On August 17, a magical text arrived. It read, in part: “I have many many ripe figs just a block or so away. They are in the tree ripening as I text. Can’t eat them fast enough. Please come on over whenever and pick yourself some!!” I don’t know that I’d ever eaten a fresh […]
The big cicada event this year began and was over again before we even got to the Fourth of July. But the annual cicadas are back, just like they always are, singing from the trees. While the 17-year cicadas come in extremely large numbers – that’s kind of their whole thing – the annual cicadas […]
You know I love the 17-year cicadas. I loved when the nymphs were crawling out of the ground. I loved when the adults were blundering about. I loved the wings littered on the ground. I loved the singing from the trees. Now I love seeing the flagging on trees, the latest reminder of the cicadas’ […]
A butterfly in my kitchen—that’s a surprise. It would have had to flutter up a lot of stairs and down a lot of hallways to get here from outside. I suspect it actually came in with some kale. I think it’s a cabbage white butterfly, a sweet little agricultural pest that arrived on this side […]
Earlier this summer I went on a bee hunt. I’m talking about native bees, not honeybees. In the words of Sam Droege, the guy leading the bee hunt, “If your model of ‘bee’ is the honeybee, you need to forget nearly everything you know about bees.” Droege works at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and […]
This week, at a lake house in Michigan, I kept hearing a sound that made me think of a gull, but wasn’t. At least, I heard it when I didn’t see any gulls. I’d heard that the Merlin bird identification app can now identify birds by sound. So I held my phone up and it […]
I don’t actually remember that much about the cicadas’ last visit, in 2004. I remember turning onto my parents’ street and noticing how loud the trees were, filled with chorusing insects. But not much about the bugs themselves. Mostly what I remember is trying to convince bug skeptics that a cool thing was happening. My […]
In the city, during the pandemic, sometimes this view is my best look at nature for the day. But isn’t it grand? A lovely sunny tree, a starling. In spring: flowers. In summer: cicadas. Throughout the morning, light catches it in different ways. Sometime in the next few years, a new apartment building will appear […]