedication, but exceptional brilliance. Could I sustain that? Could I withstand its demands over time? I was not sure. It intimidated me. It scared me, even. So I chose the safer path.

Then life happened. A new country. A new language.

That may have been the hardest transition. You learn a new language, lose a little of your own every day, and eventually find yourself less at home in the language you were born into, while never quite at ease in the new one. I could no longer write in French at the level I once had, while my English remained below the standard I expected of myself. I had not exchanged one culture for another. I was learning to live in the space between them, carrying deep roots in one while forming another layer of life, thought, and voice in the other.

The precision of words has always mattered deeply to me. I could communicate in English long before I felt I could truly write in it. Writing has always come more naturally to me than speaking, though. It slows my thoughts to the pace of language. It gives me time to search for the exact word, to bring an idea into focus until it says precisely what I mean. But language is not only vocabulary or grammar. There is another difficulty: culture.

French is shaped by strict linguistic rules and social conventions. They are not the same, though they inform one another. Together, they shape how we construct thought, argument, intimacy, disagreement, and even politeness, in ways that differ from American cultural expectations.

Our differences do not lie merely in the words we use. We approach subjects and life itself in fundamentally different ways. We reveal ourselves differently. We behave differently in public and in conversation. The expectations surrounding what may be said, how directly, and with how much explanation are not the same.

These cultural and linguistic rules permeate writing. They are present in rhythm, tone, humor, logic, and what a reader recognizes as sincere, elegant, persuasive, or clear. They also inform judgments of what is appropriate, educated, or well expressed.

There is no direct translation between two languages because each opens onto a different way of inhabiting the world.

I also had to find my voice in English, in a life far from the one in which I had first begun to write. That took years. Decades, really, of tentative writing, searching for the right words, and trying on narratives that never quite felt like my own.

Yet those years of moving slowly through the world, observing, reflecting, and contemplating were leading me somewhere I could not yet see. Eventually, those elements converged. My mind, my spirit, and my voice found a continuous thread. This time, there was no choosing. Only finding my place in the life that had unfolded. Besides, I have things to say.

And here I am today.

Delayed by Delight: A Bumblebee Stop 🌸

Jeff wondered why it was taking me so long to get from the car to the front door. After all, he'd seen me arrive through the window.

Sometimes it really does take me twenty minutes to get from my car to my front door, because something along the way stops me in my tracks, like this little beauty.

Twenty minutes, in this case. But look at him.

Most likely a male bumblebee (Bombus sp.). That pale, fuzzy "white beard" is one clue, and his large eyes are another. Unlike females, males don't collect pollen and lack pollen baskets on their hind legs. Rather than gathering food for the colony, they patrol the landscape in search of queens, often flying set circuits and marking them with pheromones as they go. I think he was sleeping on the job, and my approach woke him up. Sorry, friend.

As for species, I'm leaning toward Common Eastern at first glance, but Brown-belted and Two-spotted are still in the running. I'll take a closer look later.

It's encounters like this that remind me there's always something worth noticing, even on the short walk from the car to the front door. Hard not to stop and admire him, right?

📷 Bumble Bees · Bourdons (Genus Bombus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

When a Goldenrod Flower Moves with Intention 🐛

The Caterpillar in the Florets

I was inspecting the flower clusters of sweet goldenrod (Solidago odora) at Hatches Harbor, looking for galls. At this time of year, I often linger over the flowers because so much is happening at that scale. A goldenrod inflorescence is not simply a display of yellow. It is a small, crowded habitat: pollen and nectar, developing seed, insect eggs and larvae, predators, parasitoids, gall makers, and innumerable lives that find food or shelter among the florets.

Then one flower cluster moved.

Not with the larger, shared sway of wind moving through the goldenrod. This was a smaller, uneven motion, a twitch that seemed to belong to one small piece of the inflorescence. Looking closer, I realized that the “florets” were partly an animal.

I am leaning toward a camouflaged looper, perhaps the larva of the wavy-lined emerald moth (Synchlora aerata). The caterpillar itself appeared yellow beneath an extraordinary covering of borrowed goldenrod. It had clipped small pieces of its host plant and attached them to its back, making a costume from the very florets in which it fed. The result was not merely camouflage by color. It was camouflage by construction: a caterpillar becoming, in outline and texture, a loose little cluster of goldenrod flowers.

Camouflaged loopers are geometrid caterpillars, or inchworms. They are known to clip flower fragments and foliage, fastening them to raised projections on their backs with silk. Goldenrods are among their host plants.

The costume is not permanent. When the caterpillar molts, moves to a different host, or finds that its existing disguise no longer matches, it replaces the decoration. What looks from a distance like passive imitation is an ongoing behavioral practice: cutting, carrying, fastening, and replacing plant material.

By the way, I found the flower galls I was looking for, consistent with Schizomyia racemicola, the goldenrod flower gall midge. I also found a little party of three small bees, possibly Andrena species, still sleeping, clumped tightly among the goldenrod florets on another stem. Another story for another time.

I had set out to find evidence of an insect reshaping goldenrod into a cluster of galls. I found that, but I also found a caterpillar remaking its own exterior from the plant: becoming, for a while, a moving piece of flower. And the giveaway was not shape or color, but motion that did not belong to the wind.

📷 Wavy-lined emerald (Synchlora aerata) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly

A Toad in the Leaf Litter 𓆏

Small, Hidden Continuities of August

I love catching sight of a young American toad on the forest floor. It feels like a small victory. They are superbly camouflaged among leaves, soil, and moss, so finding one is never guaranteed. It is also a quiet reassurance that some things are right in the world: young toads are where they should be, doing what they should be doing at this time of year.

By early August, many young American toads have already been on land for weeks. Having left their breeding waters from mid-June onward, they move through surrounding uplands, growing rapidly, hunting small prey, and seeking cool, moist shelter. Their diet includes ants, beetles, flies, and other invertebrates small enough to manage.

My encounters also seem to reflect the landscape. In Middlesex County, I most often see American toads (Anaxyrus americanus), while on the sandy Outer Cape, I more often see Fowler’s toads (A. fowleri). Both species occur on Cape Cod and broadly across Massachusetts, so this is an observation about local habitat and encounter patterns, not a hard boundary. Fowler’s toads are associated with sandy areas near wetlands; American toads are commonly found on forest floors and in other more mesic settings.

The forest floor is not an easy place for a small toad. Young toads face snakes, birds, and mammals, as well as hazards from road crossings, habitat loss, pollution, and disease. Their defensive skin secretions may deter some predators, but camouflage, stillness, and the availability of moist cover remain essential.

So when I catch that slight movement in the leaf litter and realize it is a young toad, I feel grateful for the small, hidden continuities of August.

🔎︎ More about American toads

→ Powell, Robert, Roger Conant, and Joseph T. Collins. Peterson Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern and Central North America. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

→ Raithel, Christopher J. Amphibians of Rhode Island. Rhode Island Division of Fish and Wildlife, 2019.

→ Wells, Kentwood D. The Ecology and Behavior of Amphibians. University of Chicago Press, 2007. 

📷 American Toad · Crapaud d'Amérique (Anaxyrus americanus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

Bachelor Sleepovers in a False Sunflower 🌻

Two Long‑horned Bees and Their Shared Flower Bed

Yesterday evening, during my nightly round of the garden, I stopped to check a false sunflower where I had spotted two long‑horned bees (of the genus Melissodes) that morning, both likely males. To my surprise, there they were again, this time sleeping head to head right at the interface between the central disk and the ray flowers, rather than at a small distance from one another as they had been the night before.  

Wedged there securely, they were gently sheltered from wind and weather by the surrounding petals and by the low position of this particular flower beneath the taller blooms around it. It is a quietly touching little sleep arrangement. Male long‑horned bees often spend the night out on vegetation or in flowers like this, because they do not have nests of their own to return to. Females, in contrast, usually sleep inside the underground nests they have dug, where they are also storing pollen for their larvae.  

It makes sense that these males sleep close to the patch of flowers they patrol and use during the day. By bedding down right in their foraging patch, they minimize energy spent searching for food the next morning, and they “know” their way back into this familiar matrix of blooms. These small bachelor sleepovers on flowers are a characteristic part of male long‑horned bee life, a small but beautiful detail in their natural history. 

I am now officially committed to stalking them, or rather checking on them evening and morning, to see how faithfully they return to this same flower and how their sleeping arrangements change over time. And so I did. This morning they were still there, sleeping longer than I do. At some point in the night, they had shifted slightly apart, a tiny rearrangement in their shared flower bed. I am smitten.

🔎︎ More about long-horned bees 

→ Vermont Atlas of Life, Long‑horned Bees (Melissodes) https://val.vtecostudies.org/projects/vtbees/melissodes 

→ Native Beeology https://nativebeeology.com/mind-your-bees-and-gardens-2/long-horned-bees

📷 Melissodes | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

One Life - Fifteen New Beginnings 🦟

At first glance, it looked like a little piece of debris. As I approached, I realized it was a beetle pupa attached to the top of a rugosa rose leaf. 

On closer inspection, I noticed some fifteen tiny parasitoid wasps, likely chalcidoids and perhaps members of the Tetrastichinae subfamily, moving deliberately over its surface. Each was only a few millimeters long, yet together they transformed what seemed like an old, dried pupa into another fascinating natural history moment.

If these wasps had just emerged from the pupa, instead of a single beetle completing its transformation, an entire brood would have begun theirs. One host had become the nursery for these minute wasps, a reminder of the intricate ecological relationships that quietly shape insect populations.

These tiny wasps are more than a curiosity. As parasitoids, their larvae develop by feeding on a single host and ultimately killing it, helping regulate herbivorous insect populations and serving as quiet biocontrol allies in gardens, fields, and wild plant communities.

It is easy to walk past little details without a second glance. But slowing down and looking closely revealed not a piece of debris, not one insect, but some fifteen, each beginning its own story.

🔎︎ More about parasitoid wasps

→ Beneficial insects - parasitoid wasps https://extension.umn.edu/beneficial-insects/parasitoid-wasps 

→ North American genera of Tetrastichinae (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) https://doi.org/10.1080/00222939400770091.

📷 Subfamily Tetrastichinae | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

First Mola Mola Encounter, Oh My! 𓆝

Oh my God, what a treat! My first wild mola mola! What a fantastic fish!!! And not just one, but three! A truly grand day, made even more special by watching a group of nine or so humpbacks and a gray seal at Stellwagen Bank.

What an awesome, wonderfully strange fish: such an unusual shape, yet the largest of all bony fishes. I knew mola mola drift, but do they actually swim? I had to check.

Despite their awkward appearance, mola mola are surprisingly efficient swimmers and active foragers. During summer, they enter Stellwagen Bank in search of prey, including jellyfish, salps, squid, and small fish. They may not be fast swimmers, but they can travel long distances and make impressive dives. They move through the water using their enormous dorsal and anal fins, a remarkable adaptation for such an extraordinary fish.

Nature never stops surprising me and rewarding my curiosity.  

📷 Common Mola · Mouldouz · Poisson-Lune (Mola mola) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly

🌳 Writing on Trees: The Hidden Life of Paper

“Following my notebook backward, from the desk to the forest and rivers that made it possible.”

I just finished a notebook. A life jotter, really.

It always takes me forever to cover the last pages. I am not sure why. The final page fills most slowly of all. Maybe I am lingering, holding on a little longer before turning a new leaf. I like writing, and handwriting especially. It feels almost like a lost art, but also like a way of thinking that keeps pace with the body. There is something meditative about pen on paper: the soft drag of ink, the quiet rustle of a page turning, the way thoughts arrive at walking speed instead of highway speed.

I am lingering again. Anyway, when I put my pen down and closed the cover, I did what I always do. I reached for the next notebook from my stack, ready to keep following the thread that has been occupying my mind lately: tree stories. New leaves of paper, new room for observations, questions, and realizations.

I placed my hand on the cover, feeling that sense of beginning, ready to give this notebook a name. Then I stopped.

Oh. I have a piece of a tree in my hand!

I am not entirely sure what I felt in that moment. Something like reverence, mixed with a rush of questions about cost and transformation. So I went looking for answers.

I have spent years tracing the lives of insects and plants, following caterpillars from leaf to chrysalis, watching leaf‑out dates slide earlier on the calendar, listening for the first spring peepers in cold, muddy pools, puddles, and ponds. It then felt strange to realize I had never traced the life of a notebook.

Of course, I know paper comes from trees. But I had never really asked how much of a tree disappears into these clean, anonymous pages.

Somewhere, a tree grew long enough and straight enough to be worth cutting. It stood through years of weather I will never see: snow packed into the forks of its branches, summer storms shaking its crown, chickadees and nuthatches and downy woodpeckers working its bark. At some point, it met a saw. Its trunk became logs. The logs became chips. The chips became pulp, a pale, frothy slurry that bears almost no resemblance to its former forest. From there, it was pressed, treated, dried, sliced, and packaged until it arrived here, in my hand, as this quiet, compliant thing we call a notebook.

How many sheets of paper does one tree become? How many jotters? How many books?

The answer depends on species, size, and processing, but a single straight pine or spruce can yield on the order of ten thousand sheets of standard paper. My notebook, with roughly one hundred fifty sheets, represents about one‑sixtieth of a tree. A classroom of students, moving through notebooks and loose‑leaf paper over a year, could quietly disperse several trees into homework, handouts, and margins filled with notes and drawings.

Thinking this way does not make me want to stop using paper. I value the slowness of handwriting too much, its way of inviting attention instead of speed. But it does change how I begin. Each new notebook asks for a moment of awareness, a small acknowledgment, and a quiet thank you. Some part of a once‑living trunk has been thinned into these pale, flexible pages so that I can write the lives of other beings. Beginning there shifts the page from something I use to something I am in relationship with.

The tree itself is only the beginning of the story. Follow paper from forest to finished product, and the notebook on my desk carries more than wood fiber. It carries histories of energy, water, and waste.

Researchers who study the life cycle of paper trace each stage: harvesting, transport, pulping, bleaching, pressing, drying, cutting, shipping. At every step, they measure energy use, water consumption, and emissions. Taken together, their work shows that paper is an energy‑intensive material. Mills run on heat and electricity. Logs travel long distances. Machines operate continuously. The invisible flow of energy behind this notebook far exceeds the small effort it takes to lift it.

Then there is water. Pulp and paper mills draw deeply from rivers and aquifers and return much of that water altered, darkened by organic matter, warmed, or carrying processing chemicals. Studies of mill effluent have documented high loads of organic material and measurable effects on fish, invertebrates, and microbial communities downstream. In some systems, mill discharge has been a dominant influence on water quality. The notebook feels clean and dry on my desk, but its making may have left traces in moving water, in the chemistry of a river, in the physiology of the organisms that live there.

None of this means all paper is equally harmful, or that the industry is static. The same research that documents impacts also points toward ways to reduce them: improving energy efficiency, shifting away from fossil fuels, increasing recycled fiber, and strengthening wastewater treatment. Using recycled paper can lower certain environmental burdens, including energy use and some forms of pollution. But there is still a cost. Recognizing that cost does not require abstaining from paper; it asks for attention, restraint, and respect for each page, and for the tree that made it possible.

That awareness changes small choices. I reach for recycled notebooks when I can. I print double‑sided. I ask questions about sourcing when the opportunity arises. These are light actions, but they are not nothing. They are ways of participating in a system that is still being shaped.

I share this not to provoke guilt, but to make something visible. Paper is how we think, teach, and remember. It is also how we touch forests and rivers, often without realizing it.

There are simple ways to act on that awareness: choosing paper with recycled or responsibly sourced fiber, printing only when needed and using both sides of a page, supporting companies and policies that invest in cleaner production. I no longer carry paper into the field. Years ago, I shifted to recording observations digitally. It reduces my use of paper, but just as importantly, it creates better science. The observations are immediately shareable, easier to verify, and become part of long-term ecological records rather than remaining on pages that must later be transcribed.

But beyond these choices, there is also a relationship. Each page is a thin cross‑section of living systems: a fraction of a tree, a measure of energy and water, a moment in a river’s story. When we write on it, we have the chance to make that relationship matter, by paying attention, by documenting phenology, by telling stories that help keep forests standing.

So I open this new notebook knowing it holds both comfort and cost. I name it for the trees and all the beings who depend on them, myself included, and for the tree whose fibers form its pages. I begin with a small thank you, and then I begin writing, hoping the words I place here will be worthy of the forest that made them possible.

---

A Naturalist's Note

Every object has a natural history.

We tend to reserve that phrase for birds, trees, insects, and wildflowers. But the things we make also have lives that begin long before they reach us.

A notebook begins in a forest, travels through rivers, mills, machines, and human hands, and eventually arrives at a desk, where it quietly waits to become someone’s thoughts.

The next time you finish a notebook, pause before opening another.

Hold it for a moment.

Ask where it came from.

Ask what it cost.

Then make the words you write inside worthy of the life that made them possible.

---

Further Reading

For readers who want to follow this thread into the technical literature, here are a few starting points:

Uncovering energy use, carbon emissions and environmental burdens of pulp and paper industry: A systematic review and meta-analysis.
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2018.
Synthesizes global data on energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and other environmental burdens in pulp and paper, identifying major process hotspots and options to reduce impacts.

Decarbonizing the pulp and paper industry: A critical and systematic review of sociotechnical developments and policy options.
Published 2022.
Reviews hundreds of studies to examine how the pulp and paper industry, which uses about 6% of global industrial energy and causes around 2% of direct industrial CO₂ emissions, can reduce its climate impacts through technologies, policies, and broader system changes.

Estimating the climate impacts of future paper production and recycling with life cycle assessment.
Science of the Total Environment, 2026 (online ahead of print).
Uses prospective life‑cycle assessment to model climate impacts of virgin and recycled paper and cardboard in Europe through 2050, showing how decarbonizing energy systems changes total paper‑related emissions and the climate benefits of recycling over time.

Global paper market forecasts to 2030 under future internet demand scenarios.
Study using scenario analysis (date earlier, but forward‑looking).
Scenario analysis of world paper demand under varying levels of digital information use, highlighting declines in some grades (such as newsprint) and shifts toward packaging and specialty papers.

𓆦 A Bright Fly in Summer Gold

A little garden note for July: The transverse-banded flower fly (Eristalis transversa) was working over my false sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides) today, dusted with pollen and moving from bloom to bloom with that purposeful, unhurried flower fly rhythm. I see them regularly in the area, in meadows, gardens, and flower pots, and I always appreciate this brightly colored bee mimic reminding me that flies are doing important ecological work even when they’re easy to overlook. This one was a small but steady pollinator, and a good example of how much life a summer flower can hold if you pause long enough to notice. They may not get the affection they deserve, but they are absolutely part of the garden’s story.

📷 Transverse-banded Flower Fly · Syrphe à Collier (Eristalis transversa) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly

A Handful of Observations, A World of Stories

A handful of observations from three days in the Outer Cape.

Every walk is an invitation to slow down and notice. A meadowhawk (Sympetrum sp.) paused on common soapwort (Saponaria officinalis). Nearby, black cherry (Prunus serotina) leaves bore the distinctive pouch galls of the black cherry leaf gall mite (Eriophyes cerasicrumena), while gray birch (Betula populifolia) was already fruiting, its immature seed cones promising the next generation of wind dispersed seeds. A scarlet argid sawfly (Arge coccinea) rested on staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina). An eastern teaberry (Gaultheria procumbens) flower, viewed from below, revealed the delicate five pointed star hidden within its white corolla. Finally, beneath the cap of a brittlegill mushroom (Russula sp.), two common rough woodlice (Porcellio scaber) shared shelter with a "one-legged" cricket, possibly a sphagnum ground cricket (Neonemobius palustris).

None of these observations is especially rare. Yet together they tell the story of a landscape that rewards careful attention. Natural history is not only about finding the extraordinary. It is about learning to see the extraordinary richness hidden within the ordinary.

📸 All my visual observations these past three days on the Outer Cape ➝ here | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

Volume and Line: Two Architectures of Life

I love that social media casually asks, "What's on your mind?" It gives me an excuse to answer with things like this:

Right now, I am thinking about the shape of life. More precisely, I am thinking about the fascinating way plants grow. Unlike animals, whose bodies are organized as volumes that grow by expanding an established form, plants grow primarily through linear extension. They continually add new roots, stems, branches, and leaves, reshaping themselves throughout their lives.

Imagine how extraordinarily complex that architecture must become to maximize the capture of light, the exchange of gases with the atmosphere, and the uptake of water and nutrients from the soil.

Yes, this is genuinely the kind of thing that's on my mind.

꩜ The Long Return to Breizh

On names, belonging, and cultural return

How close am I to my Breizh culture, a friend once asked.

It feels like a complicated story for those of us who live far from the land that shaped us, especially when that culture has survived only in fragments, still trying to re-emerge, and the language itself is thinning, harder to reach, as if it asks for a different kind of listening.

I feel it close at heart. Not as possession, but as a pulse, something ancient that continues to move beneath distance. Yet I remain at the beginning of a return, a cultural réappropriation still taking shape.

To begin, I honor a Breton name given to me some time ago: Enora.

My civil name is Claire. Enora came later. When I asked a Breton connoisseur who I would be in Breton, his answer was immediate: Enora. The choice was not linguistic but personal. He did not choose it as a translation of my name, but because he felt it reflected my temperament, my values, my way of being. Over time, I came to understand why.

Associated with the Breton word enor, honour, and borne by a sixth-century Breton saint, Enora is a name rooted in the landscape, memory, and traditions of Breizh itself.

I like to think it points toward a way of being grounded in care rather than performance. My advocacy, science, ethics, and language are attention, not display. I try to hold meaning and naming carefully, resisting the quiet flattening through which things lose their weight and harm becomes harder to see.

In that sense, honour is not elevation. It is fidelity: fidelity to what is true, to what is owed, and to the relationships that bind us to one another, to place, and to time.

Enora is short, distinctly Breton, Brythonic rather than Gaelic, feminine without ornament. It carries a quiet austerity, as if language itself had been pared back to what cannot be taken away. A name that feels less like an inheritance than an invitation. Less like a claim than a direction.

Claire is who I am in daily life. Enora is who I am reaching toward. I hold them both, not as a contradiction but as two ends of the same thread, one given at birth, one offered as an invitation. Belonging, I'm learning, is not always something we receive. Sometimes it is something we grow into. And sometimes the journey begins with a name that asks us to become worthy of it.

A Racer Bolting Through the Leaves 𓆙

Today I encountered my first Northern Black Racer (Coluber constrictor) in the Beech Forest in Provincetown, a human-wildlife disturbance event from the snake’s perspective, no doubt. I decided she was a she because that was how she felt to me, though I know there is no easy way to tell in the field. She produced a short, dry rattling sound, likely from tail vibration in the leaf litter, just long enough for me to localize and identify her before she bolted. Because she did bolt, and this caught me by surprise, I even jumped back a little, despite already keeping a good distance from her. She seemed to rely on speed rather than crypsis or any prolonged defensive display. She half-flew and slithered. Her escape response was immediate, powerful, and intimidating.

Witnessing that acceleration and directional control was a privilege and hinted at how well adapted racers are for active, diurnal foraging in open or semi-open habitats. In a beech forest, where fallen leaves and shifting light can offer some concealment, that kind of movement still seemed to matter most: quick reaction, alertness, and the ability to turn a sudden disturbance into distance.

📷 North American Racer · Couleuvre Agile (Coluber constrictor) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

🕸️ A Star in the Salt Marsh: The Orbweaver of Hatches Harbor

Walking back along the Hatches Harbor main trail, I wasn’t looking for a spider. I was mostly looking for a way out of the heat. At this stretch, the path runs between salt marsh and tidal flats, harshly lit, the kind of midday glare that flattens everything into high-contrast shapes. I let my eyes do what they usually do in the field, scanning for what might be out of place, for the small break in pattern that says something living is tucked into the scene.

That was when I noticed the blotch.

Halfway up a great mullein stalk, a darker, spiky knot interrupted the clean, pale stem. I first mistook it for an unopened spotted knapweed flower head, something plant-like enough to pass by. Only then did it resolve into a remarkable little spider, a starbellied orbweaver, clinging to the stalk and nearly merged with the mullein’s woolly surface. From a distance it read as plant. Up close, it became pattern.

The starbellied orbweaver (Acanthepeira stellata) is a spiny-abdomen orbweaving spider found across much of North America. It favors open, sunny habitats, where it spins vertical webs at night to intercept flying insects. Its camouflage is especially effective against stems and dried vegetation, making it well suited to exposed coastal landscapes. Like other orbweavers, it builds the familiar wheel-shaped web, though in the glare and heat of the trail hers was difficult to see and may have been partly damaged. She seemed almost part of the mullein, a small, still shape holding fast in full sun.

At first I saw only her body and the plant. She was alert yet relaxed. No obvious web cut the space around her. The air beside the stem looked empty, full of heat shimmer and insect flight but not silk. Only after I stood quietly for a while did the rest of her story emerge: a faint suggestion of threads lower down the stalk, near the leaves, where the plant’s architecture thickened. There, the web was less a perfect wheel than a blur of lines tucked into the cooler, more textured part of the plant.

The spider had chosen the blotch position, above the main web, exactly where my brain would almost, but not quite, file her away as part of the plant. What broke the illusion was the thing I rely on most in the field: the sense that the symmetry is just a little off, that one small patch of color or shape doesn’t quite belong.

I do not see this species often. In fact, this was only my second sighting, and strangely enough, the first was exactly one year earlier to the day, on the same trail! Some places seem to keep their own calendars.

📷 Starbellied Orbweaver (Acanthepeira stellata) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

▫ ▫ ▫

Aside: why “broken symmetry” works

When you walk through a habitat, most of what you see is repeating structure: stems rising at similar angles, leaves arranged in familiar patterns, stones with consistent colors and textures. Your visual system is excellent at compressing all that into “background” so your brain doesn’t have to process every leaf individually.

Insects and spiders often survive by disguising themselves as part of that background, mimicking thorns, bark, dead leaves, or seeds, but the mimicry is almost never perfect. There’s usually some small mismatch in color, outline, texture, or orientation: a triangle where everything else is linear, a matte patch on something glossy, a curve where the plant world is mostly straight. When you train yourself to look for those tiny disagreements, you start to pull animals out of camouflage that most people walk straight past.

A simple practice: on your next walk, consciously soften your gaze and scan for “the one thing that doesn’t quite fit,” a strangely shaped knot on a twig, an extra bump on a stem, a shadow that seems too crisp. Pause and give that oddity a few extra seconds of attention. Even if nine times out of ten it’s just plant tissue or debris, the tenth time it resolves into a spider, a leafhopper, or a tucked-in moth, and your pattern-spotting gets better with every success.

On Speaking to a Room I Cannot See

Recently, I gave a virtual talk where the participants were not visible at all: no faces, no names, just my host and me, and a counter at the bottom of the screen. The experience crystallized something I have felt for a while: I am not at home in this format.

Webinars are often designed for scale and control. Everyone is muted, some formats now impose that cameras are off, and interaction is funneled into narrow channels, usually a chat box or Q&A window (as was the case here, and it caught me by surprise). From a host’s perspective, this can make sense in some situations. It prevents interruptions, protects privacy, and keeps the program running on time. But for a speaker whose core values are exchange and conversation (which was the stated objective of this talk), it removes the very cues that make communication feel alive. Without that basic human visibility, it is impossible to read the room, adjust to people’s needs, or feel that the exchange is mutual rather than transactional.

Seeing people is not a luxury; it is part of what makes communication respectful. People’s choice to keep their video off is entirely their own, and I respect that. What matters to me is that participants are at least given the option to be visible, rather than being structurally kept invisible by the format. Equally, when it is possible, I need to be able to see some of the audience. An organization’s decision about format (as in this case, my host’s organization rather than the host herself) should not make both speakers and attendees hostage to enforced invisibility.

When an event chooses a setup that hides the audience while asking the speaker to show up fully, it creates an imbalance. The speaker’s presence is exposed and accountable, while the audience’s presence is abstract and anonymous. That design choice says something about whose experience is being prioritized and whose experience is being dismissed.

Going forward, I am going to be more deliberate. Before accepting an online speaking invitation, I will ask how the event is structured. If it is a strict webinar, I may request a meeting format, or at least some way to see and hear participants during part of the session. And if that is not possible, I may choose to decline.

I do not mind technology; it is part of my background. But I mind how respectfully we use it. I mind being asked to show up fully for people who are structurally kept invisible. Respect in communication includes the simple courtesy of letting us see each other. This is not about rejecting technology. It is about insisting that, even online, we treat knowledge-sharing as a relationship rather than a broadcast.

Lives Interlaced on a Black Cherry Leaf 🐜

I had set out with a simple plan: check a bog and maybe catch sight of pitcher plants. These days, it is never a given, as many bogs are quietly drying. When I couldn’t find a place to park, I turned back, stopped the car, looked at a trail map, noticed a cluster of nearby paths, and thought, ‘I haven’t been there’, and decided to see what it holds.

That small shift led me into a mixed pitch pine, black oak, and scrub oak maritime forest. The trail opened toward an overlook of kettle ponds and parabolic dunes, their forms shaped by a steady wind moving in one direction. Simply lovely.

As usual, covering less than a mile took me a long while. Color, texture, and form in the vegetation kept asking for attention.

With pitcher plants out of the picture in this habitat, I returned to my other thread of inquiry this week: following the movements of carpenter ants and their relatives along vegetation. A black cherry caught my eye, though not at first for itself. What revealed it were the black cherry leaf gall mites (Eriophyes cerasicrumena). Lately, it is often the tracks that introduce me to the host. Tracks have become my first keys. I have grown to appreciate this way of seeing. It echoes what I often share on walks: interactions are what make worlds. What an organism is in isolation is less than what it is within its community.

I lingered on the leaves, watching the galls shift in color from cream to a deep dusty rose. Ants moved deliberately among them. When I gently touched the twig holding those inhabited leaves, the ants responded immediately, quick and purposeful in their defense.

Looking more closely, I realized that the deeper pink or mauve forms I had been noticing were not galls at all, but caterpillars.

Using a twig to keep a respectful distance, I parted the leaves slightly. The caterpillars appeared to be feeding on the gall tissue, perhaps on the tiny inhabitants of those galls. In return, I assume the caterpillars offer the ants a sugary secretion, which would keep the ants nearby and give the caterpillars a kind of protection. The black cherry provides the site and food altered by the gall mites, the mites create the nutrient-rich structures, the caterpillars exploit those structures and their occupants, and the ants patrol and defend the spot in exchange for the sweet reward. Four species, tree, mites, caterpillars, and ants, together form a small living economy of shelter, food, and defense.

Yet as I watched, another question emerged: what is the black cherry getting from all of this?

I have since logged the observations and am waiting for confirmation. Whether or not the identification holds, the moment stands on its own. It was a reminder that attention shapes what we find. Plans may guide us to a place, but it is the openness of mind and senses that reveals what is already there.

📷 Cherry Gall Azure · Azur des Phytoptes du Cerisier (Celastrina serotina) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.