The evening of Mother’s Day, I looked out over the pond where we’re living and saw two Canada geese gliding across the water in the golden light. They moved slowly, close together, their reflections stretched long behind them. At first, I thought I was simply watching a pair making their quiet way across the pond.

Then one of them shifted slightly, and I realized there were actually three.

A tiny gosling was tucked so tightly against its mother that I could barely see it at all.

I stood there for a moment with that ache mothers know so well — the sudden remembering of small bodies beside your own. The years when your children moved through the world almost as extensions of you. Always close enough to touch. Always following at your heels. Always needing you.

Earlier that day, my daughters had taken me on a picnic for Mother’s Day. They are both grown now and living lives of their own, but they recreated something we used to do every spring when they were little. Every year during spring break, I would take them to one of our favorite spots near the sea. We’d spread out a picnic, wander along the shoreline, walk through the gardens nearby, and take photos together. At the time it was just a picnic. Just a walk by the water. You don't realize until later that those are exactly the days your children (and yourself) carry with them forever.

This year, they planned the whole day themselves.

We sat near the water again, just as we had years ago. We walked the same paths. We took more photos. And as I watched them laughing together beside the sea, I kept catching glimpses of the little girls they once were layered over the women they’ve become.

By the time I saw the geese that evening, my heart was already full of nostalgia.

Canada geese are deeply protective parents. Both the mother and father guard their goslings closely from the moment they hatch. Goslings can swim within a day of being born, but they stay tucked near their parents for safety and warmth. Adult geese are known to position themselves between their young and potential danger, hissing, spreading their wings, or charging if they feel threatened. Family groups often remain together for nearly a full year, with the young staying alongside their parents through migration and winter before eventually forming families of their own.

Watching that tiny gosling hidden against its mother brought all those years rushing back to me.

Motherhood feels a little like that, I think.

At first, your children are so close to you they are almost part of your own body and breath. You carry them everywhere — physically, emotionally, spiritually. Your days revolve around protecting them, feeding them, teaching them the shape of the world. Then little by little, almost without noticing, space begins to form between you. They step farther ahead. They build lives and homes and traditions of their own.

And that is exactly what is supposed to happen.

Still, there are moments when I miss those earlier years so fiercely. The days of sticky hands and spring picnics and little girls walking beside me near the ocean. The years when home was simply wherever we all were together.

But maybe one of the quiet gifts of motherhood is discovering that love changes shape without disappearing.

My daughters are grown now, yet they still remembered those picnics. They still wanted to return to that place with me. They carried those memories forward too.

There is something deeply healing in realizing the moments that mattered to you also mattered to them.

As the geese disappeared farther into the gold-lit water, the gosling still tucked safely between its parents, I felt both the grief and gratitude that seem to live side by side inside motherhood. The longing for what has passed. The joy for what remains.

In early April, I noticed several pairs of wood ducks from the window that looks out over the pond where we’re living. They were moving through the morning mist, the drake’s colors almost unreal in that soft light, the hens close beside them as if they were stitched together in motion. I remember thinking I needed to paint them.

What followed has become a familiar rhythm for me: observe, paint, research, understand. Each step leads naturally into the next, and I’ve come to trust that process as a way of really knowing a place.

This is what I learned.

Why Pachaug Pond Is Such Good Wood Duck Habitat

Pachaug Pond sits in northeastern Connecticut and, at over 800 acres, it’s the largest body of water east of the Connecticut River. Within it lies a forested island protected by the Avalonia Land Conservancy — quiet, wooded, and entirely surrounded by water. Watching the ducks move in that direction, I’ve found myself wondering if that’s where they’re nesting.

Wood ducks (Aix sponsa) aren’t birds of open water. They depend on edges — wooded wetlands, slow-moving streams, swamps, and ponds bordered by mature trees. Unlike most ducks, they are cavity nesters, relying on natural hollows in older trees like oaks, maples, and sycamores to raise their young. A secluded, forested island with no human disturbance is about as close to ideal as it gets.

They’re native to this region and have long been part of the ecological story here in southern New England.

What Made Me Stop and Really Look

We’re living temporarily on Pachaug Pond while my husband and I look for our next permanent home. Leaving the place we had lived for twenty-five years wasn’t simple. We raised our daughters there, in a house tucked deep enough into the woods that we couldn’t see another home from any window. It felt like its own small world.

Then, in quick succession, two changes arrived that were impossible to ignore. A warehouse rose where there had always been only trees. And when the buffer of forest along the nearby highway was cut, the quiet we had always known was suddenly replaced with traffic noise we had never heard before.

The landscape around us had shifted, and so had the sound of it. Eventually, we left.

Now, from this window, I see something entirely different — open water, shifting light, and nature all around. One place showed me what was being lost. This one keeps showing me what remains, if I’m willing to pay attention.

I’ve only recently started calling myself a naturalist, though the curiosity has always been there. Painting is simply the latest way I’ve followed it. When I choose a subject, I research it before, during, and after the painting process. It’s never just about the image — it’s about understanding what I’m looking at.

Observation and learning have always gone hand in hand for me, and watercolor has given that practice a new shape.

The Wood Duck Drake: A Closer Look

The male wood duck is one of the most striking waterfowl in North America. His head shifts between green and purple depending on the light, with bold white markings tracing his face. His eyes are a vivid red, and his bill carries multiple tones — red, white, yellow, and black all layered together.

His chest is rich chestnut with fine white speckling, and his sides are warm tan, with darker wings edged in crisp white.

The female is quieter in appearance, soft brown overall, with a clear white teardrop marking around her eye that makes her surprisingly easy to recognize once you know it. Her coloring is not just subtle — it’s protective, helping her disappear into nesting cover.

Both males and females have strong, clawed feet — an unusual trait among ducks, and one that makes sense once you understand their habit of nesting in trees.

How Wood Ducks Nest: The First Days of Life

Wood ducks nest in tree cavities, sometimes as high as fifty feet above the ground. The female lines the hollow with down and lays between six and fifteen eggs, incubating them for about thirty days.

When the eggs hatch, something remarkable happens almost immediately. Within twenty-four hours, the ducklings must leave the nest — before they’ve ever been outside, before they can fly, before they’ve even eaten.

The mother calls from the ground or water below. The ducklings respond by climbing toward the opening using those small, clawed feet, and then they leap into open air. From heights that can exceed fifty feet, they fall — and land on the forest floor or water below. Luckily they’re light enough to survive the drop.

It’s one of those natural behaviors that feels almost impossible until you learn it’s happening all around us.

I didn’t know any of this until I started painting one.

A Species That Nearly Disappeared

By the early 1900s, wood duck populations had declined sharply. Market hunting removed enormous numbers of birds, and the loss of old-growth bottomland forests eliminated the mature trees they depend on for nesting cavities.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended commercial hunting, and over time, nest box programs helped replace what had been lost in the landscape. Wood ducks adapted readily to these artificial cavities, and populations slowly recovered throughout the twentieth century.

Today, they are among the more common ducks in eastern North America and one of the most frequently harvested species in the Atlantic Flyway.

Here in Connecticut, the return of forested wetlands and protected areas like the Avalonia Land Conservancy - Barton Island - on Pachaug Pond has allowed them to remain part of the living landscape.

What Painting Taught Me That Watching Didn’t

Before I painted a wood duck, I only knew them as something beautiful passing through the pond.

I paint because it helps me learn. Each subject becomes a kind of study — something I return to with curiosity rather than certainty. The goal is never just the image; it’s understanding.

With the wood duck, that process deepened everything I thought I already saw. The clawed feet I had noticed suddenly had context. The island out on the water wasn’t just scenery — it was essential habitat, part of a larger ecological story.

I’ve come to value how these practices build on each other. Observation sharpens my painting, painting deepens my attention, and research adds more context to both. Each time I return to the water’s edge, I see a little more than I did before.

The wood ducks were here long before I arrived and will remain long after I’ve found my next place to put down roots. Spending this time with them — watching, painting, learning — has been a quiet introduction to this place I’m calling home, for now.

Last Friday I found myself walking land I feel a deep connection to — not just as an herbalist or a plant lover, but as a Nipmuck woman. Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Wales, Massachusetts sits within Nipmuck historical homeland territory, and our tribe has an ongoing relationship with them — one built on mutual recognition of what that land means and who has always belonged to it. So when I had the opportunity to join a guided bioblitz walk there, it felt like more than a field outing. It felt like showing up for the land in a small but meaningful way.

The walk was led by Dan Wilder, Director of Applied Ecology at Norcross, and it was timed deliberately. Norcross hosted the event in conjunction with the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge — a global, four-day community science event that took place this year from April 25–28. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, the City Nature Challenge has grown from a friendly competition between two California cities into an international event where participants document nature in their neighborhoods using iNaturalist. The goal is simple: make observations of wild plants and animals and contribute to one of the largest community science events in the world, helping us better understand — and protect — the nature that lives in and around us.

Our group was a mix of people like me — members of the public with a curiosity about plants and an interest in learning to use the iNaturalist app. Dan guided us through the property with a specific purpose: every observation we logged would feed directly into Norcross’s dataset supporting their ongoing rewilding work. What grows here, what’s returning, what’s thriving — all of it matters to the decisions they’re making about this land.

I’ve been aware of iNaturalist for years, but this was my first time using it in a structured, purposeful way. There’s something different about logging an observation when you know it’s going somewhere that matters. It sharpens your attention.

And I paid attention.

I found old friends everywhere — yarrow growing low and feathery along the edges, wild blueberry, mountain mint, wild bergamot, and Pennsylvania sedge doing what sedges do, quietly anchoring the understory. I spotted gray birch, dwarf ginseng, live-forever, soapwort, and ghost pipe — that strange, pale beauty that always stops me in my tracks. Some I knew by sight, some I was meeting properly for the first time. That’s one of my favorite things about walking a new place with real intention.

Here’s what I want to say plainly: you don’t have to be a trained botanist to do this. Most of us on that walk weren’t. We were people who love plants, who want to know them better, who showed up on a Friday morning because we have a passion for plants. The iNaturalist app helps fill in the gaps — you photograph what you find, and a combination of AI and community expertise helps with identification. It’s participatory science in the most accessible sense of the word.

This kind of open, participatory science has a name now — citizen science — but the hunger behind it is nothing new. What is new is the access.

Not very long ago, botany was a closed door. For most of its formal history, plant science belonged to wealthy, educated men — those with the leisure time, institutional connections, and social permission to call themselves experts. Women who loved plants could grow them, tend them, maybe sketch them — but their contributions were rarely taken seriously, and their names rarely appear in the scientific record. Working people, Indigenous people, anyone outside a narrow band of privilege — their knowledge of the living world simply didn’t count, no matter how deep or carefully tended it was.

That has been changing. Slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely. The rise of citizen science — and platforms like iNaturalist in particular — has cracked that door open wide. Today, a person walking through a state forest in rural Connecticut, or a wildlife sanctuary in Nipmuck territory, can log an observation that becomes part of a permanent scientific record. Their find might document a species in a location it’s never been recorded before. It might inform a land management decision decades from now. The data doesn’t care who collected it.

There’s something quietly radical about that. Knowledge about the natural world is being reclaimed by the people who live within it — which is, if you think about it, exactly where it always should have been.

But beyond the app, beyond the data — there’s something older at work when you slow down and really look. Indigenous relationships with land have always been built on this kind of careful, sustained observation. Knowing what grows where, what returns each year, what’s changed. That’s not hobby botany. That’s a practice of relation.

I think of my herbalism work that way. I’m not extracting knowledge from a landscape — I’m in conversation with it. A bioblitz, for all its modern-sounding name, is really just a formalized version of something humans have always done: paying attention to the living world and keeping track of what they see.

The City Nature Challenge runs annually each spring. If you’ve been curious about iNaturalist but haven’t made the leap yet, this event is a wonderful entry point — look for local bioblitz walks hosted by land trusts, wildlife sanctuaries, or conservation organizations near you. You don’t need to know every plant’s name. You just need to show up and look.

The land will do the rest.

Where to Put Your Observations to Work

If the idea of contributing to something larger appeals to you, these platforms make it easy to get started. Some focus on plants specifically, others on broader biodiversity — but all of them turn your time in the field into data that matters.

iNaturalist The one we used at Norcross, and a good place to start. Primarily a biodiversity inventory, iNaturalist lets you photograph and log any wild organism — plant, fungi, insect, bird — and the community helps with identification. Your observations become part of a permanent, searchable scientific record. Free and available as an app or on the web.

Budburst An initiative of the Chicago Botanic Garden, Budburst tracks plant phenology — when things bloom, leaf out, and fruit. Accessible for all ages, from 3rd grade through adult. A lovely project for anyone who keeps a nature journal and already pays attention to seasonal changes.

Nature’s Notebook Similar in focus to Budburst but requires more detailed data entry, making it better suited for high school, college, or dedicated adult observers. Run by the USA National Phenology Network, it contributes to long-term climate and ecosystem research.

Journey North Tracks the seasonal migrations and movements of wildlife across North America — monarch butterflies, hummingbirds, robins, and more — alongside plant events like the first tulip or emerging milkweed. A wonderful complement to botanical observation, especially if you’re interested in the relationships between plants and the creatures that depend on them.

Cornell Garden Based Learning For those who do much of their observing closer to home, Cornell has several data-collection projects focused on tracking successful plant varieties in gardens. A good entry point if you’re not yet comfortable going out into the field.

Fieldscope from BSCS More of a data visualization and project-building tool than a single database. Fieldscope can be used alongside established projects like Budburst, or as a platform for designing small, regional citizen science programs of your own — useful if you’re a teacher, naturalist group leader, or just someone who wants to organize something local.

SciStarter Not plant-specific, but worth bookmarking. SciStarter is essentially a search engine for citizen science projects — you can filter by topic, location, time commitment, and age range to find the right fit for your interests and schedule.

Seek Made by the iNaturalist team, Seek is designed with younger or newer naturalists in mind. It uses your phone’s camera to identify organisms in real time without requiring you to create an account — a gentle on-ramp before committing to the full iNaturalist experience.

You don’t have to use all of these. Start with one. Go outside. See what finds you.

This post is part of a bigger conversation I've been having for years over at OutdoorApothecary.com. It's where I write about plants, foraging, folklore, seasonal living, and what it means to actually know the land you live on. If that sounds like your kind of thing, I think you'll feel right at home there.

I came across some Marsh Maragold this week on a walk near the freshwater wetlands at the Dutka Nature Preserve -Avalonia Land Conservancy — a cheerful clump of bright yellow blooms right at the water’s edge. Marsh marigold. Caltha palustris. One of the first wildflowers to show up in the Connecticut wetlands each spring.

They're not actually marigolds. They're members of the buttercup family — Ranunculaceae — and they've been growing in the wet, muddy margins of streams and marshes here in New England for a very long time. You'll find them blooming from April into May, often with their feet right in the water. Depending on where you grew up, you might know them by another name — cowslip, kingcup, meadow-bright. The name "marigold" itself likely comes from "Mary's gold," a medieval association with the Virgin Mary, when the flowers were used as Easter offerings.

The glossy, kidney-shaped leaves are unmistakable. The flowers are a deep, saturated yellow — five to nine waxy sepals that look like petals. They glow. Standing next to a stand of them in early spring light feels like catching something before the rest of the season arrives. Every year, when I see them for the first time, I think — there it is. The marsh lights its first candle.

Marsh marigold has a long history of use in traditional folk medicine across Europe and North America, but it’s worth knowing — the plant contains a compound called protoanemonin, which is mildly toxic when raw. Historically, the young leaves and buds were eaten after prolonged boiling to neutralize the irritants, but this isn’t something I’d recommend without careful research. It’s a plant better appreciated in the field than on the plate.

What I love most about marsh marigold is what it signals. Its presence tells you something about the land — that groundwater is clean and close to the surface, that this is a healthy wetland margin. It’s an indicator species. An ecological landmark, if you know how to read it.

The ecological value of this plant goes deeper than the eye. Marsh marigold is one of the earliest nectar sources of the season — showing up before most wildflowers have even thought about opening. That matters enormously for early bees, flies, and the first butterflies emerging from overwintering. There’s a hungry gap in early spring when almost nothing is blooming yet. Marsh marigold fills it.

The dense growth also provides cover for amphibians. Wood frogs and spotted salamanders breed in these same wet edges right around the time marsh marigold blooms. It’s all happening at once — the yellow flowers, the egg masses in the shallows, the peepers calling from somewhere just out of sight. Spring in a Connecticut marsh is not one thing. It’s everything arriving together.

And like many wetland plants, it does quiet work with water quality — absorbing excess nitrogen and phosphorus from surrounding soils before they reach the water. The plants you barely notice are often the ones holding everything together. When the seeds are ready, they disperse by floating — carried downstream to colonize new wet margins, new muddy edges. The marsh plants its own future.

The Avalonia Land Conservancy protects over 4,000 acres across southeastern Connecticut and walking their land never gets old. I'm grateful for every acre and for everyone who fights to keep land like this intact — places where marsh marigold can simply exist, uninterrupted, unhurried, doing what it has always done.

It’s a chilly day in eastern Connecticut today. A Gray sky threatening rain -the kind of April morning that keeps you inside.

So I won’t be out walking the woods to mark Earth Day. Instead, I’ll be sitting with my nature journal. And truthfully, that feels like the perfect activity on a chilly, rainy day.

There’s something about sitting down with a nature journal — sketching what I noticed yesterday, revisiting the photos I took, writing about a plant I’ve been watching — that demands a different kind of attention. Walking through the woods is one thing. Recording it is another. Journaling makes me slow down and really observe. It turns a walk in the woods into something much more intentional and deepens my connection to the land.

And then I fall down the rabbit hole, in the very best of ways.

One journal entry leads to a question. That question leads to consulting a field guide, then a blog post or YouTube video, then two hours I didn’t plan on spending. What was that lichen on the stone wall? Why do the wood frogs always seem to call right before rain? That’s where the accumulation of real knowledge starts — not in the quick observation, but in genuine curiosity.

As a bioregional herbalist and naturalist, this kind of attention matters to me. It’s how I’ve come to know the plants here as more than specimens or resources.

I see them as relatives.

This is something I carry from my Nipmuck heritage. As a member of the Chaubunagungamaug Band of Nipmuck Indians, I grew up understanding the natural world as alive and relational. The plants, the water, the soil, the animals — they aren’t just things. They have their own place, their own purpose, their own right to exist. The land is not a backdrop to our lives. It is a living presence we are in constant relationship with.

When you see it that way, taking care of the land isn’t a duty. It’s what you do when you’re in relationship. Reciprocity isn’t a concept — it’s a practice. Sometimes that looks like harvesting plants with care. Sometimes it looks like leaving something untouched. Sometimes it looks like leaving an offering and giving thanks - often with tobacco, sage or sweetgrass. Sometimes it looks like simply witnessing and remembering.

In my own practice, this shows up in small ways. Before I harvest, I leave a pinch of tobacco. I say thank you — to the plant, to the tree, to whatever I’m taking from. I speak to them the way I would speak to a friend.

I understand if this sounds strange. But relationship has a way of changing how you see things. Once you slow down and really pay attention — season after season, in the same places — you begin to notice. The plants respond to care. They have preferences, patterns, deep relationships with the soil and insects and light around them. And you.

The rights of nature matters to me because it reflects something I already believe — that the land, water, and plants around us are not resources to be used, but living relatives to be respected. Indigenous peoples have held this understanding for generations. What's shifting now is that laws and policies are finally starting to reflect it.

The plants are not here for us. They are here with us.

Earth Day, every day. It’s a nice sentiment. But it can feel hollow when the land, the plants, and our relationship to the natural world only cross our minds once a year.

To truly be in balance, these relationships need to be ongoing. All year. Not just in April.

As modern humans, most of us have drifted far from that kind of connection. It didn’t happen all at once — it happened slowly, over generations. But it can be rebuilt, just as slowly, through practice. Nature journaling is one way in. It’s simple, it’s accessible, and it works. It pulls you back into relationship with the place you actually live — the plants coming up in your yard, the birds and wildlife moving through, the slow shifts of the season.

You don’t have to be an herbalist or a naturalist to do it. You just have to be willing to pay attention.

Earth Day, every day means an ongoing commitment to showing up for the land the way it shows up for us. Every single day.

I went as part of a Nipmuck delegation to the Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Wales and Monson, Massachusetts — 8,238 acres of forest, wetland, and waterway sitting squarely within Nipmuck territorial homeland. I’ve been to Norcross before. We have an ongoing relationship with them. But this visit felt different. This one felt like a real conversation.

For five hours, we walked with Norcross staff alongside professors of ecology, botanists, and horticulturalists. I kept having to stop and just take it all in—the simple, powerful truth that I was standing on this land, in this company, being reintroduced to the land in a deeper way.

A Legacy of Good Intentions Gone Wrong

Arthur D. Norcross grew up in nearby Monson, Massachusetts. He loved this land deeply. Beginning in 1939, he set about building his vision of a wildlife sanctuary he called “Tupper Hill” — and over the following decades, he shaped it dramatically. He built 25 miles of roads. He constructed four major dams to create ponds. He modified wetlands and waterways. He planted non-native species throughout the property, believing he was creating something better for wildlife.

By the time the Norcross Wildlife Foundation was formally established in 1964, roughly 3,000 acres had been transformed according to one man’s vision of what a sanctuary should look like.

I don’t say this to be harsh. Arthur Norcross loved this place. But love without deep ecological knowledge — without the knowledge that Indigenous people had been cultivating here for thousands of years — can cause harm. A significant part of Norcross’s restoration work today involves undoing those interventions. Removing non-native plants. Reopening waterways. Learning to step back and let the land remember what it was.

It’s a humbling lesson that I think about in a lot of contexts.

What Do the Nipmuck People Want to See Here?

That’s the question they asked us, and I want to sit with it for a moment because it isn’t a small thing.

Norcross’s mission now explicitly includes supporting community-sourced knowledge and amplifying all voices — especially those of frontline communities. For us, that means being asked which plants hold meaning for Nipmuck people. Which ones we’ve always gathered here. Which ones connect us to this land and to our own long history of caring for it.

They also allow Nipmuck people to hunt and gather on this land. That matters enormously. Access to ancestral land for traditional practices isn’t something most conservation organizations offer. It reflects a genuine rethinking of who belongs here and why.

I don’t take any of this lightly.

Learning to Work With the Beavers

One of the things that excited me most about this visit was hearing about their approach to the waterways.

For much of the 20th century, the prevailing mindset around beavers was control. Manage them. Limit them. Keep the water where humans decided it should be. Norcross has 4 man-made dams on the property — infrastructure put in place to do exactly that.

The new plan is to open some of those dams. To let the water move the way it wants to move.

Walking along the streams, I kept noticing these worn little paths running down to the water’s edge — smooth, almost polished-looking slides where beavers had been going back and forth. Gnawed stumps here and there. Evidence of a whole other community of land managers at work. I didn’t see any beavers that day, but I felt their presence everywhere.

The shift in thinking here is simple but profound: stop fighting them. Let them do what they’ve always done. Beavers are among the most effective ecosystem engineers we have. When we work with them instead of against them, the land heals faster than we can manage it ourselves.

What the Land Was Saying

We arrived just as the serviceberry was blooming. To Nipmuck people it has always been more than a plant — it’s a calendar, a medicine, a food source, and a teacher. Its flowers tell us the shad are running and the gathering season has begun. Its berries, fed our people through summer and into winter. Robin Wall Kimmerer (highly recommend her books) writes about plants like this as gifts, meant to be shared. Standing on this land watching it bloom, that’s exactly how it felt.

Around us the forest floor was fully awake — mayapple, trout lily, bluets, skunk cabbage, pitcher plants tucked into the boggy places. The land doing what it has always done here.

What I Brought Home

I’ve stood on a lot of land described as ancestral territory. Sometimes the land itself feels distant, almost unrecognizable—but here, my heart knew it right away.

Walking out of those woods after five hours, muddy boots, still processing everything — I felt something I don’t always feel.

I felt like a relative. Not a guest.

That’s a rare and good thing.

The Norcross Wildlife Foundation is a private, nonprofit wildlife sanctuary dedicated to the preservation and restoration of natural habitats. Learn more at norcrosswildlife.org.