Too Little, Too Late, But Better Late Than Never?

By: | May 8, 2026
Snowy spruce

More snow finally came on Tuesday night, two months later than it was supposed to finally come, and it is too late, but it is better than nothing. That’s what everyone is saying. “I’m so grateful for the moisture.” “I hope the flowers I covered will make it.” “I’m happy it snowed, but I do wish it had snowed back in February and March when we really needed it.” “It will be a drought-denter, but not a drought-buster.”

A May snowstorm is not actually all that rare, and most people who live in Colorado are happy about it. The ones who complain or act surprised are usually the Texans who moved here and still talk all the time about Texas. The snow is good — any snow in the mountains is good — and we need it all year, but especially right now, in our absurdly severe megadrought.

Still, even a typical May snowstorm comes at bad timing this year, because the trees and the forest were not ready.

The leaves are on deciduous trees, which happened earlier this year than usual, because it was in the 80s in March during a historic heat wave. I wrote about it in The Atlantic. We lost most of our snow back then, and when more snows came in April, we lost some leafed trees to the weight and the frost. Some farms lost their entire peach crops, the trees having been tricked into thinking it was spring from then on. Others were much more lucky, but famous Colorado peaches are heading for a mixed summer.

In the woods where my house is, the scrub oaks came in a month early and then their buds froze. Now they are in a perpetually liminal state, not-blooming but almost-blooming. Frozen in time and in actual frost.

The blue spruces near me were recently sporting tumescent male pollen cones, and I remarked to my husband that I will have to remember to close my office window, so that my desk won’t be covered in yellow pine dust. What will happen to those cones now? Are they ok?

I looked it up, because I am always worrying about trees, and I learned that blue spruce pollen is shed from April to June, depending on altitude. It was not shedding yet for me, but at 6,700 feet in elevation, I suspect it will be very soon, or would have been. I hope to be sneezing again soon as a sign of the trees’ health.

I also worry about the delicate, but also incredibly hardy mountain plants. In the high mountains, the grasses and the tundra plants were exposed early, and were drying out because the snow was gone two months earlier than usual, at least in some spots. The snow this week is welcome, but it will also bury them, and if they were already out of dormancy, I imagine this is tough for them.

I looked this up, too, and read that cushion plants and sedges can produce buds under the snow, and then awaken for just eight weeks of summer. I hope they were not waking up yet.

Snow at the wrong time can hurt, in a year when everything has been happening out of sync. This snow is too late. But it is better than nothing.

I mean, at least now, the blue spruces and the ponderosas and the tundra grasses will be slightly less likely to burn. Small victories!

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons because I didn’t want to put a photo of my house on the interweb

Hello Birdie

By: | May 6, 2026

The world is a lot right now, so I want to suggest that you find some little delights to keep your spirits up. Perhaps start with birds. (And if that doesn’t work, there are always dogs.) Last May, I wrote about how I’d become a bird spy. A year later, I’m still obsessed with my birdcam.

What I love most about it is that I can observe the birds in my yard up close and personal. I can watch how they eat the birdseed and the cute little sounds and calls they make and the ways they interact with one another at the feeder. It really does feel like spying, but hopefully in a non-creepy way. I’m just interested in these creatures!

One of the things I especially like about the cam is that it alerts me when there’s a bird at the feeder. Sure, this can get to be a lot, since there are usually birds at the feeder. But oftentimes I get pinged when I’m not home and/or occupied elsewhere and it’s a lovely little reminder to look outside and see what’s happening in nature.

I might be in a board meeting in Washington DC, but I can see that there’s a Lazuli bunting at my feeder, and isn’t it pretty?

Snapshot: Funny little ferns

By: | May 4, 2026

See those little round plants? The flat ones? They’re ferns. Ferns! Did you even know ferns came like that? Not a frond in sight? Little flat discs? Well, they do! They grow in many, many wet places in Japan, often among the wee mosses and lichens, which means I’d seen them for a long time and never known what they were – until Google Lens came along to help me. The ones in the photo above have sent up long, skinny sporophytes with orange sporangia on the underside, which means they’re ready to reproduce.

Wee round ferns! Two would fit side by side on my thumbnail! My goodness, the world has wonderful things in it.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Standing at the Shoreline

By: | May 1, 2026

Hey Alexa, how long can a beaver hold its breath? I’m asking because I was kayaking last night at Totier Creek off the James River and I spotted a beaver swimming from one bank to another, his little head sticking up like a thumb and his body and paddle of a tail cutting a V through the smooth water. And suddenly he went under and never came back up. Believe me, I watched for him in all directions for, like, 10 minutes. The thing was gone.

Alexa didn’t care much about my explanation for the question, nor my decision to call the animal a “he,” but she did tell me beavers can hold their breath for up to 15 minutes on a single dive, plenty of time to get across a waterway without being bothered by a curious human in a kayak who was hoping for a closer view.

For stuff like that, this AI thing is awesome. It may not have all the answers yet, but it has a lot of them and at least when typing your question into a chatbot you can insist on a certain type of source (give me answers only from Nat Geo or National Wildlife or Beavers International magazine or a professional journal) to ensure the answer is credible. (You got me: There is no Beavers International. But if there were I would trust it fully for beaver facts.)

Next, I’ll admit this, with some hesitation: Recently for work I needed to quickly turn around a Q&A I’d done with a scientist, and the transcribed Zoom interview was all over the place and way too long. Desperate, I pasted the whole thing into a chatbot and asked it to organize it logically and cut out the ums and the time codes and the repetition and put it into a Q&A format at about 1,000 words. CHAT did all those things in less time than it took me to blow my nose, which was so helpful I wanted to cry. (Explains the runny nose.) How can one ignore these tools when facing this type of time-consuming effort? I decided I was okay with using AI in this way.

But where’s the line?

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Guest Post: Chemistry & the Students from Elsewhere

By: | April 29, 2026

The Friday before spring break, the handful of students who haven’t cut out early or taken off for Eid are sharing some of their favorite new words gleaned from their independent reading: black hole, sound barrier, bookies, puppets, dime, wrist, Wyoming, information. We talk about what each of these mean, write sentences, consider what new worlds they allow us to either glimpse or explain. They dream up a reality to probe.

My students are all between fourteen and eighteen years old, new to the United States from what feels like everywhere, and learning English with the approximate average literacy level of a first grader. Like any child, their approach to language learning is curious, open, data based—in a word, scientific.

We have just wrapped up stoichiometry, or the “recipes” unit. You remember: How many grams of CO2 do you need to make 71 grams of C6H12O6? Some students speak math very well and this they like. Some students speak math very well but their sibling was just deported by ICE and we haven’t seen them in school for three months, so there’s that.

Chemistry has always been abstract—having taught all the other ones over the years, I find it the most hard to wrap our heads around. Physics is laws sterling yet transformable. You can approach it in any order and it builds and wraps back on itself. Biology is the beautiful scattershot, an exploration of how outrageously those laws can be expressed and an affirmation of how much even the sterling transformationists depend on chance or a nudge in one direction or another (you thought this was simply matter or antimatter, velocity or position? Explain what the hell reproduction is please). But chemistry is somewhere in the middle—sterling laws that explain sterling, if you’ll indulge me. Atoms and molecules that we can only grasp in bulk, obeying rules we can only explain in board game form—jump an electron up or down from this ring here, which isn’t really a ring, and also the electron isn’t really here—or elements we line up in a contentious table with a decidedly Earth-based bias. If that matters.

A table is this, I say patting the lab tables next to me. The tape peels off one of my word labels reading “table” like I also have “clock,” “faucet,” “projector screen” and as many other items as I could name and write in the furtive last days of the previous school year when you try to set up everything to make things easier, if only marginally so, for the following September. It can also mean a way to organize information, rows and columns, up and down, numbers or letters in order. Like your data tables. Like the periodic table. Yes, it is organized. We did a whole unit on it in November, periodic trends? You weren’t here yet. Right.

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Passion Fruit Diplomacy

By: | April 27, 2026

For years, we’d been trying to entice two kiwi vines to create some shade over the picnic table in the backyard. We gave them questionable water during a drought, fenced them off from predatory puppies and toddlers. As the years passed, they just looked sadder and sadder.

Finally, we dug them up and put in a single passion fruit vine, hoping for — well, hoping for nothing, really, but a bit of green. When a neighbor first offered me the withered purple fruit from her vine, I declined.

The leaves appeared within a season and bolted up to cover the arbor. And then last spring:  flowers! Delightful fireworks of purple and white. A flower people see their own stories in: for the Inca and Aztec people, the plant’s original cultivators, the flower’s whirl of spokes may have connected it to the sacred Sun. Friars returning from South America in the early 1600s found the five wounds of Christ and the 10 disciples in its petals.  In India is is the Krishna Kamal, representing aspects of the Mahabharata; in Japan, the clock flower, for its dial-like face.

Mine is a conversion story. When the fruit started to drop, I ignored them until there simply were too many. They wore me down. Each morning, I cut one open and scooped the seeds onto my yogurt. I started to look forward to the routine: walking out into the yard to find the fruit that had fallen in the night, then the fruit splitting open like a geode, the bright yellow pulp inside the rough exterior.

When I was in high school, there was a poster of life lessons in the bathroom. One of them: plant zucchini only if you have a lot of friends. Years later, I found myself in need of further instruction. Each day became cloudy with a certainty of passion fruit, an endless purple rain.

Enter the humble cardboard box. Alone, for me, it is a sign of mild shame from ordering online. But filled with surplus passion fruit and left by the sidewalk, it become a neighborhood meeting point! A conversational topic with people you’ve never met! A beacon of positivity and scurvy prevention in a cruel world!

Also, it becomes empty. Which is good, because it is spring again, and the flowers are blooming, and the wind is blowing. Soon a morning will come when the ground will be covered in more passion fruit than I can eat. Let me know if you’d like a few.

Low Info

By: | April 24, 2026

Last post, I wrote about fish crows, a bird of very few words. A pair of them will be flying along and one says, “krokk;” and after a bit, the other says “krokk” and maybe adds another “krokk” or not; and that’s it, end of conversation.

Fish crows are, like all crows, famously social. And society requires communication: no communication, no community. So crows should have a lot to say to each other and the other crows I have around here, American crows, definitely do. But fish crows: “you good?” “yup.”

As I said in that last post, crow researchers know a good bit about what crows are saying and it’s what you’d expect: they warn each other about threats, they update about threats moving closer, they argue over territory, they tell each other about food, they arrange meetings. The little ones ask for food, the big ones tell them to stop asking. But those are American crows and everybody, honest, every American knows how incessant, how noisy they are. So I have a burning question: how can fish crows say all those things crows need to say if they just say a word or two at a time?

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Watch the grass grow

By: | April 22, 2026

On a spring day three years ago, the river climbed out of its banks.

Unseasonable heat and heavy rain had hit the snowpack high in the mountains, sending a winter’s worth of meltwater in a pulse down the tributaries, into the mainstem, and spilling across the valley floor.

Work seemed unlikely under these circumstances, so I visited the flood instead.

In the park, the river wrapped its arms around cottonwood trunks and overtopped the grass in gentle, reaching puddles. I watched the river push up in roiling parabolas against bridge piers, then drove to the thin riffle where it dashed across the highway. I stopped at a friend’s property, where the river filled swales and ran through the garden and lapped just short of the house’s back stairs. “It’s the Everglades,” my friend said, as we stood on the porch surveying all that mirrored water.

Inside, my friend’s teenage daughter showed me into the bathroom, where she was fostering seven kittens. She placed the smallest—a gray fluff of a tabby—on my outstretched forearm. The kitten toddled up to my shoulder, then curled against my neck and fell asleep. She chose me. And the next day, I chose her.

One week later, I was in a car accident so bad it is hard even now to talk or think about.

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