This week, many wasps and flies that are reproducing in the leaf litter and soil are wingless. Wings are inconvenient in the tiny spaces to be negotiated as these animals search for food or places to lay eggs. Just a taste of the milky white poison that Eastern American toads (Anaxyrus americanus americanus) secrete from their parotid glands sends most would-be predators off to look for a more palatable meal. Northern water snakes (Nerodia sipedon), like many snakes, go by many different common names. They like both water and low sunlit vegetation for basking. They mate in April or May and, unlike most other snakes, they don’t lay eggs, but rather give birth to live young—just about now, at the end of August.

Of 375 species worldwide, only Ruby Throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) live and breed in New England. They drop their temperature at night to conserve energy, entering a state of torpor, but since they weigh a mere tenth of an ounce, they can warm and revive themselves very quickly. Only the males have the ruby throat. All summer, aphids (many species in the Aphis, Myzus, and Prociphilus genera) have been providing ants with honeydew. Now the ants (species in the Formica, Camponotus, and Tetramorium genera), are carrying the aphids underground to keep them safe through the winter. While Black-Capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) have finished nesting and begin to form winter flocks, Goldfinches (Spinus tristis) may still have young in the nest. During these last days of August, insect music replaces bird song, a sign of summer’s end

Now is the time to dig up this year’s burdock (Arctium minus) before this biennial produces sticky burrs next year. This pesky plant’s burrs, which cling so well to a wool sweater, led to the invention of Velcro. Burdock leads a double life: Despised weed and a staple of Japanese cuisine. The diet of the painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) is 50 percent vegetarian and 50 percent insects, snails, small fish, tadpoles, mussels, and dead animals. Clouds of pollen fill the air in cattail marshes. The starchy rhizomes of cattails (Typha latifolia), are quite edible, but they are known to absorb and store toxins from unclean water. The juniper (Juniperus virginiana), also called the eastern red cedar, now sports berries can be crushed to season veal or roast lamb—those berries, along with a sprig of green, are wild-harvested for floral use, especially Christmas wreaths. The harvesting does not harm the plant. Nighthawks (Chordeiles minor) are migrating; look for these slender-winged birds at dusk. They are not hawks at all, but insect-eating species in the Caprimulgidae family.