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Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide, Bloomingdale, NY (2026)

07/21/2026

Freshwater sponges? You betcha. This one (photographed yesterday) flourishes in a cool, clear, highly oxygenated stream near where Debbie and I live. Its location will remain a secret because these colonies are all too prone to disturbance. Slosh around in a stream, and you kill them without meaning to. Even a light touch may damage them severely or wipe out an entire colony.

Sponges belong to the animal order Porifera. The name refers to the group's abundance of holes, or pores, through which these colonies of tiny organisms filter food out of their home waters. This particular colony, which Debbie spied first, occupies a patch of rock roughly the size of a half-dollar coin.

Some freshwater sponges, like this one, live where sunlight hardly ever strikes them. This sponge may well belong to the shade-favoring species Spongilla fragilis, but that's not much more than a guess. The resource that informs my casual spongology is Ann Haven Morgan's classic Field Book of Ponds and Streams, published in 1930. One must devote a large portion of one's life to the study of sponges to gain much mastery of them, and I confess I am too much of a generalist. Other freshwater sponge colonies, sometimes in the same stream, glow a brilliant green. These harbor chlorophyll-carrying cells called zoochlorellae inside their own cells. Amazing!

07/17/2026

Flowering time for the lesser purple fringed orchid has arrived in my neck of the woods. Those lucky enough to find this wildflower blooming enjoy a feast of color and texture.

Some take it in, then die---not people, at least not generally, but insects. The flower clusters often harbor enterprising spiders waiting for the arrival of pollinators.

This spider (Enoplognatha ovata, I think, sometimes called the candy-striped spider even though many, like this one, lack candy stripes) looks like an orchestra conductor. With eight nimble legs its goal is to conduct an arriving insect to its mouth. There a quite bite and jolt of venom will orchestrate the captive's demise. If you dislike spiders, don't look this one up in a spider book. A volume on my shelf reports, "The chelicerae of the male are large with long fangs."

This photo and several others taken at the time have sat in my files for five years. Only today did I look at them closely and realize that there was an arachnid in the works. Seconds after taking this photo, the spider captured a fly.

07/17/2026

When I was in kindergarten, or thereabouts, my mother took me out in the yard and showed me the first monarch butterfly caterpillar I ever saw. I still feel the excitement. There before me, a plump, extravagantly striped caterpillar wiggled and chewed, not in some faraway national park, but right in our own weedy and wonderful backyard. My reaction was predictable. I wanted to pick up the caterpillar and hold it and bring it home and keep it as a pet.

My wise schoolteacher mother allowed more than a few wild creatures to come into the house, including several snakes, but on this occasion, she persuaded me to leave the caterpillar where we'd found it. It would be better for the caterpillar, she said. It was delicate. She was right, of course. Since then, though, I've raised plenty of monarch caterpillars and released them after they'd vanished into closets of their own making and emerged as super males and super females capable of flying all the way to Mexico.

In most places, monarchs are seen much less often than they were during my kindergartening. Various troubles plague them, troubles we would do well to grapple with for their sakes as well as ours. Right now they're still here, still eating their way through milkweed leaves during their own early days, and as orange and black adults, still making one of the most amazing journeys on Earth.

07/17/2026

Holy cow! It's been fifteen days since I last posted here. For better (mostly) and for worse, I've been busy. Time to do a little catching up.

The last weeks of June and first of July bring lots of loon activity to photograph at a cautious distance. It helps to have a short boat, a long lens, and birds that are accustomed to canoes and kayaks passing by and not posing any threats. Behaving well around loons this time of year is especially important because mated pairs are often tending nests or feeding and guarding fledglings. Loon chicks might better be called floatlings or, when resting on the backs of parents, easy riders.

Life is hard for these grandest and most charismatic of Adirondack waterbirds. High water can wash eggs out of nests built almost at water level because loons have little ability to move on land. Predators often find nests and pillage. Even after the chicks hatch and began floating and back-riding, they are prone to sudden loon infant death syndrome by mink, raccoon, eagle, and variety of other pitiless carnivorous neighbors.

The loon in this photo was half of a pair that I suspect had lost its nest a few days earlier. It was doing something loons do often: rearing up in a sort of relaxed wheelie. The behavior is called wing-stretching. If loons do this repeatedly and with agitation, you've barged through an invisible line defining their comfort zone. Time to leave the area.

07/02/2026

Scary? Nah. It's just a harmless, beautiful, soft, gentle little red-bellied snake. This reptile is about the size of a pencil. From my experience, and I suppose I've handled more than a hundred, the red-bellied doesn't bite, although I've read that when threatened one may curl its upper lip, perhaps to look tough.

When it's hungry, this snake catches and eats slugs and snails, mostly. It may also snag and swallow earthworms, small frogs, and little salamanders.

A cool thing about the red-bellied snake is that, unlike the similar-sized and equally harmless ring-necked snake, it gives birth to live young. When my daughter found this snake, it was crawling across the floor of our presently horseless horse barn. Tas is experienced with red-bellieds, and she noted that this one was distinctly plump over much of its length. I suspect it's a female, and she's gravid. In herpetological lingo, that means pregnant.

07/02/2026

How much sap can a sapsucker suck? While I don't know the answer to that question, I'm guessing not all that much, especially when they're busy feeding nestlings caterpillars, grubs, and ants.

Here's a mother yellow-bellied sapsucker feeding one of her progeny. We know she's a female because her mate, who also works hard to feed the offspring, has a blazing red throat. The nest hole is in an American beech tree killed by beech bark disease. I wish the disease wasn't sickening beeches in our woods, but I'm glad the sapsucker family was able to make the best of a dead standing trunk.

Do sapsuckers actually suck sap? Yes, or, well, they lap it up with their tongues. These birds drill rows of holes in the bark of living trees, holes that are called sap wells. In the spring, when the birds are most actively drilling, about half their diet consists of sweet sap, cambium, and inner bark. (Hummingbirds visit the sap wells, too.) The other half? Insects, generally, although later in the season and in the fall, the sapsuckers feed a good deal on fruits. Winter? Except for the very rare straggler, the sapsuckers move south to places where sap still oozes.

06/20/2026

Who, me, exaggerate? I don't do it intentionally. However, concede that when I speak about things I'm passionate about, I get carried away sometimes. The more enthusiastic one's companions, the greater the passion. This photo includes my late great friend Sid Whelan and his wife, Patsy. No doubt I was feeling inspired by their keen interest (and the rest of the group's, too) in whatever I was talking about. The subject of discussion? I have no idea. It looks like I'm telling a fish story. My guess, though, is that I was describing the diameter of grand old sugar maples along the trail we were walking.
That trail leads from the campus of the Adirondack Experience: The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX) to a lovely backwoods gem known as Minnow Pond. I'm scheduled to lead a walk to that pond again on Monday, July 13, 2026 at 3 p.m., the walk to be followed by an optional al fresco dinner, and the dinner to be followed by a panel discussion on the profession of Adirondack guiding. Distinguished colleagues on and off the panel will be leading walks that afternoon, too.
If you'd like to join in the fun and adventure, visit the ADKX website and sign up. Pre-registration is part of the deal. The Museum has an entrance fee, and the walks have nominal fees. The optional dinner requires a greater investment, but it promises to be delicious and fun. The evening program is free, although this world-class educational institution is always happy to accept donations.
https://tinyurl.com/2dc8uav3

06/18/2026

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Edward Kanze
While enjoying a morning walk a couple of days ago, the corner of my left eye caught the movement of a monarch butterfly. It flitted along a riverbank and came to rest in a sapling maple.

Then I realized the monarch was not a monarch. It was a viceroy.

While this butterfly looks incredibly like the better-known monarch, it gives away the game with a thin black line that crosses the bolder black lines that divide the wings' orange panels. The viceroy also tends to be smaller than the monarch. This one caught my eye partly because it seemed not like a mini-monarch but one that was smaller than average.

Living things are always changing and evolving, and the same is true of science. I learned long ago that the viceroy butterfly was a Batesian mimic of the monarch. The nineteenth century English naturalist Henry Walter Bates pointed out that some harmless animals sometimes imitate the appearance of harmful ones and in so doing scare off would-be predators. Monarch butterflies are famously distasteful and somewhat toxic. The viceroy seemed to benefit by looking like them. This kind of mimicry is often described as "deceptive."

More recent research, however, suggests that the viceroy butterfly is distasteful, too. So now entomologists, or some of them, see the viceroy as a Mullerian mimic. The German naturalist Franz Muller noted that mimicry is not always deceptive. Two or more distasteful creatures might evolve a nearly identical appearance, creating a sort of multi-species warning system that benefits all in the group. Muller's thesis makes an "honest" mimic out of the viceroy (and I suppose an honest mimic out of the monarch, too).

06/12/2026

Here's another bird from our Monday June 8 climb up Esther Mountain. It suggests a chickadee, but just for a moment. The bill is too long and sharp-pointed, the whole frame is too long (while still being small), the streaking on the flanks is not what you'd expect on a chickadee, and there's no black bib. And the landing gear glows orange! This is a blackpoll warbler.

I had to contort myself to shoot nearly straight up to grab this photo. Meanwhile, the bird had to do contortions of its own to keep an eye on me. We each had a quick look. Then this upper elevation breeding bird of the Adirondacks was gone.

While I think of myself as a writer just hitting his stride, I have published seven books---eight, if you count a concise history I wrote of Fort Massachusetts on Mississippi's Gulf coast. The first, published by Henry Holt and edited by the wonderful Jack Macrae, was a nature and travel book about New Zealand. That one's out of print, a situation I aim to rectify. The next to last was "Adirondack" (SUNY Press), which is both a nature book and a memoir. The latest is "The Nature Of The Place" (Globe Pequot/North Country) about wild things in the Adirondacks. These two titles remain available from discerning (well, so I think) public libraries and booksellers.

Another out of print book of mine, "Wild Life: The Remarkable Lives Of Ordinary Animals," collects playful essays that ran in the newspaper column I wrote for over twenty years for a CT-based newspaper chain. The warm and enthusiastic editor of the book "Wild Life" was Brandt Aymar, the publisher Crown, an imprint of Random House. The first piece, and my favorite, is 'Heroes Of Flight.' It's about two extraordinary long distance fliers, one famous, one obscure. The famous one is Amelia Earhart. The obscure one, obscure unless you're a birdwatcher, is the blackpoll warbler.

What Earhart, who was no slouch, accomplished in 1935, flying from California to Hawaii with the help of a 550-hp Wasp motor, 500 gallons of fuel, thirty-five gallons of oil, two altimeters, three clocks, three compasses, detailed charts, weather forecasts, and store-bought wings, the blackpoll warbler, in the course of its southbound autumn migration mostly over water to Brazil or thereabouts, greatly exceeds in distance and daring. It does so with its home-grown wings, a diet of bugs, a bit of celestial navigation, and plenty of nerve, muscle, heart, and moxie. Every time I see a blackpoll, I think of how far it's come, or how far its parents have come, and how far it has to go.

06/10/2026

Meet the Hudsonian titmouse. So this sprightly northern cousin of the black-capped chickadee, Carolina chickadee, and tufted titmouse was known in the late 19th century. Earlier, John James Audubon called it the Canadian titmouse and, later, the Hudson's Bay titmouse. Today most of us who admire this bird when we find it in northern forests and peatlands and high on mountains call it the boreal chickadee.

I used to enjoy hobnobbing with the boreal chickadee a few miles from our house in a boggy area thick with black spruce and tamarack. You'd hear the sound of a chickadee that didn't sound quite like the usual black-capped. If you investigated, a boreal chickadee sighting would often be your reward.

Lately, I don't find this bird near home. Why? I have no idea. It could be climate change, which seems to be pushing northern birds a little farther northward, or it could be avian flu. It could be both, or neither. It could be my hearing. After a lifetime running horrifically noisy power tools, including back in the day when few of us wore hearing protection, I admit with chagrin that my ears aren't what they used to be.

The best way for me to find boreal chickadees to photograph these days is to climb a mountain. I always haul along a heavy camera and even heavier lens, both in the hope I'll find boreal these birds, which are favorites of mine. More often than not I miss them. But yesterday, Debbie, daughter Tas, and I climbed Esther Mountain. (Tas also climbed Whiteface.) Although my knees are better than Debbie's, her ears are far keener than mine. I reached the car before she did, but she was the one who found the handsome bird you see here.

Ed Kanze, Naturalist and Adirondack Guide

07/21/2026

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