The Selfheal flower makes sweet nectar and this attractive color to lure insects into her boudoir, where she powders them with pollen and hopes they will deliver it to a different Selfheal flower where this pollen will inseminate that flower and make fruit with fertile seeds.
The Bee collects pollen because its a super fantastic food packed with carbs, fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals. (And probably all sorts of phytonutrients that do magical things too, this is a powerful medicinal plant) She picks it up and puts it in her leg baskets so she can carry lots home in one foraging foray, just like I do when I fill my basket with mushrooms in the fall.
The Crab Spider is a hunter. She finds sexy flowers and hides in them, waiting for a pollinator to come by and while they are distracted by the bounty of pollen she jumps out and delivers a Vampire bite like this and sucks the life juices right out of them. I bet she eats the pollen baskets as desert.
Lady Crab Spiders are amazing at camouflaging. I actually took several photos of this bee before I saw the spider and I was actually out in the meadow looking specifically for Crab Spiders so I could tell you this story! I saw her as an anomalous red striped white flower on the purple flowers and my brain accepted that as normal. The nifty thing is that these spiders are…. What’s the word for when you can presto-chango your colors to blend in with the environment? Like Chameleons and Octopuses? Later I was musing about it, I thought it was weird that she would even try to hide in a purple flower because she can be white and yellow but not purple. Since yellow is the opposite of purple, maybe being as unyellow as she can makes sense. I mean, I saw her but I couldn’t see her.
Selfheal, Goldenrod Crab Spider & Common Eastern Bumble Bee
Male Crab Spiders are different, they don’t do any of that stuff. They can be 50x smaller than females. The boys don’t hunt, it takes too much patience, instead he jumps from flower to flower looking for girls and eats pollen and nectar as he goes. This is not the only animal I can think of where the boys are vegetarian and the girls are vampires. It takes a lot of protein to make eggs.
June’s full moon is the Strawberry Moon because that’s the one that wakes up the Wild Strawberries who are smaller, slyer and sweeter than Market Strawberries.
Wild Strawberries
I have an inconsistent relationship with Fairy Rings, those very green, nitrogen rich patches of lawn where Mushrooms grow in circles around vortexes, places where it’s dangerously easy to slip through to other realities. I know that the superstitions like wearing your hat backwards to protect you from inter-fairy-ring-soul-transmission are just rumors started by the fairies hoping to trick us into entering the faery realm so I usually manage to keep a safe distance.
The thing is, some years I take extra care to stay on the safe side of the rings, and some years I can’t help but head right inside as if pulled by a magnetic attraction that blocks my cautious thinking. When you go through a fairy ring its hard to know what’s changed. Humans are very adaptable. We accept our situations, and often don’t notice transcendental change.
Today the Wild Strawberries were growing inside a fairy ring and I tried to photograph them but they kept disappearing. They were delicious.
There’s been lots of talk this month at the Biophilium about control, planning, and intention vs wandering, trusting and going with the flow in the wild and in the studio. It’s hinged on questions of self identity, integrity and confidence. As an exhausted adventurer recovering from Spring migration, I’m struggling to hold on to control of my decisions, like the one to stay out of fairy rings, but the flow is taking me to nice spontaneous experiences like the sweetness of special Strawberries, so I’m deciding to trust myself to make the most of what ever shenanigans I find myself in.
Fairy Ring Mushroom Gills
This is the Fairy Ring Mushroom that grows in my lawn; the one that cuddles with the Wild Strawberries. It’s been there for years and fruits for months every summer. They are good to eat because they TASTE LIKE MAPLE SYRUP!! They are relatively easy to learn to identify, partly because their stems are so robust that it’s difficult to break them with your hands.
You can find Fairy Rings growing in lawns even when they are not fruiting by noticing how the grass grows. Most plants can’t access the nitrogen that makes up most of the atmosphere, and need another organism to ‘fix’ it, so they can use it to grow. The Fungi grow in roundish patches in the lawn expanding every year. The new growth around the outside edge is where the Fungus is digesting dead plant matter under ground and releasing loads of nitrogen into the soil. The grass around the outer edge picks up this nitrogen and grows faster, bushier and more healthily than the rest of the lawn. Lawn care cult leaders call this a ‘symptom of Fairy Ring disease’, but it’s a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
Grow trees not grass.
While planning a birding route on Gmaps I found these massive Fungi growing in an island sports field. (Compare with the size of the Baseball diamond). What I like so much about this is that we can’t see the Fungi, but we can see what they are doing to the grass, and so we know exactly where, how big and what shapes they are.
Fairy Rings as seen from space
The Fungi are growing in the soil around the grass roots. Each individual mycelial mass is expanding radially as it grows over the years. The outer ring of the mycelium is supplying more nitrogen to the grass and making it greener.
You can see where individual Fungi bumped into each other and fused together and became one individual. I mean. It looks to me like that’s what’s happening. If they were simply overlapping, or interlapping, weaving themselves through each other, sharing space but staying separate unique entities, wouldn’t we see the luscious green rings as ven diagrams as I do with fruiting fairy rings of different species that overlap and share territory?
I could be wrong. Maybe something different is happening where they connect. Maybe they are not making love. (Mushrooms have sex by fusing together, swapping DNA and staying connected forever) Maybe they are doing battle. Fighting for territory and resources, and where the battle is happening they are too stressed to do what ever grass enriching magic is happening along the rest of their boundaries.
On second thought, when one Fungal entity bumps into another they together would digest the nutrients in the fresh dead grass at the boundary between them and then have no new fresh food to turn to nitrogen. This would trigger fruiting, so I’d have to go back in the fall to see if mushrooms grow in a ven diagram showing distinct overlapping individuals or if they fruit only around the outside border as a new unified being.
Whatever you are reading put it down and read this.
Nature’s Best Hope is a book of DIY conservation. It explains why and how we should plant trees on our lawns and which trees to choose for maximum benefit to wildlife. It explains the mechanics of ecology in ways that are crystal clear, easy to understand and very motivating.
The book presents a history of our relationship to wildness and nature and talks about how and why the aesthetic of our landscaping of private land is the way it is. Tallamy suggests that the current aesthetic of suburban front yards is a status symbol that says “I have the money and time to manicure and weed my lawn” and is a symbol of community solidarity and a message that we care about our property and look after it. The problem is that the aesthetic is outdated and actually does an enormous amount of damage to the land and to wildlife we are trying to signal that we care about. He suggests ways to update that culture so our aesthetic supports our values.
His ideas of how to make forests instead of lawns would save, money, time, and fuel and provide productive biomass, habitat and take carbon from the atmosphere… Really his ideas would solve a lot of our problems. If you own land you must read this book. It will guide you to make a deeper more loving relationship to your land and your neighborhood. If you are feeling nervous about climate change, or loss of biodiversity, read this book. It will give you hope and ideas about how you can be a positive influence in the world.
This book is a description of EO’s love of biological systems.
He was considered the greatest biologist alive until he died in 2022. His insights are deeply informed by biology and are also a bit mystical. He articulates the magic of life in the language of science and puts into words many passions that I share. This book explores the innate human urges to observe and learn about wildlife and asks ‘Is it possible for humanity to love life enough to save it?’ He describes his own Biophilia as the awe he feels while observing and learning about non-human organisms and how indulging in these practices increases his appreciation of all life. He places the value of wildlife within a context of culture and human survival. He describes the elegance of art and science as part of human evolution.
I want to memorize every sentence in The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. It’s a super book about the behavior of trees and how this behavior makes a complicated ecology that is a forest.
It explains how trees live in connection with their kin and describes the relationships between trees and other organisms. It illustrates how a forest functions as a living system. It talks about how they perceive the world and how they communicate. This book is written by a German forester turned conservation ecologist and is required reading for anyone interested in ecology, wildlife or plants to be able to participate in conversations on contemporary ecology. It’s also just a nice read.
He has written several similar books, this is the best one, but The Secret Wisdom of Nature is also a very good look at the interconnectedness of a forest.
Cowbirds are like upside down Grackles: Blackbirds with rainbow iridescence, but a Cowbird’s rainbow runs in the other direction, from tail to head. His Squeek is Grackley but sounds more like a ‘glug, glug, squeee’ than ‘Creek, Creek, squeeeeeek, and Cowbird voices are much squeekier.
These guys are famous. They used to be called Buffalo Birds because they ate the insects that live on Buffalo and were part of the migrating buffalo ecology that moved around the content but we killed all the Buffalo. (There were 60 000 000 of them and colonizers did it on purpose to hurt native people) The Buffalo were replaced by domestic Cows and the Cowbirds adapted.
Part of the story is that the birds had to keep moving to keep up with the Buffalo so they stopped nesting. There just wasn’t enough time to make a nest, lay, brood and raise fledglings before the Buffalo wandered off, so they laid their eggs in other birds’ nests and left them to be raised by strangers.
It’s not exactly true, but it’s a good story. The thing is that Cowbirds don’t abandon their babies. The part where they don’t ever make their own nests is true, they always lay their eggs in some other bird’s nest and often in several other birds’ nests like the Easter bunny does. Sometimes the host is a bigger bird, sometimes a much smaller bird and the unconsenting adoptive parent is stuck feeding a baby who might quickly grow up to be much bigger than them and who will probably eject the other babies from the nest. But Cowbirds don’t do it because they have to go, they stick around.
This behavior is called brood parasitism and there are people who don’t like it. If you find a nest containing the egg of a brood parasite your eye might be able to recognize it. The host bird might not, but then again she probably knows exactly what’s going on so just leave them all alone. If you remove the Cowbirds’s eggs Mrs. Cowbird will notice when she comes to check on them. If her eggs are gone but the host’s remain, she will remove/break the other eggs. (What the heck are you doing looking in nests anyway?)
This behavior is evolutionarily advantageous to Cowbirds because it is usually not a human who does the eviction, it’s usually a host parent who notices and removes the foreign egg, but a mother Warbler who is able to see the difference between the eggs and who is inspired to respond by removing the Cowbird egg will not pass these traits on to her offspring because those offspring will not hatch, having been broken by the Cowbird. So if you remove the Cowbird egg to protect the host you actually ensure that the other eggs will also die. What will likely happen next is both sets of parents will start laying eggs again, which is very energy expensive. They will likely also build a new nest in a new site because this location was a failure. So much work to replace a perfectly good nest that you sabotaged. Vigilanti Cowbird egg thieves don’t help the host, they hurt them more.
Do we have the authority to decide what species lives and dies? The choice of a Robin over a Cowbird is based on human values: the idea that no one should ever have to work to support someone else’s kids. Wait, that’s what human’s believe? That’s a pretty low down value. To let this value drive you to kill things is disgraceful. Things exist in fabulous symbiosis. Ecology is magical clockwork. If you take out the cogs that you don’t like the magic will stop ticking.
The Cowbird story continues: baby Cowbird hatches and grows up in a nest of birds that look, sound, smell and behave totally different. It must be weird. But they are not cut off from Cowbird culture. When they are big enough to fly, but still living in the nest they wake up in the middle of the night. The rest of the family is sleeping. There is the sound of Cowbirds singing off in the distance. The adolescent Cowbird sneaks off to make Cowbird friends and play Cowbird games and learn Cowbird things and then climbs back into the nest before any one else wakes up.
The Biophilium 