The wasps came in to die. First one, buzzing and bumping into the living room window, who was soon joined by a few sisters. Within an hour, there were more than 40 sinisterly striped yellow jackets (Vespula alascensis) zooming from one window to another in pursuit of light, and I was outnumbered. …

This Field Note was written by Alyssa Roggow. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

I had visited Glacier National Park in the summer plenty of times to see its rainbow of wildflowers spread across the mountains. Still, I had never seen the change from summer to autumn colors until I hiked the Highline Trail late last September. …

This Field Note was written by Tricia Erickson. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

It must have looked like a scene in a movie Western: a herd of bison crossing a river, dust in the air, noise, splashing, all set against the grandeur of Yellowstone National Park in May. The herd included bison calves, born in late March through May that year. …

This Field Note was written by Janet Cass. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

It’s a beautiful late-June day, perfect for walking around Clearwater Lake in Lolo National Forest. The trail to the lake opens onto a comparatively open area, where Clearwater Lake really is astonishingly clear. Behind it is the Swan Range, and the volunteer guide points out the Swan’s avalanche chutes, which feed the lake. …

This Field Note was written by Janet Cass. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

Closing my front door, I caught sight of a large dark animal moving among the trees in my yard. I saw small velvet antlers…a bull moose. Ribs visible under his patchy winter coat, his singular focus on biting the budding leaves of the aspen and chokecherry. I didn’t know if he saw me on my porch but he now had a rapt audience of one—me! Wild animals—deer, fox, coyote—are frequent visitors to my yard, but this was the first moose. Why was he here? …

This Field Note was written by Lynn Arthur. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

I cannot see the cranes this morning, but I can hear them. They are somewhere in the basin of the valley where the yellow, cow-cropped grasses end and the thicket around the water begins. The Sandhills arrived the night before as a wild flurry of sound, drifting in just after dusk when the silhouette of mountains against sky became black on midnight blue and I could not make their bodies out against the dark. I wonder how the cranes knew about the water. Was it the sharp smell of melt? Could they hear the trickle of liquid around rock? Or was it the outline of the snow-fed creek in the moonlight, like the white space between a fingerprint’s arcs and whorls, that was so identifiable from the air? …

This Field Note was written by Claire Voris. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

I was sunning myself on a large boulder along the snowy banks of the Lochsa River, absorbing warmth and the scent of red cedar, when an abrupt call: “check! check! check!” startled me out of my reverie. I turned to glimpse a tiny, dark brown animal disappearing into a rotted log. Moments later, it resurfaced, hopped merrily up onto the crumbling red wood, and began scratching and poking about for its dinner. …

This Field Note was written by Tami Brunk. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

Montana. It’s like no other place on Earth. With wide, grassy plains, big skies, herds of mammals, large predators, and a rugged attitude, who else can claim such a collection of amazing and unique features?

Actually though, Montana is like somewhere else on Earth, but somewhere you may not at all expect…and that place is Africa. …

This Field Note was written by Camille Barr. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

Over the past several years I’ve been introduced to the freedom offered by ducking resort boundary lines and skiing in the backcountry. But the more I’ve grown to love skiing the backcountry, the more I’ve come to respect the immense and unpredictable power of snow.

This Field Note was written by Robina Moyer. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

It is that time of year again, when fall slowly fades into winter and daylight begins to wane. Many people warmly welcome the shorter days and longer nights, tucked inside and perhaps snuggled by a fire. Not so for me, who craves light like a bear craves huckleberries. The end to what we call Daylight Savings comes with no silver lining. But in my quest to find joy in each short winter day, the increased darkness of this season does come with a pink lining. …

This Field Note was written by Jennifer Newbold. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

If you are like me, you will probably hear hundreds of pikas before you ever see one. For years, I heard their shrill calls while hiking high ridges and peaks, but no matter how still I stood or how hard I gazed at those rocky mountain slopes, I never saw a real, live pika. Elusive and unique to the western United States, American pikas drove me crazy, taunting me atop a cold, icy mountain summit, nestled deep in a barren talus field under a pile of rocks. They are the last creatures you would expect to find in these places, but their habitat is one where few other mammals ever go—the cold damp climates of high mountain ecosystems. …

This Field Note was written by Jessie Grossman. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

Walking in a heavy snowstorm at night is one of my favorite ways to experience winter. There is something magical about being wrapped in a hug of falling snow. Snowflakes land delicately and melt on the tip of my nose. The trees are covered in a lacy latticework of icy crystals. The world slows down for a while and becomes quiet, save for the scrape of shovels on driveways and sidewalks, or the thwop of snow as it slides en masse from roof to yard. …

This Field Note was written by Kathleen Carey. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

I love paddling my kayak, to get away even for just an hour or two. Sitting in my kayak one morning on a detention pond close to home, I watched a small, tan spider hopping on my paddle. I quickly took a picture, hoping to identify it later. Before I could enjoy watching this new-to-me spider too much, however, another spider—large, black, and hairy—emerged from under my paddle, ran up to the smaller spider, bit it, and started dragging it off! The two looked a bit like they were dancing, with one partner embracing the other from behind. I snapped more pictures before dropping both predator and prey back off on shore. …

This Field Note was written by Irmi Willcockson. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

I spotted a shadow moving swiftly under the water of Trout Creek in northwest Montana, and my heart started to race. My partner had called me outside just fifteen minutes before saying he saw something in the creek, and I had been stalking up and down the bank ever since. I noticed a wide flat tail propelling the shadowy animal forward, and suddenly its head popped up above the water. Two large black eyes considered its surroundings as it meandered upstream. I watched excitedly through my binoculars as it dove smoothly under willow roots and resurfaced near a boulder. After two years of living along this creek, I had finally seen the ever-elusive beaver! I hadn’t really known what beaver signs to look for though as just a novice beaver enthusiast. …

This Field Note was written by Rachel McKay. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

Last weekend, some friends and I woke up to a foot of snow blanketing the pines outside our windows and the coldest October temperatures on record in the Blackfoot Valley. We pulled on layers of fleece and Gore-tex in the early morning and trudged away from our little lodge to a pond not far up the road. I hovered at the edge of the sheet of ice, pondering its thickness, gently set my foot down in the snow, and took a tiny step before sliding out onto the frozen water, turning happy circles in the sunshine.

As we hurled the fine, powdery snow into the air to watch it sparkle, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a black shape slowly circling against the blue sky, getting ever so slightly smaller with each turn. …

This Field Note was written by Paulina Jenney. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

It’s cloudy and damp. Better to be indoors. As my friend Megan and I walk through the halls of the University of Montana’s Geology department, we pass a glass case containing the skull and arm bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex. “Peck’s Rex” was found just outside Fort Peck, Montana, in 1997, but we stop to admire it only briefly; we’re on our way to check out a much smaller, but equally, I think, exciting fossil discovered in the same area. …

This Field Note was written by Carrie Laben. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

We chose an early start to avoid the oppressive heat and smoke we’d endured for the last month. August had arrived early in Missoula! My friend Mary and I organized our backpacks while Iris, true to her blue heeler instincts, impatiently eyed our progress from the creek. Initially, we agreed on a quick run but abandoned those ambitions for a relaxing stroll on a creekside trail. The cottonwoods and alders on the left and ponderosas and perennial grasses on the right framed the trail as if it were the subject of a painting, drawing our eyes up the valley. Mary was celebrating the variety and vigor of the riparian understory when I saw Iris sidestep a stick ahead of us. Iris leaves no stick unturned, so my curiosity was piqued. As we approached, I could see it was a rubber boa! …

This Field Note was written by Michelle Cox. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

On a backpacking trip two summers ago, a group of fellow students and I started our trek across the Bob Marshall Wilderness on the West Fork of the Teton River. Much of this area had burned in a wildfire a few decades ago, but the landscape was far from barren. Beneath the smooth, branchless trees, fireweed was growing in bright and colorful abundance. …

This Field Note was written by Sarah Capdeville. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

As a teenage boy on the farm in Iowa, I experienced a horde of grasshoppers while unloading a wagon of oats. The surface was covered with grasshoppers! It was not difficult to grab one, and when I did, it would “spit tobacco.” I have since learned that spitting a dark liquid is a defense mechanism. Memories like this one have stuck with me, and in part fueled my interest in the mass of grasshoppers that somehow ended up in Rocky Mountain glaciers. …

This Field Note was written by Terry Habeger. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.

I was living in a 144-square-foot treehouse with my family the first time I encountered a herd of elk.

Straightening the quilt on one of the cots, I glimpsed movement through a window and rushed – barefoot – to the narrow deck to see what it was: a herd of 200 elk galloping along each rise and dip of the valley below the treehouse. …

This Field Note was written by Kelsi Turner. Would you be interested in writing one? Contact Allison De Jong, Field Notes editor, at adejong [at] montananaturalist [dot] org or 406.327.0405. Please visit the Field Notes website at the Montana Natural History Center for more information.