There is a moment, just before sunrise, when the world holds its breath.
The bees are still nestled away. The grass is cold underfoot. And if you’re paying attention — really paying attention — you can feel it: the hum of something larger than yourself.
That’s where this newsletter lives.
Hi. I’m Sarah Red-Laird, founder and director of Bee Regenerative. I’m a scientist, a conservationist, and a woman who has built her life around a simple but radical act: paying attention to small things in big landscapes.
For over a decade I’ve been studying bees on working agricultural lands across the American West — ranches, vineyards, prairies, and high desert basins — traveling with my little blue heeler, Midgie, in a mobile van laboratory that doubles as home, office, and field headquarters.
The science matters deeply to me. But so does something harder to measure: reciprocity. The understanding, rooted in Indigenous wisdom and lived experience, that we are not separate from the land we study. That every sunrise is a clean slate. That every bumble bee is a relative worthy of reverence.
Sarah’s Field Notes is where I write from that place — the space between data and wonder, between rigorous fieldwork and the kind of knowing that lives in your chest when you sit on the hot dirt and realize a community has just formed between you, nearly 1,200 bison rumbling by, the nearby cottonwood trees, the sunflowers, and the bees.
It’s field notes and musings. Personal essays and mind wanderings. The unfiltered, unpolished, deeply felt life of someone who has chosen to live close to the land and close to the work.
Access to public essays on native bees, regenerative agriculture, & the lands where science meets story
All free subscriber content, plus
Full access to all posts — including deeper field notes, research musings, and personal essays not shared publicly
Research deep dives: what we’re finding, what it means, and why it matters
Access to community threads and occasional Q&A with Sarah
Everything above, plus
A personal voice memo from Sarah during field season; behind-the-scenes audio dispatch from the field
