Along the luminous seam of surf and sand, a heron reads the tide’s slow grammar, patience embodied, until water yields a silver secret and morning becomes ceremony.
We walk the long seam where the Atlantic writes its restless script, and our beachcombing becomes a study in attention. The shore’s edge—where foam loosens shells from sand and the wind arranges salt on the tongue—draws other walkers too: grey herons, patient and arrow-straight, patrolling the surf line as if reading a language older than tides. They halt us without trying. We stand, quieted, while they work the boundary between water and land, between hunger and satisfaction.
I pack an iPhone sometimes for beachcombing as a lightweight alternative to SLRs. This post features iPhone photographs.
Along this narrow world of sand and surf, herons keep two distinct manners. Some linger near anglers, learning the thrift of handouts and the craft of appearing inevitable. Others refuse that bargain and hunt on their own, staking the wash with a slowness that is not delay but method. These independent operators move along the ocean’s margin: high enough to let the breakers fold ahead of them, low enough that their long legs stir the small lives hidden in the cross-hatching currents. To follow one with the eye is to adopt a different clock. Sandpipers skitter and dash; the heron lengthens time.
A perfect place to stalk the surf
At first the bird seems merely spellbound by light on water. Then a shift: a narrow cant of the head, the smallest realignment of the eye to the glare. The neck—serpentine and stored with intention—uncoils quick as a strike, and the bill cleaves the surface. The world either yields or it doesn’t. Often it doesn’t. When it does, the beak lifts an impossibly large, glinting fish, as if the ocean had lent out a secret.
Success!!
What follows is ceremony. The heron stands and calibrates, turning the silver length with almost invisible nods until head and prize agree. A sharp jerk aligns the fish with beak and gullet; the upper throat swells, accepting the whole, unchewed. Two more pulses and the catch is a memory traveling inward. It is an astonishment every time, not because we do not understand what is happening but because we do, and still it exceeds us.
We carry a smart phone on these morning circuits, a slim stand-in for heavier glass, enough to witness without intruding. Backlit by the early sun, the herons are cut from bronze and shadow, working the luminous edge while the day composes itself behind them. In the afternoons we meet fewer of the solitary hunters when the strand belongs more to the opportunists near the thinning knots of anglers. Why the shift, we cannot say. The ocean has its schedule; so, it seems, do its readers.
If we keep our distance, we are permitted to watch. Cross a line we don’t perceive and the bird will rise all at once, the long body unfolding, the voice a rasping scold torn from the throat of reed beds and marsh dawns; but, grant it enough space, and the heron returns us to the lesson it keeps teaching: that patience is a kind of movement; that the boundary of things is where change is clearest; that the most astonishing acts require the courage to do very little, very well, for a long time.
We come to linger where the waves erase our tracks, apprenticed to that slow grammar, trying to learn the tide’s careful verbs before the light turns and the day becomes something else—a different text, the same shore, the heron already a thin signature against the horizon.
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Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills
Colored lights of our skies are lifelong triggers for the imagination. On any moonless, crystal night—far from the town-glow—three thousand or so stars and the wandering planets scatter across the dark. We read them instinctively, stitching patterns the way our ancestors did, turning a brilliant chaos into stories. Along the ecliptic, twelve of those patterns became the constellations, a starry calendar by which careful observers told the seasons. When Cancer, the Crab rides high, winter has the northern hemisphere in its grip
Click photograph for my OnLine Galleries. Clicking the other photographs in this post will yield a larger image.
On the night of January 20–21, 2019, a full moon climbed from the horizon and slid into Earth’s shadow, transforming a familiar face into a copper coin. As it rose, that low-horizon “larger” moon—an illusion born of context—felt close enough to pocket. Hours later, the moon darkened to a dull copper color and appeared to float amid Cancer’s dim stars.
I set up a Canon DSLR on a tripod with a 24mm f/1.4 lens, pushed the ISO to 3200, and shortened the exposure to 1.3 seconds—a compromise between freezing star points and preserving the feel of the sky. The moon, of course, was overexposed in that wide frame; later, I overlaid a correctly exposed moon (from a telephoto shot later in the night) at its true apparent size to match the scene as the eye saw it. Is it the most “technical” astrophotograph of the eclipse? No. But it is faithful to the moment I witnessed and good enough to carry the story forward.
The Moon on the Crab’s back
Cancer is never an easy connect-the-dots. Its stars are modest, more suggestion than signature. Look just to the side of the moon’s position that night and you come to Delta Cancri, the orange giant nicknamed the Southern Donkey. Draw a mental line down and slightly right to the faint pair Nu and Gamma Cancri—white stars that only masquerade as twins. They are not physically bound, merely near each other by line of sight: Nu about 390 light-years away, Gamma at 181. Scatter in Alpha and Beta off the Crab’s back and the outline becomes more plausible, the way a minimal sketch becomes a creature once the eye knows what to look for.
The Beehive
Between Nu and Gamma, edged closer to the moon, lies the real prize: the Beehive Cluster—also known as Praesepe or M44. Even with modest binoculars, Praesepe explodes into a field of delicate sparks, a thousand stars loosely wrapped into a hive. Galileo famously turned his early telescope on this cloud and teased forty separate points from the mist; modern optics reveal a populous neighborhood of stellar siblings in shades from ice-blue to ember-red. It is one of those sights that converts a casual sky-gazer into a repeat offender.
Total Lunar Eclipse and Surrounding Sky with labels for primary element of the Cancer constellation
Later in the night I lifted the telephoto—70–300mm at 300mm, ISO 3200, 3.2 seconds—and let the moon fill more of the frame. At totality, the light thinned to a clay-jar red as Earth’s atmosphere bent sunlight around the planet and into its shadow. The effect is both simple and profound: every sunset on Earth happening at once, projected onto the moon’s face. Craters and maria softened into relief, and the globe stopped being a flat disk and became a round, ancient body again. Even without Delta, Gamma, Nu, and the Beehive in that tighter field, the sense of placement remained; I knew the Crab’s back was there in the dark, and that the moon had joined it—just for an hour—as a guest at the manger.
“Beehive” with Total Lunar Eclipse with labels for primary elements of Cancer Constellation
The Total Eclipse
What I love most about an eclipse is its pace. Nothing is impatient: the bite appears, the light drains, the color warms, and the world around you changes temperament. As the bright glare wanes, neighborhood sounds recalibrate—the hush between footfalls, the small click of a door, even the steadying breath you didn’t know you were holding. A total lunar eclipse is an astronomy lesson that behaves like a poem; it teaches by arranging time and light until awe and understanding meet.
And then, quietly, it returns what it borrowed. A thin wedge of white blooms at one edge, a rehearsal for dawn. Copper gives way to pearl, and the old moon looks new again, just higher and smaller against the deepening night. Cancer recedes into suggestion; Praesepe goes back to being a faint cloud to the unaided eye. The camera is packed away, the tripod shoulders its own shadow, and you keep the best exposure of the night where it can’t be corrupted: in memory.
If you have binoculars, mark Cancer on a winter chart and step outside when the sky is clear. Find Delta, sweep toward the dim pair of Nu and Gamma, and then rest your gaze on that hazy patch between them. Bring a friend into the circle and let the cluster resolve, star by star, into something alive with depth. It will not be the last time you look for it. And if you’re lucky enough, as we were that January, the moon will pass nearby, reminding you that even the most familiar companion can be made strange and beautiful by the turn of a shadow.
The sky is a storybook, yes—but also an instrument. Nights like this tune both.
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From milkweed egg to striped caterpillar, jade chrysalis, and fluttering monarch, witness metamorphosis, migration, and our role in protecting Danaus plexippus across North America today.
On the underside of a milkweed leaf, the world begins small enough to miss unless you kneel and look closely. In this first photograph the newborn is still a whisper of life, a pale pinhead egg collapsed into a glistening scrap, the tiny caterpillar beside it like a gray comma punctuating the green. It has just eaten the soft shell that cradled it—its first meal, its first thrift. The leaf’s pale roads of veins radiate around the hatchling; within that simple map lies all the geography it needs.
By the second photograph appetite has taken its proper throne. These pilgrims wear a uniform of warning: bands of yellow, black, and white—stripes as bright as hazard tape, a heraldic banner advertising the bitterness borrowed from milkweed. Each bite draws down defensive latex; yet the caterpillars feed undeterred, pausing to snip the leaf’s veins to quiet the flow. Their black, threadlike “tentacles” nod as they travel, and their peppery pellets—frass—collect like midnight hail. Five times they will outgrow themselves, shrugging off skins to reveal wider, hungrier versions within. The room is strewn with green rib and ragged edges; the air has the gentle smell of cut stems. All the while, milkweed’s poisons, the cardenolides, pass into growing bodies and become their bodyguard.
At last a hush. A final meal, a purposeful wander. The caterpillar chooses a high eave of the world—a stem, a stick, the corner of your rearing tent—and hooks itself into a downward J. Within hours the skin splits like a soft zipper; the striped creature pours itself out of itself and seals into a smooth chrysalis.
Here, the caterpillar has attached itself to a silk pad from which it hangs. Underneath the skin, the caterpillar is transforming to the chrysalis. In these photographs the silk pad and chrysalis attachment from a previous transformation are in the foreground.Macro of the Monarch butterfly chrysalis. The black stalk attached to the silk pad is call a cremaster.
The following photograph and video catch the moments into becoming: the jade lantern has become transparent, darkening, its gold studs glinting like constellation points, and through the thinning walls the folded wings show, orange smoldering under smoke. Inside, old tissues have dissolved into a living broth; imaginal discs—tiny blueprints carried since the egg—have flowered into legs, eyes, and flight. To call it “metamorphosis” is correct; to call it mystery is truer.
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When the case opens the butterfly backs into the bright. It clings while the crumpled wings fill and flatten, hemolymph pumping life into every cell. In the next image the adult drinks from a petunia trumpet, a jeweled ember with white-spotted hems. The monarch—Danaus plexippus—tests the wind with new, purposeful wings. Its scientific name nods to ancient stories: Danaus after the Greek mythic king of Argos, a father who fled with his fifty daughters across the sea; plexippus for Plexippus, a figure of the same old tales—his name carried forward into this wanderer of the sky. The English name “monarch” is said to honor both its regal size and domain, and, some say, the orange-and-black of William of Orange. Kings and myths gathered like cloak and scepter around a creature that weighs less than a paperclip.
No butterfly has entered human life more completely. Schoolchildren cradle jars of milkweed sprigs and tape handwritten labels to chrysalides lined like seed pearls along a classroom window. Taggers kneel in September light, add a tiny disc to a wing, and write down time and place so the journey south can be traced. In the mountains of Mexico, where oyamel firs hold winter like a secret, people fold the monarch’s return into the Days of the Dead, believing that souls ride home on those wafers of flame. Gardeners tuck swamp milkweed into narrow beds and call their yards “waystations.” Photographers, such as myself, record the stories that happen leaf by leaf.
In early July a Monarch caterpillar revels in milkweed flowers.
Yet our touch is not simple. Fields simplified by herbicides have shaved milkweed from fencerows; tidy mowing removes nectar from roadsides in the tender weeks of migration; captive rearing in vast numbers, though done with reverence, may carry unintended risks of disease and weakened orientation. The monarch asks us to enlarge our sense of home beyond the fence: to let patches of milkweed lift their pale crowns in rough corners; to choose late-blooming asters and goldenrod; to keep a few ditches shaggy until the travelers pass. Conservation, like metamorphosis, is work that happens inside ordinary days.
Watch the cycle again in my images—egg to appetite, appetite to stillness, stillness to wing—and hear what it whispers in the steady voice of milkweed leaves and soft fall air. Rachel Carson wrote that “those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Here beauty wears stripes and beads of gold, sips from garden petals, and threads a continent with its frail insistence. The monarch’s life is a ribbon we can follow with our eyes and, if we are willing, with our hands—gentle hands that leave room for milkweed to rise, for caterpillars to feed, for a chrysalis to darken and a window to fill, one bright morning, with wings.
On a personal note, this season was a success. Monarchs visited our milkweed patch several times allowing me to save/harvest nineteen eggs/caterpillars and raise them until release.
Selected references
Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. (Reissued: HarperCollins, 1998; Open Road Media e-book, 2011.) The quoted passage (“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth…”) appears early in the book; the Open Road edition places it on p. 41.
Wikipedia contributors. “Monarch butterfly — Etymology and taxonomy.” (useful overview with primary citations).
Oberhauser, K. S., and M. J. Solensky, eds. The Monarch Butterfly: Biology and Conservation. Cornell University Press, 2004.
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Discover the Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), a wetland shrub of spherical blooms, sustaining pollinators, birds, and waterfowl while reminding us of life’s enduring cycles
In the quiet wetlands of late summer, when cattails lift their brown torches above the reeds and dragonflies skim the still water, there is a shrub that speaks in spheres. Its language is not the pointed spear of grass or the broad fan of lily pads, but the perfect symmetry of globes—round, intricate, and startling in their precision. This is the Buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis, a native of swamps, pond margins, and the soft, yielding soils where water shapes the land.
At first glance, its clusters might be mistaken for something fashioned by human hands: spiky balls arrayed along slender stems, each one a small planet bristling with tiny cells. Only in memory can we recall their summer incarnation, when each ball was a constellation of snowy blossoms, white tubular flowers extending like delicate pins from a spherical center. Bees and butterflies crowded them then, drunk on nectar, wings glinting in the sun. Hummingbirds darted in as though drawn by an unseen magnet, their beaks fitting perfectly into the narrow blossoms, a partnership written long ago in the shared script of evolution.
Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) at Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Now, in August’s waning light, those blossoms have folded back into seed, transforming into the russet orbs captured in the photograph. What was once nectar is now promise—food for ducks, shorebirds, and the small lives that depend on wetlands for sustenance. In the hands of buttonbush, time itself is circular. Flower becomes fruit, fruit becomes seed, seed becomes shrub, and the cycle spins quietly on, just as the spheres themselves suggest: complete, unbroken, eternal.
A Wetland Companion
Buttonbush is rarely alone. It thrives where cattails whisper, where pickerelweed thrusts up spikes of purple bloom, where the air holds the scent of waterlogged earth. Its roots grip the muck at the edges of ponds and rivers, holding soil against the restless tug of currents. In doing so, it becomes part of the unseen architecture that holds wetlands together, slowing erosion, filtering water, providing shelter for fish in the shade of its stems.
Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) at Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
This shrub, unassuming in stature, is an engineer of stability. It creates thickets where red-winged blackbirds perch, where frogs crouch in shade, where turtles bask on half-submerged branches. The wetlands of North America would be poorer without its presence, for it provides not just beauty but the scaffolding upon which entire communities of life depend.
The Human Thread
To the human eye, the buttonbush’s spherical blooms are so striking that they demand metaphor. Some have called them pincushions, others tiny planets, others fireworks arrested in mid-burst. Native American peoples, however, looked beyond metaphor to medicine. The bark and roots were used in remedies for ailments ranging from headaches to fevers, though with caution, for the plant holds mild toxicity when consumed raw. It is a reminder that many gifts of the natural world are edged with danger, and that wisdom lies in balance.
Today, gardeners and conservationists plant buttonbush intentionally. It is welcomed into rain gardens, where its thirst for moisture makes it a perfect ally for absorbing stormwater. It is used in wetland restoration projects, where its deep roots anchor new life. And it is cherished by those who walk the edges of ponds and discover in its round blossoms a geometry that feels both wild and deliberate, a gift of design from the living earth.
Fourth of July, 2019, Stewart Park
The Sphere as Symbol
Rachel Carson once wrote that in nature, “nothing exists alone.” The buttonbush embodies this truth with clarity. Its spheres are invitations, junctions where plant and pollinator meet, where flower and bird share a moment of mutual necessity. They are offerings to the eye as well, challenging us to see patterns where we might otherwise see only happenstance.
Standing before a buttonbush in bloom, one feels an almost childlike wonder: how could such symmetry arise unbidden from soil and sunlight? Yet this is the miracle of evolution, that order may spring from chance, that beauty may serve survival, that what pleases our senses also sustains life.
A Closing Reflection
In the wetlands, where water mirrors the sky, the buttonbush offers its own reflection of completeness. Its seed heads persist through autumn and winter, small orbs clinging even when leaves fall, reminders that the cycles of life turn steadily beneath the stillness.
To linger with buttonbush is to be reminded of nature’s quiet insistence on wholeness. It speaks in forms: round, repeating, enduring. To walk away from it is to carry a sense of connection, to know that in the pattern of its blooms we glimpse a truth both humble and profound—that life is not a line but a circle, and in every turning there is renewal.
For Further Reading
USDA NRCS. Plant Guide: Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis L.). United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. Available online: https://plants.usda.gov – Provides detailed information on identification, habitat, and ecological role.
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Cephalanthus occidentalis (Common Buttonbush). Native Plant Information Network. Available online: https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=ceoc2 – Covers botanical features, bloom time, wildlife value, and landscape use.
Dirr, Michael A. Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses. 6th Edition. Stipes Publishing, 2009. – Authoritative horticultural reference on Buttonbush and other shrubs.
Peterson, Roger Tory, and Margaret McKenny. A Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-central North America. Houghton Mifflin, 1968. – Classic field guide covering buttonbush’s wetland habitat.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962. – Source of the quoted passage: “In nature nothing exists alone.” (Chapter 2, “The Obligation to Endure”).
Moerman, Daniel E. Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press, 1998. – Comprehensive reference documenting traditional medicinal uses of Buttonbush among Native American peoples.
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At Ashford Castle, swans glide on the Cong River’s glassy waters, weaving together myth, history, and cinema in a timeless reflection of Ireland’s enduring spirit.
Headed south from Cong Village, past the venerable Cong Abbey then Saint Mary’s Church of Ireland, the road bends into the Ashford Castle estate. Time seems to shift here. The stonework of the abbey lingers in memory, only to give way to manicured parkland, ancient trees, and the shimmer of water. The road itself, aptly named Ashford Castle, carries the traveler to a place where history, nature, and imagination meet.
I do not recall passing a guard box on my first visit, though one now stands firmly on the roadside, manned and proper, as though the estate were never meant to be entered without ceremony. In truth, Ashford Castle has always carried the air of a threshold—between village and wild, past and present, myth and reality.
Soon the road brings one to the banks of the Cong River. Here the water widens, flowing calm and sure, and across it rises the battlemented silhouette of Ashford Castle itself. Its towers, turrets, and stony walls seem to grow from the riverbank like something inevitable, a fortress transformed into elegance. The castle’s mirrored reflection on the water doubles the grandeur, as though the real and imagined castle exist side by side.
It is no wonder filmmakers found inspiration here. Scenes from the classic 1952 film The Quiet Man—the tale of Sean Thornton, played by John Wayne, and the fiery Mary Kate Danaher, embodied by Maureen O’Hara—were shot on the far bank of this very river. To watch them walking by these waters is to see Ashford Castle woven into Hollywood’s Irish dreamscape, a backdrop both romantic and enduring.
Yet long before cinema, the river was already a stage. The Cong River is a natural marvel. It emerges from the same Carboniferous limestone that shapes the Burren of County Clare—an austere landscape of limestone pavements etched with fossils and caves, where rare alpine and Mediterranean plants thrive among ancient tombs. Through fissures in this ancient bedrock, the waters of Lough Mask find their way underground before rising again at Cong. This subterranean journey, through stone filters laid down some 350 million years ago, leaves the water clarified, luminous, and cold. By the time it slides past Ashford Castle, it has the purity of glass.
It is in this clarity while walking the opposite bank on a different morning I found a parent swan and its cygnet feeding. The adult glided, immaculate, its long neck bowed as drops of river fell from its beak. At its side, the cygnet paddled with earnest strokes, gray down still clinging, a fragile shadow of what it would one day become. Together they traced a quiet path across the water, ripples fanning behind them.
Few images so perfectly match their setting: a medieval castle, guardian of centuries, reflected in the same waters where these swans carried on their timeless rhythm of nurture and growth. It was as if the river itself composed the scene—a blending of stone, water, bird, and sky that belonged nowhere else but here.
The swan has long been a symbol in Irish lore. The Children of Lir, cursed to live as swans for nine hundred years, are among the most haunting figures of Celtic mythology. To see the white bird with its offspring before Ashford Castle was to glimpse that myth breathing still, alive on the Cong River.
Photographers know the difficulty of capturing water and stone without losing the life between them. On that morning, however, the river gave freely—its surface alternately smooth as glass and dappled with breeze. Stones at the water’s edge appeared like stepping-stones into history. Each frame revealed another face of the estate: the wide reach of the Cong, the castle framed by trees, the play of cloud shadows across the current.
The castle itself, though reshaped as a luxury retreat, still speaks of older times. Founded in the 13th century by the Anglo-Normans, Ashford passed through centuries of conquest and change before becoming, in the 19th century, a romantic Victorian pile. Today its battlements remain picturesque rather than defensive, but the sense of continuity—of lives unfolding along these banks—has not faded.
Standing there, camera in hand, I was struck by the layered meaning of this place. The Cong River flows from unseen caverns, purified by limestone older than memory. It nourishes swans, reeds, and trout alike. It reflects both a castle and a sky. Along its opposite bank, legends of cinema and Celtic lore alike find footing.
As the swan and cygnet drifted slowly downstream, I thought of them as part of the same enduring thread. Parent and child mirrored castle and village, past and future, permanence and change. The ripples they left widened until they touched both banks, an unbroken gesture across centuries.
A sun-worn dragonfly rests at journey’s end, its amber wings whispering of distant winds, silent skies, and the untold grace of nature’s farthest travelers.
I found it trapped in the surface tension of standing water, motionless, its wings curled and clouded with the memory of flight. A dragonfly—worn, delicate, yet still resolute in form—lay before me like a token of the warm midsummer air that had lifted it through the fields and over the waters. July in Ithaca brings with it such winged travelers, borne on breezes scented with milkweed and bee balm, and this one, though grounded now, seemed still to carry the echo of great distances.
The dragonfly is not of the brooding sort; it lives neither in shadows nor secret places. It claims the sky as its own, ranging wide and far with a grace born of ceaseless motion. This particular specimen, its body some two inches in length and its wings veined like the bare branches of winter trees, bore the telltale marks of the Wandering Glider—Pantala flavescens. Each wing was tipped with a black bar, as though the artist who made it had laid down a final, definitive stroke to balance the creature in the air. Near the base, a wash of amber yellow glowed softly, like the last light of evening behind thin clouds.
There is something unquiet about the dragonfly. It does not hover long nor does it dawdle. It darts, it glides, it shimmers in and out of sight. It is a creature of action and of space. The glider, especially, seems to belong not to any one stream or meadow, but to the wind itself. Naturalists tell us this species is among the most traveled of all insects, crossing oceans, riding monsoons, appearing in lands where no memory of its departure remains. What must it see? What sunrises shimmer from its compound eyes, what shorelines flash beneath its outstretched wings?
In the dragonfly’s manner, I find no sign of labor, only the silent art of survival. It patrols its airspace like a hawk, yet it bears no menace, only the precise and relentless hunger of a born predator. With each dart and glide it performs a service to the air—clearing it of gnats and mosquitoes, feeding itself without waste. Nature, in her economy, grants no idle beauty, and the dragonfly is both elegant and essential.
As I gazed at the delicate carcass, I thought of the old philosophy that linked the soul’s journey to the flight of birds. But here, perhaps, is a more fitting image: this dragonfly, which lives but a brief summer, yet might travel farther in its span than many creatures do in a lifetime. We are apt to call it “wandering,” as though it lacked aim or anchor. But I think it follows a thread of purpose invisible to us—something stitched into the weave of wind and weather, of season and sun.
It had come far, and its journey was complete. My wife provided an empty saffron spice box to preserve and display it—for the grandchildren to marvel over.
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There, pressed into the grain of the boardwalk like a dark fleck of forest lint, the Bold Jumping Spider (Phidippus audax) waits—motionless, yet alert. To the untrained eye, it may seem insignificant, even nondescript. But a closer look reveals a creature of fine design and surprising charisma: a compact body cloaked in velvety black, adorned with pale markings like runes, and forward-facing eyes that gleam with eerie intelligence.
Unlike the orb weavers and net-spinners of spider lore, Phidippus audax does not rely on traps. It is a hunter in the truest sense—an animal that lives by leaping toward its future. With eight powerful legs and a muscular abdomen, it can launch itself many times its own body length, arcing through the air toward an unsuspecting moth or beetle. Yet it does not leap blindly. It trails a single silken thread behind it—a safety line, a commitment to survival. It is an act of courage tethered to caution.
Most remarkable are its eyes. A quartet of simple lateral eyes scan for motion, but the two large, front-facing principal eyes are something more—a rarity among arthropods. They grant it acute vision, with the ability to detect detail, movement, and even depth. When it turns its gaze toward you, you feel seen—not just registered, but regarded.
Found lurking in a joint of wood frame enclosing a trail map. Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, on a summer afternoon\.
These spiders are active thinkers, decision-makers. They test their environment with movements that can almost be described as exploratory. They do not walk so much as prowl, stepping into shadow and light with an awareness that seems out of scale for their size.
And though they are often met with fear or disdain, Phidippus audax poses no threat to humans. It asks only for a few square inches of wood or leaf to stake its claim. In return, it offers a glimpse into a different kind of grace—an agile, silk-spinning daredevil, leaping with acute precision.
To observe one is to witness the meeting of design and instinct, form and function, in perfect miniature. In the vast, humming network of woodland life, the Bold Jumping Spider may be a small player, but it performs its role with flair. If the trees are the spires of the forest cathedral, and the ferns its leafy congregation, then Phidippus audax is a kind of sacred rogue—silent, swift, and utterly unconcerned by our towering presence.
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Cushendun (from Irish: Cois Abhann Doinne, meaning “foot of the River Dun”) is a small coastal village in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It sits off the A2 coast road between Cushendall and Ballycastle.
It has a sheltered harbor and lies at the mouth of the River Dun and Glendun, one of the nine Glens of Antrim. The Mull of Kintyre in Scotland is only about 15 miles away across the North Channel and can be seen easily on clear days.
In the 2001 Census it had a population of 138 people. Cushendun is part of Causeway Coast and Glens district.
SONY DSC
Here are several of the information placards near the harbor explaining some local history.
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Ballyteerin townland, where Shane O’Neill was killed, is on the road to Torr Head.
Reference: Wikipedia, “Cushendun.”
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On a serene May morning, a small flock of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks graced the author’s yard, showcasing their vibrant plumage and bringing beauty to the tranquil scene of nature.
It was a gentle May morning, the kind that seems to hush even the wind, as though nature were holding its breath for something wonderful. Through the kitchen window, just past the black iron gate entwined with the fresh green of climbing rose, I spotted them—feathered heralds of spring’s deepening promise—perched like jeweled notes on a musical staff.
The Rose-breasted Grosbeaks had arrived.
May 3, 2025 Four Male Rose Brested Grosbeaks visited our backyard bird feeder during spring cleanup.
Not one or two, but a small flock, draped in raindrops, feathered in contrast and charm. They gathered around our backyard feeder like guests invited to a familiar table. At 5:56 a.m., the camera captured the first image: two males on the feeder and one each on fence and chair, a bold bib of crimson splashed across snowy chests, huddled against the gray of the feeder, their plumage brilliant even in the diffused dawn light. I couldn’t help but smile. This was a scene of quiet splendor, a symphony for the eyes and soul.
The males, unmistakable in their attire, wore tuxedos of black and white, with the defining rose-red marking on the breast that gives the species its common name. Their scientific name, Pheucticus ludovicianus, is less poetic but equally telling. “Pheucticus” comes from the Greek pheuktikos, meaning “shy” or “avoiding,” reflecting their reclusive habits in forested nesting grounds. “Ludovicianus” refers to Louisiana, an early French colonial name for a vast region including their breeding range—a nod to their North American roots.
At 5:58 a.m., the lens captured more details: a male with slightly mottled wing feathers, suggesting he was a younger bird, still dressing up in adult finery. The trio clung to the feeder’s edge, their heavy, conical beaks—perfect for cracking seeds—clearly visible. That oversized bill gives them the name “grosbeak,” from the French gros bec, literally “large beak.” Functional beauty, you might say.
May 3, 2025 Three of the Four Male Rose Brested Grosbeaks visited our backyard bird feeder during spring cleanup.
Then, at 6:08 a.m., came the contrast—the female. Subtly adorned in warm browns, with creamy streaks and a wash of yellow near the wings, she perched beside her flamboyant mate, as if to say: elegance need not shout. The two birds looked momentarily toward each other, and I was struck by their balance—his flair and her grace. Her eyebrow stripe, called a supercilium, lent her a composed, alert expression. While the male might catch the eye, the female commands attention in her own, quieter way.
May 3, 2025 Male and Female Rose Breasted Grosbeaks visited our backyard bird feeder during spring cleanup.
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are migratory, long-distance travelers who winter in Central and South America and return each spring to North America’s deciduous and mixed woodlands to breed. Here in upstate New York, our yard is a brief rest stop on their northward journey—or, if I’m lucky, a summer home. They often nest in dense foliage, and their song, a melodic, whistled warble—like a robin who’s taken voice lessons—is often the first clue to their presence.
This morning, no song was needed. Their silent presence was enough.
Watching them, I felt time slow, the kind of moment when the ordinary yard becomes cathedral. Watching them, I felt time slow, the kind of moment when the ordinary yard becomes cathedral. The wet fence and chair under the feeder, even the crumpled leaf bag—everything was blessed by the company of these birds. Rain softened the world, and the birds brought color to its hush.
Later that day, reviewing the photos with metadata timestamps from my iPhone—each image like a verse in a poem—I marveled at what I had witnessed. These weren’t just birds. They were stories in flight, living punctuation marks in the sentence of my morning.
Nature gives us these moments, brief as birdsong and just as sweet. You only have to be still, and ready to receive them.
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Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills
References
Pheucticus ludovicianus (Rose-breasted Grosbeak). Cornell Lab of Ornithology – All About Birds.
Jobling, James A. The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm, 2010.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Etymology of “Grosbeak.”
iPhone 14 Pro Max image metadata (May 3, 2025; 5:56 a.m. to 6:08 a.m.; Ithaca, NY).
Two men experience the breathtaking beauty and vastness of Monument Valley, reflecting on nature’s timelessness while feeling small against the grandeur of the landscape at dusk.
They drove on through the late November light with the road falling away toward the valley. In the west the sun hung low, a copper disk above the red land. The two men squinted through the windshield. Before them, Monument Valley unveiled itself in towering silhouettes and stone ramparts where the world opened to an ancient scene held in amber light. A long black ribbon of highway led onward, straight and true, toward those looming buttes etched against the sky. The older man eased the truck to the shoulder and killed the engine. In the newfound quiet, they sat as the wind ticked against the cooling hood. Ahead, the valley’s monuments stood waiting in the orange glow of sundown.
“Hell of a sight,” the driver said softly.
Sentinel Mesa and a slice of Big Indian peak to the left. A risen moon above all.As the day progressed here is Big Indian to the left, a portion of Sentinel Mesa with the risen moon above all
To the east, Sentinel Mesa rose broad and dark, its flat summit catching the last aureate light. The mesa loomed like a great natural battlement guarding the valley’s entrance. Aside, a solitary pinnacle known as the Big Indian stood in muted vermilion hues. In profile it did resemble a weathered face—a monumental visage gazing eternally south over the sacred lands. Farther south, Mitchell Butte jutted upward, its sheer walls burnished red-gold on one side where the sunlight still lingered. A mile or so southeast, the land climbed again to the massive bulk of Mitchell Mesa, now mostly in shadow. The sun was dropping behind it, outlining that mesa’s far rim in a halo of pale fire. Near to Mitchell Butte, a tall slender Gray Whiskers Butte rose like a lonely watchman. Its pinnacle was streaked with dusk, the stone fading from blood-red at its base to a somber gray at its crown. One of the men pointed toward it silently, and the other simply watched, understanding the unspoken thought: how small they were below these giants of rock.
Mitchell Butte, Grey Wiskers Butte and Mitchell Butte
High above Sentinel Mesa, the evening swan of this desert had already appeared — a waxing moon, nearly full and ghostly white. It floated just over the mesa’s dark crown as twilight gathered, like an omen or a blessing. The sky behind the landforms had begun to take on the deep indigo of coming night. In the east, opposite the dying sun, the heavens were lavender and faintly banded with pink. The moon climbed in silence, gaining strength as the sun bled out in a final flare of vermilion along the horizon. In that half-light the mesas and buttes became blackened shapes, cut from the twilight itself, their identities merging with the land’s dusk. November’s chill crept in with the dark. The younger man drew his jacket closed. Neither of them had thought to speak for minutes now. They simply wandered a few yards from the truck, eyes turned outward and upward, silhouettes of their own against the dimming day.
Sentinel Mesa with risen moon
His companion nodded. He opened the door and stepped out. “Never seen anything like it,” the younger man said. His voice was reverent, almost a whisper. The driver climbed out too, boots crunching on red grit. They walked a few paces from the road, drawn forward as if on a tide. The evening air was cool and carried a dry, dusty scent tinged with sage. In the far distance, the monuments cast long blue shadows over the valley floor. The travelers stood for a long moment without speaking, each alone with the scale of it.
The land was vast and inscrutable. In the silence it felt holy. It was easy to believe no one else in the world existed at this hour — only these two and the ancient valley spread before them. The wind came from the west in a long sigh, carrying the dust of the desert. It whispered through dry bunches of brush at their feet and stirred a lonely tumbleweed across the cracked earth. The younger man removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair as if to assure himself this was real. The older man stood with thumbs hooked in his belt, head tilted back to drink in the view. His face was lined and still, the dying light painting one side in gentle umber. If either man harbored any burdens or regrets from the road behind, the land seemed to dwarf those worries into nothing. They felt themselves small as insects on an endless painted floor.
After a time, the driver cleared his throat. “We’ll lose the light soon,” he said. His voice was low. He seemed unwilling to break the spell with anything louder.
The younger man nodded again but did not take his eyes off the valley. “Just a few more minutes,” he replied.
“All right.” The driver smiled thinly and pulled out a cigarette. He struck a match and cupped it against the breeze, the brief flame reflecting in his narrowing eyes. In the glow of the match the canyons of his face showed for an instant, then vanished into shadow again. He drew in and exhaled a plume of smoke that the wind instantly seized and unraveled. Sentinel Mesa crouched out there like a great shadow, crowned now by a silver moon that grew brighter by the minute. The older man followed that mesa’s outline with his eyes, tracing the crenellated cliffs and the slope of rubble at its base. “They named that one right,” he said, mostly to himself.
“What’s that?” the other asked softly.
“Sentinel. Standing guard.” The driver gestured with the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Feels like it’s been watching this place forever.”
Sentinel Mesa standing guard with the red desert floor and fauna in the last light of sunset
The young man considered the hulking form of the mesa. In the twilight it did have the aspect of a watchtower keeping vigil over the valley. “It probably has,” he said. “Long before we ever came.”
On the road behind them a faint glint of chrome from the hood caught a stray moonbeam.
The younger man broke the long quiet. “You ever been down here before?”
The older man nodded. “A time or two.”
“You see all this then?”
A chuckle from the older man, low in his throat. “Not quite like this. First time I come through here I didn’t see a damn thing.”
The younger man looked over, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” the old man said, “I’d been driving since Durango, and I’d run out of good sense somewhere near Shiprock. Rolled in with the rain. Thought I’d catch a nap and wake up to a postcard.”
He paused, lighting another cigarette, letting the flame flicker in the cooling breeze.
“Only I parked across from a big ridge in the moonless dead wet dark, didn’t think much of it. Woke up next morning to what I thought was the edge of a landfill. Just a big wall of brown rock. Figured I took a wrong turn and ended up behind a gas station.”
The young man laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Got out, stretched, cursed the road and the view and the whole damn state. Got out to take a leak, figured I’d head on. And just as I’m zippering up, I look to the right—and there it is.”
He waved his hand toward the black outline of Mitchell Mesa, vast and solemn in the moonlight.
“The whole valley,” he said. “Caught me sideways. I parked blind to all of it. Missed the whole show.”
He shook his head, the cigarette ember glowing orange.
“Spent the next half hour cussing myself out. Sat there red-faced with a thermos of cold coffee like a man at the symphony who showed up deaf and late.”
The younger man laughed, full-throated now. “You mean to tell me you slept in Monument Valley and thought you were behind a gas station?”
The old man shrugged. “In my defense, it was cloudy.”
They both laughed then, the sound rolling out over the scrub and rocks and into the vastness.
He walked a little farther from the road, and the older man paced beside him. Ground crunching underfoot, fine dust kicking up around their boots. They ascended a slight rise where the terrain leveled off in a broad expanse leading toward the valley proper. Beneath their feet the earth was soft and powdery—red earth, lit now by the dim purple of dusk and the growing lunar light. The younger man scuffed the toe of his boot in it, and a little crimson cloud rose and drifted away. By daylight this soil was a vivid rust-red, the color of dried blood. It was as if the ground itself had a memory of violence or sorrow, but the truth of that color was simpler and older: the iron in the earth, left behind by ancient oceans, oxidizing over eons in the sun and airen.wikipedia.org. The land bled red because the very minerals of its making had rusted in the long passage of time. In places the valley floor was cracked clay, in others loose sand, all part of the same great story of stone turned to dust.
The two men walked out a bit further into the open, where scattered plants clung to life in the hardpan. There were low shrubs of sagebrush exuding a faint herbal scent, and clumps of purple sage with gray-green leaves, their summer blooms long spent. Here and there jutted the spiky forms of yucca, bayonet-tipped leaves fanning out from the base of each plant. Most everything that grew here hugged the ground and wore the dusty colors of the soil. In the failing light, the sage and grass tuft looked almost colorless, pale as ash. Only when lightning storms rolled through would the desert briefly bloom green; in these dry weeks of autumn the vegetation lay dormant, patient. A scraggly juniper tree crouched in a shallow gully nearby, twisted by wind and drought, its bark bleached where it faced the sun. These were the survivors of an unforgiving climate – rabbitbrush, snakeweed, hardy shrubs that lived on almost nothing. The young man knelt and pinched a bit of sage between his fingers, releasing its sharp fragrance. This smell, to him, was the perfume of the desert itself.
In the sand at the base of the sagebrush, he noticed a faint track. He brushed aside some dust to reveal the imprint of tiny claws: the delicate spoor of a lizard that had passed earlier when the ground was warm. It wound off between the rocks and vanished. Other tracks crisscrossed subtly in the dirt – a jackrabbit’s long-toed prints, nearly indistinguishable amid scuffs, and the delicate imprints of some small bird that had hopped about pecking for seeds. Life was here, though it was seldom seen. A red-tailed hawk wheeled silently high above, cutting black circles into the dim sky. Perhaps it was hunting one last time before full dark. The younger man stood again and looked out over the valley with new wonder, realizing that countless creatures lived and moved in this terrain largely unseen. In the daytime heat they sheltered in burrows and shadow. At dusk they came forth. He imagined a coyote trotting through a distant wash on soft paws, nose to the ground; a mule deer picking its way among these rocks somewhere beyond sight; a mountain lion watching from high up on a ledge as it had watched all afternoon. This desert did not easily give up its secrets, but they were there.
The older man stepped out onto a broad flat of rock and ground his cigarette butt under his heel. In the silence his companion could hear the scrape of boot leather on stone. The rock was part of an exposed slab that had broken off from a greater outcrop. It sloped gently down into the valley and was strewn with fine gravel from its own slow decay. The driver pressed his bootsole into a brittle crust of the rock’s surface, and it crumbled with a dry sound. These monoliths around them were not as immutable as they looked. Wind and rain had been gnawing at them for ages uncounted. Every thunderstorm that swept these flats cut new gullies in the shale, undercutting the bases of the cliffs. Every hot summer day the rock expanded, and every cold night it contracted, fissures growing by imperceptible degrees. Water trickled into cracks and ice pried them wider in winter. In time, great slabs would calve off with a roar and a billow of red dust, adding another heap of boulders to the talus at a butte’s feet. The valley was strewn with such piles like fallen ramparts. Erosion was the master sculptor here, patient and inexorable, chewing away the softer rock beneath and leaving the harder stone standing in great towers and tablelands. Each butte, each spire, had endured unthinkable ages to remain in this moment as a seemingly permanent fixture—and yet they too were slowly disappearing grain by grain. In a thousand years the difference might be subtle; in a million, perhaps these forms would be gone entirely, ground down to the flatness of the surrounding plain. The land was alive in geological time, though to human eyes it appeared frozen in a grand and silent repose.
They wandered farther, and now the truck was a small shape behind them on the roadside pullout. Neither man minded. The road was empty; no other vehicle had come along for a while, and only a lone set of headlights glimmered many miles away, moving slowly, probably a rancher or a late tourist heading home. The two travelers were alone with the land and sky. Overhead, the first stars were coming out in earnest, timid specks appearing in the dome of night. The moon was higher now and bright enough to cast shadows. The tall profile of Big Indian was cut into the moonlit sky, unmistakable and solemn, and on the valley floor the leaning spire of Gray Whiskers stood lit on one side by the cold glow. Away to the east, the open desert beyond the valley was falling into darkness, a great stretch of unknown country into which the highway disappeared. And still the west flared with afterlight — a band of deep red on the horizon, fading to gold, then greenish and up into the endless blue-black. It was a sky that seemed too vast for the world.
The younger man found a boulder at the edge of the flat and sat down. He removed his hat and set it beside him. The stone felt cool now under his legs. The heat of the day had fled so quickly that the air itself seemed to crackle with cold. He drew a deep breath and let it out. The land gave back only silence. A great and ageless solitude reigned here, the kind that makes its home in deserts and high places where man has no authority. He could feel it pressing in, not unkindly. It was the solitude of a world largely unchanged long before humans and likely long after. Under that eternal sky and the gaze of those stony sentinels, their own lives felt momentarily trivial. Yet the feeling was not bitterness or despair. Rather, it was humbling and strangely reassuring, as if all the griefs and triumphs that had ever marked a human life were nothing next to the calm presence of these rocks. The earth endured. The earth would always endure. Time and wind would wear down even mountains, but until then these mesas would keep witness over the days and nights, the storms and still mornings, the generations of men who came wandering through seeking something larger than themselves.
The older man walked over and eased himself down on the same boulder. He groaned softly as he sat, rubbing one knee. They both looked out over the emerging night. For a long while, neither spoke. Far in the distance, a coyote yipped — a brief, high sound, then silence again. The younger man smiled in the dark.
“The cold is coming fast,” the older man said after a time.
“Yeah. It does that quick out here.” He picked up his hat and dusted it off, though no dust truly could be kept off in this country. Dust was the true sovereign of the valley — red dust that coated boots and clothes, that hung in the air at midday, that settled on skin like a fine powder. It would ride back with them in their vehicle no matter how well they shook their coats. It had a way of clinging on, a reminder of where one had been.
“You ready?” with a tilt of his head back toward the truck.
The younger man took one last sweeping look over Monument Valley. The forms of Sentinel Mesa and its neighbors were nearly indistinguishable from the dark of the sky now, save where the moonlight etched a line or two along a cliff. The valley floor was lost in shadow. In the east, a few scattered clouds caught a faint silver luminescence from the risen moon. The beauty of the scene was stark and almost aching — a kind of beautiful emptiness that a man carries away inside him, knowing he has witnessed something that can never properly be told. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came. Instead, he simply nodded and got to his feet. They began walking back toward the truck, side by side.
Behind them, the desert night continued its slow unfurling. One by one, stars pierced the darkness. The moon climbed higher on its silent arc. The great stone silhouettes stood unchanged, as they had through countless nights. In a few hours the dawn would come and paint them in rose and gold once more. But for now the valley slumbered under the pale glow of the moon. As the two men reached their vehicle and the engine turned over, its headlights flaring to life, they took one last look across the plains of Monument Valley. Then the truck pulled back onto the highway and receded down the lonesome ribbon of asphalt, two red taillights diminishing and finally vanishing into the boundless Navajo night. The land remained as it was, vast and indifferent to their departure. Sentinel Mesa and Mitchell Mesa stood like opposing pillars at the great gateway of the valley, keeping their eternal watch. The wind sighed over the road and across the sleeping rocks. The footprints the men had left were already beginning to blur with settling dust. Above, the indifferent stars traveled their courses. And the red earth of the desert stretched away in all directions—ancient, patient, and still, beneath the enduring sky.
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Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 