On Phenology

And the paradigm-shifting joys of bee-watching

Sonoran bumblebee (Bombus sonorus) foraging on lavender

“That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.”

Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”

It’s my favorite kind of Saturday, when I only have one appointment in my calendar: a walk in the woods. This is an appointment I always keep. 

I’m on my chosen trail early, while the air beneath the Ponderosa pines is still cool and crisp. Birdsong fills the canopy, and as I plod along the dirt path, I pause now and again to let my Merlin Bird app listen. Chipping sparrow. White-breasted nuthatch. Orange-crowned warbler. I can’t help but smile at these names. My naturalist practice is turning me into a techno-optimist.

At a fork in the trail, I take the branch I’ve yet to travel. I’ve studied the maps and have a new route precisely envisioned – and yet, through a combination of poor signage, my pitiful sense of direction, and a touch of whimsy, this certainly will not be the path I end up on.

In minutes, I gain in elevation until the towering Ponderosas are replaced by Pinyon pines and alligator junipers of modest height. At my feet, extended families of giant agave bugs congregate in their favorite plant, where they pierce the succulents’ skin and drink its sweet syrup. The prickly pears are turning magenta-ripe, and I can’t resist bending over and pinching one to see how much the skin gives. My thumb comes back with a few tiny needles embedded in it, as fine as baby hairs. Through sparse foliage, I admire the views of Granite Mountain, that gorgeous pile of massive boulders over 7,000 feet tall, whose outline is my favorite fixture of the Prescott skyline.

The trail dips down sharply, and I move slowly, wary of the still-tender ankle I rolled on a rock scramble last weekend. I descend into a valley where the vegetation becomes so lush green and dense it narrows the trail to a squeeze. Just as I’m beginning to question if I’m still on any path at all, I’m spit out into a creek. Sure, it’s shallow enough for me to cross without getting my boots wet, but any flowing water is a rare sight in central Arizona. It demands stopping and marveling. In this riparian habitat, I can almost convince myself I’m back in some offshoot of the creek in my Kentucky backyard – water striders make their ripples, mosquitoes buzz shrilly on my sweaty neck, and everything along the banks is wildly overgrown and neon green.

A trail sign on the other side reorients me, and I take the path which veers left along the wash. It’s cooler and ever so slightly humid in the shade of the willows and the cottonwoods, where butterflies and bees are enjoying the last of the late summer blooms. I spot four-o’clocks with their fused petals and profusion of pink anthers, red and blue varieties of morning glories climbing every tree, orange globemallow blooms spiraling around their stems, among countless yellow and purple asters. There are even a few sacred daturas open, enormous and ephemeral trumpet-shaped flowers that look straight out of the tropics and are poisonous from their flowers down to their roots.

There is something large and black and buzzing at the asters just ahead. Could it be? It’s a Xylocopa! I’m so overjoyed, I greet her out loud. Xyclocopa californicus is a massive carpenter bee with an all-black body and dark violet-tinted wings. We don’t have these bees in Kentucky, but even if we did, I would never have stopped to notice that this creature is a bee, not a horsefly or a wasp. For most of my life, the sound of buzzing sent me running away from, not towards its source.

Back in early July, I filmed a video for work about pollinators at a nearby lavender farm, and the diversity of butterflies and bees attracted by this relatively small field was mind-boggling. Before that experience, I had never looked closely enough at a bumblebee to really notice how furry and adorable they are, like little dogs, or known about the diverse world of flies that mimic bees’ appearance and behavior. That was also when I met my first Xylocopa californicus and marveled at her bluish wings, shiny abdomen, and enormous size.

Every day at work now I take time to notice what pollinators are out in our native plant garden and what they’re doing. This activity, paired with what I’ve learned through my readings, has produced countless revelations. I witness the difference between true pollinating and mere nectar robbing. I notice the pollen baskets on the female bees’ hind legs filling up until they look like yellow saddlebags. I see not only their two compound eyes, but the third, fourth, and fifth simple eyes on the top of their heads.

Female California carpenter bee (Xylocopa californicus) nectar robbing on a sage bush

When I say goodbye and turn to leave this Xylocopa to her business, I feel an unexpected longing, a pang in my chest. I won’t know when I will see my last bee of the season, but there will come a day, whether in a few weeks or months, when all the adults have died off or gone into hibernation for the winter. Late summer wildflowers like the scarlet gilia at my side, which was a feast for all sorts of butterflies just a month ago, are now going to fruit. One common buckeye enjoys the last drops of nectar from a furling blossom. Autumn is here.

I’ve never before missed the bees in the winter, because I’ve never before taken delight in them in the summer. In fact, it’s been a long time since I’ve lived in one place long enough to get acquainted with the textures of each season, to track the constant transformations, to miss anything once it passed. For the last seven of my 23 years on this Earth, I’ve always been on the move – I moved away from my parents home in Kentucky at age 16 to attend a boarding school three hours away, I moved out to California for my undergraduate degree but had that experience completely fractured by the pandemic, and I spent my final year of my degree abroad in Paris and Oxford. This mobility and transiency have been enormous privileges that lent my life a certain lightness and perpetual spring. As a kid who moved around a lot before middle school, letting go of attachments and establishing a new version of myself in new places has always come naturally to me.

But this transience put certain modes of understanding and interrogating the world out of my reach. I recently learned the term phenology – the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life. I was astounded that such a field of study exists and that I spent my entire undergraduate degree ignorant of it, for what could be more important than studying the patterns and rhythms of change, the very substance of life? Yet of 686 the courses in biology offered at my alma mater this year, not a single one contains “phenology” in its description.

Phenology is a slow science, not suited for people in a hurry. You can’t do it without hunkering down and keeping an eye on things – not for a few weeks or months, but for the long haul. To know when the first flowers bloom and when the first birds return and when the first queen bees emerge from hibernation year after year, one must be patient and ever vigilant.

I was slated to return to France, now actually, in order to teach English at a high school in Montpellier this school year. Back in June, I thought I was moving out to Arizona only for a summer internship, another ten weeks of novelty before moving onto the next place, the next life. But once I settled in here, I rapidly became connected with this place due to the nature of my work and the natural history practice it brought into my daily life. I despaired at the prospect of never seeing these landscapes and ecosystems in autumn, winter, and spring. It rapidly became unthinkable to me. Luckily, for the first time in so many years of my life, I did not have to leave. I did not have to move so quickly onto the next thing.

When I first told my boss I wanted to stay here and keep working at our humble non-profit, he didn’t believe me. Most people still think I’m insane for choosing arid, small-town central Arizona over a metropole on the French Riviera. But most people haven’t lived the way I have lived thus far in my 20s. I don’t need anyone to understand or endorse my choice to stay in this place I have no connection to other than this overwhelming love and curiosity for the landscape – that’s not why I’ve tried to articulate some of what led me to this choice. I’ve tried so that anyone who reads this far may feel a little bit more open to the unexpected turns life takes and a little more empowered to embrace them with open arms.

I’m not saying I’m going to live out the rest of my days in central Arizona. If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m always changing my mind and surprising myself. But I’ve rarely felt more optimistic about life than I do now, knowing that I can stay here for a while and keep an eye on things, the bees and the flowers and the birds, all the changes big and small, for one years’ cycle and perhaps many more.

Somewhere in this essay, I had it in my mind that I would weave in a review of Dancing with Bees: A journey back to nature by Brigit Strawbridge Howard. Although I’ve clearly failed at that move and instead made this all about me, you can still see that the book did its work on me – I am on a journey back to nature, and I can’t stop pausing to marvel at the bees! That is a testament to its merit.

Howard’s essay collection is an instructive introduction to the vibrant, intricate, chronically over-looked world of solitary bees, as well as an inspiring memoir that captures how studying bees brought the entire natural world back into focus for her. Her adoration for bees is palpable and positively contagious, and all that I’ve learned from her expertise have enriched my own encounters with bees and the whole of nature.

The most heartbreaking yet urgent essay in the collection, the one I can’t get out of my head, begins with Howard spotting a Hairy-footed Flower bee out foraging on her snowdrops in February. This is a highly unusual sight, but Howard’s initial delight at the appearance of this beloved bee soon becomes a sinking feeling in her gut. This bee was tricked into emerging from hibernation by an unusual winter spike in temperature – the flowers she usually feeds on are not in bloom yet, and the chance she will survive the coming frosts is very slim.

As the globe continues to warm, the work of phenologists will only become more relevant and more devastating in its findings – erratic weather and changing temperatures are disrupting the cues that tell bees when to emerge from hibernation and flowers when to bloom. Species that depend on each other, like these flowering plants and their pollinators, are having their life cycles thrown out of sync, to detrimental effects for both parties. This phenomenon is known as phenological mismatch.

But there is a silver lining – we can all help out the native bees who are adversely affected by phenological shift in very direct and simple ways. By creating gardens with flowers that bloom at different times throughout the year all year long, with a range of shapes, sizes, and colors, we can create sanctuaries for native bees, who are crafty, resourceful, and as eager as we are to adapt to a changing world. Even just one flowering plant on a windowsill or an open patch of dirt can help bees find food and a space to nest. In a few weeks when I move into a more long-term housing arrangement with a yard, I’m looking forward to creating a space for bees there, with patches of dirt for ground nesters and a wood pile for wood-nesters, interspersed among an array of flowering plants.

Without keeping an eye on things, we will never know if the species we share this world with are having a fair shot at fulfilling their life cycles. Even if we can’t stop the changes, we owe it to the creatures we share this planet with to bear witness to how they are being affected and find new ways we can support them. If we aren’t taking notice of the “insignificant” changes to native bee populations, we will be blindsided by their catastrophic cascading effects, when our agriculture is facing mass failure due to disruptions in the life cycles of our most effective pollinators.

With more than 1300 native bee species, Arizona no longer feels like a haphazard, temporary rest stop in my journey – it feels like where I am meant to be for the time being. Though I will miss the bees in the cold winter months, I am so grateful for the enchantment that bee-watching has brought to my summer. In the meantime, I’ll be eagerly making preparations for their return come spring.

Male Sunflower bee (genus Diadasia) sleeping in a tansyaster