Second Grade Tracking Stories (Award winner!)

Last week I attended the Outdoor Writers Association of America’s annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin. At the conference, it was announced that my third book, Natural Connections 3: A Web Endlessly Woven won second place in the Excellence In Craft Contest’s book category. Naturally, I’m thrilled. My essay, “Second Grade Tracking Stories” also won first place in the Family Participation-Youth Outdoor Education category for both blog and newspaper. This week I’ll share that essay with you again!

Emily and the award. Photo by Paul Queneau. 

Second Grade Tracking Stories

January 17, 2025

Murmurs of interest rippled through the classroom as I spread a rectangle of green felt on the floor at the front of the room. The murmurs became questions as I placed two lines of life-sized animal tracks, printed and cut out of white paper, onto the felt. When I finally invited the second graders to come up and gather around the felt, I was amazed by the almost instantaneous formation of a perimeter of kneeling children, totally focused on the scene.

Three times a year I get to spend a few days at the elementary school in Drummond, Wisconsin, teaching kids my favorite nature facts using my favorite nature props. Once each season, in Fall, Winter, and Spring, I load seven plastic tubs filled with skulls, furs, graduated cylinders, strips of birch bark, and other oddities into the Museum’s minivan for a visit to each classroom in grades pre-k through six.

The green felt with tracks that I asked second graders to interpret. Photo by Emily Stone. 

“Can you figure out what happened here?” I asked the class. They began sharing their observations, and building a story together. “There’s a rabbit.” “And a wolf!” “The wolf carried off the rabbit!”

I asked them to explain themselves. “How do you know those are rabbit tracks?” I prompted. A girl pointed out the very large hind feet, and the smaller front feet, but she indicated that the rabbit was going the wrong direction. Rabbit, hare, and squirrel tracks are all a bit tricky, because of the way these beings hop.

Rabbits leap forward and land with their front feet I explained to the kids, and awkwardly tried to demonstrate. Then their hind legs swing around and land in front of the front feet, where they push off into another leap. This creates groups of tracks where the hind feet are in front of the front feet—not what we’d typically expect,

With rabbits and hares, the big hind feet are usually paired, with the two front feet placed on a slight diagonal just behind and between them. Squirrels, deer mice, and other hoppers who spend a lot of time in trees, move in basically the same way, but their front feet land right next to each other instead of on a diagonal. As a class, we reassessed the direction the rabbit tracks were going.

Next, we moved on to the guess about the wolf tracks. The tracks I’d set out were only a couple of inches long—much too small for a wolf. “What makes you think they are wolf tracks?” I asked. “They look like my dog’s tracks, and dog and wolf tracks look the same,” offered the boy. Pretty good reasoning, I’d say! I love teaching in the rural communities of the Northwoods, where students have a broad range of outdoor experiences and observations to draw from in their learning.

I commended the boy on recognizing the symmetrical, four-toed tracks with visible claw marks as being related to dogs, but I challenged the class to think about the size. “Would wolf tracks be that small?” I asked. Some students shook their heads no, but looked a little unsure. I had everyone hold up their hand, fingers together. “A wolf track will be about the size of my palm, and as big as your whole hand!” I informed them. I love how small I feel when I find a wolf track in the snow and place my handprint beside it.

I took this photo of my hand print next to wolf tracks in Yellowstone National Park where the wolves are BIG! Photo by Emily Stone. 

Again, I asked for guesses about the owners of the tracks. Immediately, students offered fox and coyote as alternatives. Either could have been correct for the simple tracks we’d printed for the activity. On average, foxes are quite a bit smaller than coyotes, but big fox tracks can overlap in size with small coyote tracks. In the snow, red fox tracks often look less distinct, because dense hair protects the bottom of their feet from the cold. Coyotes have bare toes that leave crisp track outlines. If you have a very clear track, it’s also possible to see that foxes have wide, chevron-shaped heel pads, and the hind feet of coyotes register with narrow little heel pads.

“So we have a rabbit or hare, and a coyote,” I summarized. “And what did they do?” Together, the kids explained that the coyote killed the rabbit and carried them off, and they knew this because the tracks came from different corners. After the tracks intersected, the rabbit tracks disappeared, and the coyote tracks continued to the edge of the green felt.

And then class was over. After work, I headed out to the ski trail, absentmindedly cataloging the animal tracks at the edge of the groomed snow. I saw the hopping tracks of squirrels leading to and from trees, the heart-shaped tracks of deer stepping right in the middle of the ski tracks, and even the daisy-chain of grouse tracks winding through the underbrush. I didn’t see a single live animal, but these tracks recorded the unseen activity for anyone to read.

Grouse, squirrel and other tracks near my skis. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Did any of the second graders do the same thing? Did they pause while climbing up the sledding hill to see what furry friend had run across it? Did they follow a being’s trail to find out what happened to them? My hope is that our classroom exercise will help them learn to read the stories of the forest.

Emily’s award-winning third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Excellence in Craft Awards!

 

Emily Stone Named Excellence in Craft Contest Winner

 

Outdoor Writer Receives Prestigious Awards 

 

 

Madison, Wisconsin (August 25, 2026) — Emily Stone was named an Excellence In Craft (EIC) Contest winner Monday night at the Outdoor Writers Association of America’s annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin.

Stone won first place in the Blog/Family Participation-Youth Outdoor Education category for "Second Grade Tracking Stories" (Natural Connections), first place in the Newspaper/Family Participation-Youth category for “Second Grade Tracking Stories” (Ashland Daily Press), second place in the Newspaper/Conservation-Nature category for “Flying Kittens” (Ashland Daily Press), and second place in the Book category for “Natural Connections 3: A WebEndlessly Woven” (Green Darner Media). 

 

OWAA’s annual EIC Contest honors the best-of-the-best in a variety of communications formats – Blog, Book, Column, Graphic/Illustration, Magazine, Newspaper, Photography, Photography Essay, Radio/Podcast, TV/Video/Webcast, and Other. This year's EIC Contest was sponsored by Friesens Publishing and Pew Charitable Trusts.

 

About OWAA

 

Recognized as “The Voice of the Outdoors,” OWAA is the nation’s largest organization of professional outdoor journalists. The association’s membership includes writers, photographers, videographers, radio and TV personalities, digital storytellers and artists. Formed in 1927, the nonprofit association’s mission is to improve the professional skills and opportunities of its members, set the highest ethical and communications standards, encourage public enjoyment and conservation of natural resources, and mentor the next generation of professional outdoor communicators. https://owaa.org

 

Read more about my trip to Madison on my Substack HERE!

 

 

Turtle Travels by K.R. Woollums

Rosie Wollums is about to start her Junior year as an Environmental Studies and Creative Writing major at Coe College. Being in the Northwoods for the first time as a Summer Naturalist Intern at the Museum, Rosie was excited to explore and visit Lake Superior.

I stood barefoot, my heels and toes sinking in as if the shifting shoreline of Friendly Valley Beach was going to swallow me whole. The water of Lake Superior lapped gently onto shore, beckoning me in. A south wind pushed the warming water towards me and my new coworker and friend, Katherine. The barren lakebed glittered in the sunlight, even as I stood knee deep. I hadn’t seen any plants, insects, or even minnows. Nothing blocked the light from pouring down onto the expanse of quartz sand except for myself, Katherine, and our shadows.

A rock caught my eye. It was the size of my palm, and a few feet away. As I approached, I realized it wasn’t a rock, but a young snapping turtle laying in the sand. The dark, bumpy carapace sat in stark contrast to the pale, smooth lakebed. Despite loving the turbid waters of estuaries and lakes for both home and food, the little turtle lay in the chilly and crystalline waters of Lake Superior.

Rock or turtle? It can be hard to tell in the shifting sunlight. This is a rock, but Rosie found a turtle. Photo by Emily Stone.

The estuary near Friendly Valley Beach holds the most nutrient-rich water in the area. The Sioux River carries nutrients in, and clear, cold, nutrient-poor Lake Superior pushes from the other side. The pressure from both bodies of water keeps many of the life-supporting nutrients within the estuary, and creates an extremely productive area, providing food and shelter for many creatures, such as snapping turtles.

The bare sand of the Friendly Valley Beach contrasts with the nutrient-rich estuary where the Sioux River meets Lake Superior. Photo by Emily Stone.

Back on the shore of Lake Superior, driftwood, weeds, and small spiders filled the otherwise vacant beach. Just feet behind that sat a line of brush and trees, and swallows flew and dipped through the air above. Beyond, lay a lively river, estuary, and fields. Despite the lack of life I saw in the lake, there was plenty to be seen around me.

View from a sandbar looking back at the beach. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Wading past the turtle to a sandbar, I maintained a respectful distance. I didn’t want to disturb the turtle’s sense of safety. While snapping turtles are known for being passive in water, I was a little worried about being on the receiving end of a defensive bite.

Unlike other turtles, snapping turtles cannot hide within their shells. The plastron, or bottom shell, is too small to fit their bodies. So, instead of hiding within their shell, they bite when they feel seriously threatened in life-or-death situations, or are females actively laying eggs. Snapping turtles have a strong bite, up to 125 lbs. of pressure, because they sometimes feed on hard foods. This is almost as strong as our bites, which are 160 lbs.! Common snapping turtles are foragers, eating vegetation, invertebrates, amphibians, carrion, and even the occasional small mammal, bird, or fish!

Given the small size, and rough, bumpy shell, I knew this turtle was a juvenile. Snapping turtles' carapace flatten with age, so mature adults will have a smoother shell. Maybe this teenage turtle came from the nearby Sioux River Estuary, and was exploring Lake Superior, just like me. While it was possible the turtle hatched out a nest on the sandy beach, it wouldn’t have been this year. The turtle was already far larger than any newborn snapping turtle would be, and seemed to be at least a few years old. I knew they couldn’t be near the beach to lay their own eggs because adult common snapping turtle carapaces are 10-20 inches, and this turtle’s was somewhere around 5 inches.

Young snapping turtle with bumpy shell. Photo by Mark G, iNaturalist.

Katherine and I crept further into Lake Superior. We lay in the shallows enjoying the cool water and sun just like the small turtle. After this adventure in Lake Superior, I planned to eat dinner before falling into bed. I imagined the young snapping turtle swimming back to their estuary, grabbing a snack, and settling down just the same.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Fall Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Weirdos in the Kaleidoscope

Late summer days are a kaleidoscope of vibrant flowers in all colors of the rainbow. Some of the blossoms have their perfect petals neatly arranged while their leaves form regular patterns up their stems. They are a testament to the precision that can be written into genetic instructions for growth.

Royal catchfly is part of the rainbow of our August pollinator gardens! Photo by Emily Stone. 

I find myself drawn to the weirdos, though, like the pearly everlasting flowers woven into a new shape by black-spiked caterpillars, or the milkweed leaves whose tattered appearance hints at a feeding frenzy. (See last week’s article about my front yard safari!) These weirdos are great examples of how our relationships with other beings can be both messy and emergent.

Near the milkweeds is a thick patch of goldenrod. They weren’t quite blooming last week on my safari, but many of the stems were topped by arching plumes of little green buds, just about to burst into soft yellow flowers. Several of these stems, though, were topped by tufts of leaves, as if the stems had been pulled through pinched fingers and all the little green triangles collected in a bunch. They looked a bit like doll-size cabbages. Weirdos indeed!

Goldenrod cabbage gall. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Goldenrod galls like these were my first introduction to insect galls back in college. I remember walking through a field on a nature hike at the very beginning of Fall Block—a requirement for my Outdoor Education major—and finding both the round ball galls I’ve written about before and these leafy cabbage galls on the goldenrods.

Goldenrod ball gall. Photo by Emily Stone. 

I’d never heard of galls before, even though there are likely over 100,000 species of insects who lay their eggs on a plant, have their larvae chew their way in, then induce the plant to grow some form of house around the larvae. The larvae then drink the plant juices and enjoy the gall’s protection. Eventually each insect metamorphoses and emerges as an adult, ready to lay eggs and start again. Gall-forming insects include species of midges, flies, wasps, and mites. Each insect parasite has their own preferred host plant.

Knowing this, I thought a quick search for “goldenrod cabbage gall” would give me all the information I needed. Instead, according to an article about galls on the iNaturalist website, there are at least a dozen insects who create similar leaf bunch galls on goldenrod!

Picking my way through the descriptions of the top two galls, I realized that if I knew what species of goldenrod they were on, that would help with insect identification. But looking at a list of characteristics that separate Canada goldenrod from giant goldenrod, I still wasn’t sure. Some species, like the delicate zig-zag goldenrod of forests, or seaside goldenrod of shorelines are pretty distinctive, but these big plumy types can be tricky.

So, I texted Sarah Boles, a native landscaper and long-time Museum volunteer who planted these gardens and asked what species of goldenrod she’d put in. “None!” was her reply. All the goldenrods in our pollinator gardens blew in of their own accord, on tiny seeds carried by fluffy parachutes built for pioneering.

Finally, I decided to crack open a gall to see what I could find. Breaking the leaf cluster off the top of the plant, I split it open from top to bottom down the center. I’d expected a central chamber with a single larva, not all that different from the ball galls we dissect with sixth graders during our MuseumMobile programs. Instead, the gall looked empty. Then something moved. A tiny yellow larva wiggled out of a tiny chamber formed by the curled base of a miniaturized leaf.

A tiny yellow midge larva hides at the base of a leaf inside the cabbage gall. 

Photo by Emily Stone. 

Ah ha! Using that search image, I could now see that almost every leaf base held either a larger yellow or a smaller white larva. Some of the yellow larvae had a stomach full of green visible through their translucent sides. Now it was clear, these galls were formed by the gall midge Rhopalomyia capitata, whose galls are dormitories with 6-20 roommates. Knowing that, I could also assume that the flower was giant goldenrod—Solidago gigantea. The insects had done the plant identification for me!

Older (yellow) and younger (white) midge larvae in a cabbage gall. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Looking again at the plants, I could now see that all the goldenrod with cabbage galls had smooth stems among the flowers, while the others had hairy stems. It had been hard to be confident about these subtle characteristics without the insect’s help.

Sharing my story of discovery with Sarah, we got to chatting about how goldenrod was taking over the gardens and needed to be cut back to allow the milkweed, spiderwort, figwort, and other plants to survive. Gazing out over the garden, I realized that the plants with galls on them were shorter, with many fewer flowers, some wouldn’t have any flowers at all. They wouldn’t be able to contribute as much to goldenrod’s spread. Perhaps these little midges are Nature’s way of keeping goldenrod in balance. The weirdos have their place in the vibrant kaleidoscope of the world!

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Front Yard Safari

The flower head looked odd. Pearly everlasting—with their beautiful flat-topped cluster of white flowers with yellow centers—had finally bloomed. And now the petals would dry out and hold their shape for many months. Except, as I walked past the small patch of native plants between the Museum and the Forest Lodge Library, I noticed that one of the flower clusters was a shapeless blob of petals. Dark balls, like peppercorns, clung to the bottom. And did one of those petals move?

Poking the blob, I found that it gave easily under my finger, as if were made of soft cloth. Peeling open a corner, I spotted yellow stripes, red dots, and multi-tipped black spikes. Yikes! That’s what this American painted lady caterpillar wanted me to think…and then to leave them alone.

An American painted lady caterpillar hides inside the house of flower petals they wove together. Photo by Emily Stone.

A few weeks ago I found a younger version of both the plant and the caterpillar on the Superior Hiking Trail. With no flowers blooming yet, the smaller caterpillar had tied together the fuzzy, gray-green leaves into a little home. I’d never seen this older version with the gorgeous, woven-petal shroud.

Scanning the garden, I soon discovered a few more caterpillar homes in the pearly everlasting, all with dark bales of frass (caterpillar poop) spilling out. Some gardeners might be frustrated to lose a few flowers, but hosting native insects is exactly why we plant native species in our gardens, instead of importing species from all over the world who don’t play a positive role in our local ecosystem.

As I poked around, I noticed something else dark and spikey hiding under the canopy of petals on a caterpillar-less flower. Was that an ant? With extra legs? And then I found a better window into the action: a brown spider clasped a black ant in a death grip. The larger front legs probably indicated they are a crab spider—a group who often sits on flowers to ambush their prey.

A crab spider feasts on an ant in the dining room created by a pearly everlasting flower.
Photo by Emily Stone. 

Inspired, I began a slow walk around the Museum’s pollinator gardens. Goldenrod buds looked ready to burst. Most of the bergamot had already erupted into purple pompoms of petals. A tattered male monarch butterfly rested on a stem. And then a tuft of yellow, black and white on a milkweed leaf caught my eye.

Milkweed tussock moth caterpillars feed only on milkweed and dogbane leaves, and concentrate toxins from the plants into their bodies to protect them from predators. The brightly colored hairs offer some protection, too! Photo by Emily Stone.

Just like the American painted lady, these caterpillars are very selective about their baby food. Milkweed tussock moth caterpillars only munch on the leaves of milkweeds or their cousins the dogbanes. Just like monarch caterpillars, their bright colors are a warning to birds and would-be predators that they have concentrated the cardiac glycosides from the plant and have become both toxic and distasteful. Once the aptly nicknamed “milkweed tigers” metamorphose into drab brown moths, they warn bats about their bad taste by making ultrasonic clicks.

Although monarch and moth caterpillars would seem to compete for the same food source, it’s reported that monarchs prefer tender young milkweed leaves, and the moth larvae focus on leaves too old and tough for monarchs.

Walking slowly, I scanned the flowers for anything out of place, any disruption to the normal patterns. On the dark center of a black-eyed Susan, I found a small green anomaly. Crouching down, I found myself face-to-face with the fierce scowl, long horns, and serrated edges of a jagged ambush bug. They lie motionless on a flower until an unsuspecting pollinator comes looking for a sugary treat. Wham! With front legs so strong and scary that scientists call them “raptorial,” the ambush bug ambushes the hungry visitor; jabs them with that vicious beak; injects paralyzing, digesting poison; and drinks their fill. Using this technique, they can catch and eat prey more than twice their size. If you try to squash an ambush bug, they will bite you. While painful, their poison is not dangerous to humans.

Jagged assassin bugs lie motionless on a flower until an unsuspecting pollinator comes looking for a sugary treat. Then they attack! Photo by Emily Stone.

Looking up, I found the green stem of an aster absolutely covered with bright red aphids. While aphids have piercing/sucking mouthparts just like the ambush bugs and other relatives in the group known as “true bugs,” they suck plant juices instead. This stem must have gotten too crowded with the clones of one female, because a few of the aphids had sprouted clear wings, readying themselves to escape the crowds and expand to a new frontier.

Aphids, including a few with wings, crowd onto the stem of a flat-topped white aster.
Photo by Emily Stone. 

My loop around the yard complete, I headed back into the air-conditioned Museum to look at my photos. Some people fly halfway around the world to witness the dramas of nature play out on the African savannah. I found plenty of action walking halfway around the yard.

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

House Finches Get a New Coat of Paint

By Katherine Woolley

Summer Naturalist Intern at the Cable Natural History Museum

Katherine Woolley is about to start her senior year as an environmental education major at Western Colorado University. When Katherine arrived for her second round as a Summer Naturalist Intern at the Museum, she announced that she hit a certain age and suddenly became a birder!

“Peep peep peep peeeep PEEP PEEEEEP peep peep” I rolled over in my bed and groaned. Spring had come early to Colorado’s Gunnison Valley where I attend university. A flash of yellow on my window bird feeder caught my attention. There perched a male house finch sporting banana-colored belly feathers where the red normally is.

Male House Finch with yellow feathers on a window feeder in Gunnison, CO.
Photo by Katherine Woolley.

When ornithologists see a house finch with this color variation, their first thought is often that the individual has xanthochromism. This genetic condition manifests as an unusually large amount of yellow pigment, frequently replacing red pigment. Going in the other direction, axanthism occurs when there is an unusually small amount of yellow pigment or none at all.

In the case of house finches like the one who was acting as my alarm clock, their diet at the time of molting causes their color abnormality. Molting is when a bird loses their old feathers and replaces them with new ones. Molting can take place at different times throughout the year, but because of the energy required to molt, most birds will make sure it doesn't overlap with migration or breeding. Some birds will molt just their head and body feathers in early spring, leaving their flight feathers for later. Since this neon yellow was a drastic change from the peachy bellies I had been observing on finches since winter, it seemed like he had molted practically overnight.

All male house finches have the capacity to be red, orange, or yellow because of pigments called carotenoids. The carotenoids that affect house finch coloration are generally split into three groups with different colors that appear when an animal ingests too much or too little of certain carotenoids. Beta-carotene creates the yellow I was seeing out my window while isocryptoxanthin makes an orange that I saw another finch sporting later in the season. The final carotenoid is called echinenon and causes the bright red that is characteristic of male house finches.

Male House Finch with red feathers at Katherine’s family home in Minneapolis, MN.
Photo by Katherine Woolley.

Most naturally occurring carotenoids are found in leaves and fruit. These carotenoid-bearing Beings are the bulk of the house finch's plant-based diet. Here in the Northwoods, finches seek out the seeds of thistles, dandelions, and sunflowers. A particular treat for house finches are the countless species of berries that grow wild in the Northwoods. The fruit of ornamental trees in our yards like crab apples, or store-bought bird food like peanuts, also contribute to the house finch diet. The occasional insects or other invertebrates they add to their meals do not impact their coloration.

While seeing a house finch in something other than his red suit is exciting and not directly harmful to the bird's health, it does get in the way of other aspects of their life. My bright yellow bird alarm clock in the Rockies never seemed to have any success with the ladies. Female house finches all over the country tend to go for males with the most saturated red in their feathers because it shows that they are competent foragers and good potential mates.

Male House Finch with orange feathers on a window feeder in Gunnison, CO.
Photo by Katherine Woolley.

I yawned, stretched, and got out of bed with the chorus of finches calling in the background. After snapping a few photos of my yellow friend, I grabbed my phone. I grinned to myself as I texted the staff at the Cable Natural History Museum telling them all about my find. I bounced on my heels as I hit send, already planning where I would go to look for yellow and orange house finches in the Northwoods when I moved back to Cable for my second year as a Summer Naturalist Intern at the Cable Natural History Museum.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Who's Hiding in the Tapestry?

From a distance, the forests of July look like a lush tapestry of green. But when you step into the loosely woven strands and take a closer look, the leaves are etched with feeding trails, dissected by holes of all shapes and sizes, and covered with the debris of life. It’s a principle of ecology, of course, that every Being is food for someone else.

Cattails, for example, are food for me! Before their flower spikes explode with pollen and become those brown sausage-shaped seed heads, the dense cylinders of their male flowers are a tasty green vegetable. Simply husk them like sweet corn, boil for 10 minutes, and eat with butter and salt. Just like a corncob, there’s a central stem you must nibble around. In Northern Wisconsin, this part of the plant becomes edible in late June.

Harvesting the male flower spike on a cattail. 

A few weeks ago while I was tromping through a cattail stand to harvest dinner, I noticed that some of the cattail leaves were folded over at the tip into a triangular origami box. I set down my bag of flower spikes and used both hands to unfold the leaf. White silk in the seams stretched and tore. The inside was lined with sheets of silk as well, and hidden below this gossamer blanket was a cluster of beige eggs. In a flurry of legs, someone small and brown escaped from the back corner of the box and dropped to the ground. Who had I disturbed?

The next origami leaf I opened much more slowly, and was rewarded with the sight of a pretty little spider covered in silky brown hairs. She stared at me with her ebony face from beyond her pile of eggs.

Riparian sac spiders fold a cattail leaf into a little origami home in which to guard their eggs. Photo by Emily Stone.

All spiders can make silk, but riparian sac spiders like this one don’t build webs. To hunt, they wander through the night, hoping to stumble on an insect or arthropod the right size for their next meal. When a female is ready to lay eggs, though, she finds the leaf of a monocot—plants like grasses or lilies with parallel venation—and bends it around herself in a clockwise direction. She uses silk to hold everything tight and to line the enclosure, then lays her pile of eggs. The leaf isn’t crimped; it remains green and living.

This tidy structure has been described as both a nursery and a coffin. The mother spider will never leave the structure again (except if disturbed by a curious naturalist). Instead, she guards her eggs against the marauding hunger of other female sac spiders. By some accounts, she dies just before the eggs hatch, and the young consume her body as their first meal. It is the ultimate maternal gift.

Sac spiders as a group are common around the globe, and this particular species has been found in Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan, across the Northwoods, and in Cable, Wis.

In looking up information on the Bug of the Week blog by Kate Redmond, I discovered that sac spiders are classified as “leaf folders,” while other leaf architects are “leaf rollers” or “leaf tiers.” All of these insects and spiders use silk that contracts as it dries to shape leaves into shelters.

S. W. Frost, in the 1942 book Insect Life and Insect Natural History, described that “As the strands dry, they shrink and pull the edges of the leaf inward. New and shorter strands are then spun which in turn shrink and pull the edges of the leaf closer together. This is continued until the edge of the leaf is drawn completely over and is fastened with other strands of silk…”

I set out to find examples of the other two leaf architects. It didn’t take long. While walking a section of the Superior Hiking Trail, I spotted large-leaved aster leaves with one edge curled inward toward the midrib. Brown trails through the tissue indicated that the homeowner was mining the leaf material from inside their hidey-hole. I opened one to discover a sprinkling of black frass (poop) and no resident. I decided not to disturb anymore. Micro-moths in the family Tortricidae are some of the most common leaf-rolling architects, and are my top suspects. This group includes spruce budworm, a pest who had sewed fir needles together nearby.

A leaf rolling insect has used silk that shrinks as it dries to construct a shelter in this large-leaved aster leaf. Photo by Emily Stone.

Spruce budworms are leaf-rolling moth larvae likely related to the architect of the leaf above. They are currently killing quite a few fir and spruce trees in Northern Minnesota. 

Photo by Emily Stone.

In a rocky section of trail, a patch of pearly everlasting leaves caught my eye. On several plants a few of the topmost leaves had been sewn together into a messy vase. Without even opening the structure, I knew that this was the work of a spikey black caterpillar who will metamorphose into an American painted lady butterfly. They scrape pale fuzz off the leaves’ surfaces to line their nest, and also munch on the inner walls of their home.

American painted lady butterfly larvae sew pearly everlasting leaves into a vase-shaped hideaway. Photo by Emily Stone.

The hiding caterpillars above will metamorphose into this beautiful American painted lady butterfly. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Everywhere I looked, the signs of leaf-eaters abounded. And then, in a flash of feathers, a bird dove into a bush. Behind the screen of twigs, a male chestnut-sided warbler hopped nervously with two different colors of caterpillars dangling from his beak. When he sensed my focus had strayed, he dove away to his nest. Those larvae were almost certainly leaf-eaters, and they were about to become birds! The abundance of summer is a great time to witness ecology in action.

Can you spot the male chestnut-sided warbler with two caterpillars in his mouth?
Photo by Emily Stone. 

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.