𓍢ִ໋❀ The Low, Bright World

Splash of Colors on the Way Down

At this time of year, when the rocky outcrop dries on Mount Towanda, I often marvel at the tiny flowers that occupy the space just above the ground. Pineweeds are fruiting; the blue curls wear their last flowers, popping among numerous young nutlets gathered in little calyx cups. I am always surprised by how long the blooming season is for the long-leaved bluets. There is so much to observe in the ground layer. One little flower never fails to put a smile on my heart: field milkwort (Senega sanguinea), polygale sanguine in my language.

What a rich burst of color it offers among the taller sunflowers and the goldenrods of the talus, now burnished by the sun. I always look for it on our way down the hill, after we have finished recording the phenology of a few old deciduous friends at the top.

At first glance, field milkwort can seem less like a flower than a bright tuft planted among the grasses. Its rounded head is made of many tiny blossoms, set so closely together that it becomes a thimble of color: raspberry, rose, lavender, sometimes nearly white, sometimes washed with green.

Squat down and look closely, and its intricate structure comes into view. Deep rose and magenta wings overlap around tiny yellow floral parts that appear between them like small lamps. Buds remain tightly gathered toward the center, while flowers at the edges open in succession. From standing height, it is a vivid splash in the grass. At ground level, the flower head becomes a minute architecture of folds and color.

Those apparent petals are, in fact, enlarged sepals, the wing-like structures that give milkworts their peculiar, folded look. The true petals are much smaller and partly hidden within each flower, forming a little structure at its center. Nothing about this blossom calls attention to itself from afar, yet it rewards the curious observer who pauses long enough to see its intricacy.

Perhaps that is why I always look for it so eagerly. Field milkwort does not dominate the slope. It simply waits low among the late gold of grasses and taller plants gone to seed, a bright small presence at the end of our walk downhill after a morning spent taking the season’s measure.

📷 Field Milkwort · Polygale Sanguin (Senega sanguinea) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

🌧️ Drenched, but Hanging On

Waiting Out the Storm

When I left this morning, after days of rain, I checked on our bees. Boy, they were drenched and looking utterly miserable. Look at this one!

I had checked on them every single day during the nor'easter, all clinging firmly to their flower, leaf or stem, sheltering through the storm. Not a single movement, nor any sign of foraging, it seemed. Tough little things.

I lifted all the flowers that had been flattened onto the ground by the weight of the water, getting them off the sidewalk along the garden and attaching them back up so our bees would not risk being stepped on. This afternoon, activity in the flowers seemed pretty much back to normal. Some of the bees looked a little worse for wear, but some are also simply reaching the end of their lives.

All in all, it looks like many of them made it through. Phew!

The photo is one I took this morning of one of them, a male common eastern bumble bee, I think. Or is it an Eastern carpenter bee... Perhaps gathering themselves before making their first move of the day.

📷 Common Eastern Bumble Bee · Bourdon Fébrile (Bombus impatiens) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

⟢ The One Slow Step

A Stairway Encounter

I was leaving my mother-in-law’s house when I did what I always do: looked down at the left side of the stairs, where yellowjackets had nested a few years ago. Force of habit, I suppose. Repeated actions can be hard to undo. But why would I want to undo this one? It keeps me aware of where I am, and of what may be there.

The yellowjackets were long gone. But there, on the step, was another creature entirely: a large, dark bug standing on long legs, as though it had been waiting to be noticed. I crouched beside it simply to admire it. Its antennae were extraordinary. Long and dark for most of their length, each ended in a bright orange tip, like two tiny signal flags. Its legs carried the same warm orange accents, set against a body the color of bark, old wood, and shadow.

This is a leaf-footed bug, Acanthocephala terminalis, a member of the true-bug family Coreidae. The name “leaf-footed” comes from the widened hind tibiae, the dark, flattened expansions on its back legs. On this one, they looked less like leaves than small dark paddles, hardly the leafy feet the name had led me to expect. 

This leaf-footed bug belongs to a different kind of familiar margin from the yellowjackets that once lived beside the stairs. Open woodland, thickets, sunny roadsides, and the shrubs that gather at their edges are its world. Sumac, wild grape, ninebark, and young hickory shoots are among the plants on which it feeds. It overwinters as an adult, then returns with the warm season, part of the small annual traffic of the wooded edge.

Then I remembered where it was: in the middle of a stair, directly in the path of unsuspecting feet. I gave it the gentlest nudge, hoping it might move to a safer place. It was not remotely troubled. Each careful encouragement produced one slow, deliberate step, then a pause. Another nudge, another single step. There was no alarmed dash, no sudden flight, only the measured progress of a creature apparently unconvinced that haste was necessary.

I had gone looking for the old yellowjacket nest. Instead, I found an orange-flagged traveler, calmly crossing the stairs one slow step at a time. It made me pause. It quieted my mind, as observing always does. It reminded me that beauty can occur anywhere and at any time, whenever it feels like showing itself to someone who cares enough to notice.

🔎︎ A few papers for the curious

→ McPherson, J. E., et al. “Review of Acanthocephala (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Coreidae) of America North of Mexico with a Key to Species.” Zootaxa, vol. 2835, no. 1, Apr. 2011. DOI.org (Crossref), doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.2835.1.2.

→ “Leaf-Footed Bugs (Family Coreidae).” Field Station, 18 Jan. 2011.

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

𓆦 Down from the Oak Canopy

Looking for Caterpillars, Finding a Cicada

After inspecting a few hundred fernleaf false foxglove (Aureolaria pedicularia) fruits last Friday, my eyes were tired, and I was about to give up my quest when I spotted her. It's funny how you can tunnel-vision on something specific and miss what's right in front of you. Only when I relaxed my focus did I notice an unusual shape along the stem of the plant: a gorgeous cicada! Maybe I walked right past a few hundred of them (just kidding!), so fixed was I on hunting, head down, for caterpillars in the fruits of the false foxglove.

In any case, here she was, a Northern dog-day cicada (Neotibicen canicularis), quietly resting on the plant. A little surprising to see her there, but maybe not. I usually hear them high in the oak canopy, but then again, false foxglove is a known associate of oaks, a root parasite of them, in fact, so maybe she'd come down to check on the flower patch below, or to grace me with her presence.

Their call is one of the more identifiable sounds of a Massachusetts summer, a rising mechanical buzz, steady and unwavering, that runs about fifteen seconds before trailing off. It's often likened to a circular saw or angle grinder, and unlike some Neotibicen, it never develops the pulsing wobble some cicada songs have, a good way to tell it apart by ear.

They're called "annual" cicadas, though that's a bit misleading. Like all cicadas, individuals spend years underground as nymphs (commonly two to five, though estimates vary here), feeding on root xylem. What makes them "annual" is overlapping broods, so some adults emerge every year rather than in synchronized mass eruptions like the periodical Magicicada. Adults themselves live only one to three weeks, just long enough to mate and lay eggs in woody stems.

The typical form is black with vivid green markings and green-veined wings, though plenty stray from that pattern, some running mostly brown, others darkening to almost solid black. Local records show the species turning up everywhere from mixed forests to suburban yards.

They're the smallest of our annual cicadas, noticeably outsized by the lyric cicada (N. lyricen), the other Neotibicen most likely to share your yard. Lyric cicadas run larger overall, sport a black pronotal collar rather than green, and tend to emerge a bit earlier in the season, singing from around July, while dog-day cicadas hold off until the later, hotter stretch of August into September.

Sometimes attention isn't about staring harder; it's about loosening your grip enough to let the world in.

📷 Northern Dog-day Cicada · Cigale Caniculaire (Neotibicen canicularis) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

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.