≽༏≼ A Lady Eastern Pondhawk at Close Range

She seemed determined to land on my hand. Every time I moved it, she followed, so eventually I gave in and waited patiently until she decided she was done with me. It took a while!

The Importance of Place

Female Eastern Pondhawks seem to pick up on the territory first. A floating mat of plants matters because that’s where a male is set up, and where mating and egg-laying can actually happen. So in a way, the female is choosing a defended patch with a male already holding it, not just picking a mate out in the open.

What seems to matter most is the quality of the site, how well the male holds it, and whether the patch is worth guarding. A good little raft of vegetation probably means both a solid male and a good place for eggs.

In short, the floating plant mat is doing more than just floating there. It’s part of the whole mating setup.

📷 Eastern Pondhawk · Érythème des Étangs (Erythemis simplicicollis) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

Threaded Things

On my way to Ptown, binoculars in one hand, checking the surf just in case, my head wrapped in the harmonies of Abel Korzeniowski, I am catching up on some reading about termite societies. Then I remembered: termites have not only a queen but also a living king. They pair for life and spend their entire reign together in the royal chamber.    

In my mind appeared a busy colony, underground or hidden deep within a mound, its different castes working together to sustain the whole. Then, as the violin crescendoed, the little king suddenly stepped into the foreground of my imagination. That image made me smile. And then, unexpectedly, it made me tear up.

Go figure.

--- 

📷 Not a king or queen, but just as captivating, likely a worker caste individual, possibly the Eastern subterranean termite · Termite à pattes jaunes (Reticulitermes flavipes) | © Claire O'Neill, observed Apr 25, 2020 · Medford, MA, USA

To the Women the Land Knows

As I approach my sixties, I find myself reflecting on a life lived as a woman in fields long dominated by men. For decades, I led in technology while, in parallel, cultivating another life rooted in learning from the natural world. Eventually, I left a corporate environment that clashed with my values and too often failed to recognize the contributions of women, and stepped more fully into the work that had been calling me all along.

Today, I am a woman naturalist with French and Breizh roots, spending nearly every day in the field, learning from the land, and sharing what years of attention have taught me.

I came to natural history through decades of attention. I was always a nature explorer in the truest sense of the word, not to conquer, not to collect trophies, but to be in relation. The formal naturalist work came later. The knowing had been accumulating all along.
  
The naturalist world is no different from many others. Women continue to navigate patterns of erasure and exclusion that are often subtle, yet deeply entrenched.

That experience is not mine alone. There has been some progress, and I can see it in the work of women who have reshaped parts of this field from within. Look at the legacy of primatologist Jane Goodall, the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, and many others who have been steadily shifting what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it.

But in everyday community life, the imbalance remains. Subtly yet persistently, women naturalists are still overlooked. We lead the walk, and someone else gets the microphone. We build the knowledge base, and someone else publishes the interpretation. We have been doing this work, patient, relational, reciprocal, for as long as there has been ground to tend and seasons to read. And still we are asked to justify our presence in the land we never left.

In our field, perhaps more than ever, the collectors of names are celebrated over the keepers of relationships, those who connect species to place, season, memory, and community. That too is a form of erasure.

We are keepers of time. We read the season before the calendar catches up. We know the first spring ephemerals, the first wood frog call, the first insect emergence, not as data points, but as obligations, as relationships, as the texture of a world we have committed ourselves to paying attention to, a language learned through years of observation and data that deepen attention rather than define it.

We are holders of knowledge, not the extracted, transactional kind, but the kind that accumulates through return, through presence, through caring about what happens to a place across years and decades.

We are guardians of reciprocal traditions, ways of being in relation to land and life that predate the institutions that have so often failed to see us.

This is not new. It carries the long shape of erasure.

Jeanne Baret from France, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, disguised herself as a man just to board the ship and do the work. She collected thousands of botanical specimens along the way. The flowering vine she helped bring to scientific attention was named Bougainvillea, after the expedition leader, not after her.

Beatrix Potter from the United Kingdom brought rigorous scientific attention to mycology at a time when the Linnean Society would not admit her. Her research on fungal spore germination had to be read aloud by a man because she could not present it herself. She is remembered for her illustrations of rabbits, not her scientific work.

Rachel Carson from the United States spent her life studying marine ecosystems with patience and precision, then wrote a book that shifted the course of environmental policy. The response from industry was not to engage her science, but to dismantle her credibility as a woman, as an alarmist, as someone presumed to have no authority in the natural world.

Ynes Mexía from Mexico and the United States, a Mexican American botanist and field explorer, collected more than 150,000 plant specimens across the Americas, with major work throughout Mexico and South America. Her contributions to botanical knowledge remain far less visible than the scale of her work would suggest.

And in our own time, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard from Canada, whose research reshaped how we understand forests as interconnected living systems, continues to defend and reinforce the legitimacy of that work while still navigating resistance to its full acceptance.

These are not exceptions. They are the structure, repeating across places and ecosystems. From European forests to North American coasts, from Latin American mountains to global voyages shaped by colonial expeditions, the pattern holds. Different landscapes, same pattern of recognition and erasure.

And still the women go out. Still, they crouch at the edge of the vernal pool. Still, they photograph, record, annotate, remember. Still, they teach their children, their neighbors, their communities, outside the institutions that do not invite them in.

The land does not overlook them. The moths come to those who wait. The wood frogs call on the same March nights they have always called, and there are women who have been counting those nights for twenty, thirty, forty years, without grants, without titles, without anyone handing them the microphone.

I came to this field late by some measures. Not late by mine.

I have been exploring since I can remember, crouching beside things, staying still long enough for the world to forget I was there, learning names and, more importantly, their stories, not to own what I encountered but to be in better relation with it. The phenological work, the protocols, the careful recording of first emergence and last call, all of that came with time. The attention was always there.

And so I know something about what it means to carry knowledge that institutions often dismiss, to do work that does not always come with a title, to love a field that has not always made room for you, and to use the rigor of data and long-term observation to help widen what counts as ecological understanding.

I write this for the women who are still out there at first light, in the rain, on their knees beside something small and extraordinary. Named and unnamed. Credentialed and not. The ones the poster does not feature and the ones the land has always known.

You are not the assistant on this walk.

You are the ones who know.

© 2026 Claire O'Neill. Text and photographs by the author. All photographs feature friends from the Earthwise Aware (EwA) community.

The Return of the Carders 🐝

The annual reunion of a bee, a plant, and one who pays attention

I do not keep rigorous phenology records for my little patch of lamb's ears (Stachys byzantina), though perhaps I should. Still, I pay attention.

Every year, a moment comes when the soft silver leaves send up their flowering stalks and the first flush of purple appears. I am not entirely sure whether those purple parts are petals or sepals, but the effect is always the same: as soon as I see that color, I feel a small jolt of anticipation, because I know the wool carder bees are on their way.

Not long after the flowers begin to bloom, there they are. It felt as though I waited a little longer this year, and I should probably record the interval between flowering and the bees' arrival. The lives of solitary bees are brief, and the individuals I see today are almost certainly descendants of those I watched last year, continuing a relationship that has likely persisted in this small patch for generations.

The male wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) is usually the first one I notice. This year, I spotted him patrolling a nearby patch of beardtongue before returning to the lamb's ears. He saw me and hovered at eye level, impossibly confident for a bee scarcely larger than a fingernail. There is something almost confrontational about the way he faces me, suspended in the air as though evaluating whether I belong in his territory.

"Hey, woman. Leave my patch and my girl alone. I am watching youI"

Male wool carder bees are famous for this behavior. Rather than defending a colony, they defend patches of flowers rich in nectar, chasing away rivals and almost anything else that enters their airspace. Few bees make their territoriality so obvious.

Soon his attention shifted to a female moving among the flowers. He rushed toward her with an enthusiasm that seemed only partly welcome, while she carried on with the business at hand. She fed among the flowers and visited the leaves, scraping their soft hairs with her mandibles. Those fibers will line the brood cells where the next generation develops, giving wool carder bees their name.

What fascinates me is that both bee and plant arrived here from elsewhere. Lamb's ears originated in western Asia. The wool carder bee evolved across Eurasia and was first recorded in North America in 1963, and has since spread widely. Yet they arrived carrying an old familiarity with one another. The female still gathers the woolly fibers. The male still patrols the flowers. Behaviors shaped long before either reached New England.

A plant and a bee, both far from their ancestral ranges, still performing behaviors shaped by a much older evolutionary history. The female gathers plant fibers. The male patrols his territory with grand confidence.

And I find myself watching. The purple appears. The carders return.

📷 European Woolcarder Bee · Anthidie à Manchettes (Anthidium manicatum) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. | EwA Buggy observation (first seasonal record at my patch) → here

𖡼𓆧 Watching a Katydid Return Each Year

 When Little Katy Appears: Notes from a Native Garden

Little Katy is back! Yes, I name the familiar faces in my yard. Little Katy has been a regular resident of my native garden for the past few years, though I spotted this one at the Growing Center this time. I am sure I will find her again among the plants. Seeing this little one emerge always brings a smile. I find the nymphs especially charming, and this is a fascinating species to observe over time.

This is the Mediterranean katydid, now beginning its seasonal appearance in Massachusetts, a small but increasingly familiar presence as warm months settle in. Originally native to the Mediterranean region, it has expanded its range in recent decades and now appears locally from late spring through summer, often first noticed through its soft, rhythmic calls at dusk.

In Massachusetts, sightings and acoustic detections typically increase as temperatures rise and vegetation thickens, especially in urban edges, gardens, and grassy habitats where it finds shelter and food. Its arrival is a quiet reminder of shifting ecological patterns, where climate and human-altered landscapes are reshaping which insects now share our evenings.

If you listen closely in the coming weeks, especially after sunset, you may start to notice its steady presence woven into the night chorus.

Note that in Massachusetts this species is considered an introduced, non-native species, but it is not formally classified as a regulated invasive pest.

📷 Mediterranean Katydid · Phanéroptère Méridional (Phaneroptera nana) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧 Spoonleaf Sundew: Tiny Traps, Big Wonder

I am super excited: I recorded our first spoonleaf phenology on EwA Pheno Lite! I now know a few patches of these remarkable plants in the Outer Cape, and I was especially looking to see whether they were flowering. The one patch I visited so far was not.

Even without flowers, spoonleaf sundew is already doing something remarkable. This is a small wetland plant with leaves that act like tiny sticky traps. In the photo, you can see one of those traps in action: a tiny insect is caught right on the leaf, held fast by the plant’s glistening (and sticky) glands. After capture, the leaf slowly curls inward, helping the plant digest insects and get nutrients from the poor, sandy soils where it grows.

Phenologically, this is the season when flowering is expected to begin or soon follow. In the Outer Cape, that likely means a close watch now for emerging scapes and the first blooms as summer advances. These plants are fragile, so I am always careful where I step and mindful to avoid wetland edges. I am so excited to keep following these plants from here on out.

📷 Spoonleaf Sundew · Droséra Intermédiaire (Drosera intermedia) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

𓇢𓆸 A Tiny Defensive Landscape

Ha! 💚 I am mesmerized by the tiny stalked hairs with their bulbous, secretion-filled tips that make the bud surface glisten. These are glandular trichomes on the sepals and outer surfaces of the flower buds of hairy beardtongue (Penstemon digitalis) just as they are about to open. Each little "dot" is a short hair topped with a clear, rounded gland that catches the light and sometimes merges with neighboring droplets. The stalks are relatively short, while the heads are swollen and translucent, giving the buds a dewy, resinous appearance rather than the matte fuzz produced by non-glandular hairs.

I am learning that these trichomes secrete a mixture of compounds that make the bud tips tacky. At this early stage of development, the secretions may help deter small herbivores, interfere with tiny crawling insects, protect delicate tissues from drying, and modify the immediate environment surrounding the developing flower.

Looking closer, on my garden's hairy beardtongue buds, the trichomes are densest along the margins and tips of the sepals, exactly where the tissue is about to separate and reflex as the flower elongates. As the buds open, these glistening projections will become less visually dominant. For now, though, they form a spiky armor around the floral parts still tucked safely within.

It is hard not to stop and admire them. Even before the flowers open, the plant has already invested in a remarkable layer of structure and chemistry, a tiny defensive landscape guarding the next stage of its reproductive journey.

📷 Foxglove Beardtongue · Penstémon Digitale (Penstemon digitalis) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. EwA Pheno Lite observation → here