Kadi Franson is an interdisciplinary artist and licensed architect who focuses on ecological resilience in the Anthropocene. Based in Southern Utah, she is also an amateur naturalist and nature columnist for her local newspaper, the Insider.

For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Franson offers a snapshot of fall in Bryce Canyon in pencil and watercolor. She includes a Golden-mantled ground squirrel, sharing with Zócalo a humorous encounter she had with one while walking in the forest behind her cabin—catching the squirrel with its cheeks stuffed, “busy storing seeds for the cold winter ahead.” She also includes all three of Bryce Canyon’s species of Nuthatches (there are only four species in the entire country). “They can all be seen out our front door, busily caching pine seeds into the thick bark of the ponderosas, hammering away like little carpenters,” Franson says of the Nuthatches, adding that they “create the soundtrack of the season.”

And, of course, her Sketchbook features illustrations of the seeds themselves—“an essential part,” Franson says, “of this interdependent web.” She describes the seeds to Zócalo as “lovely, thin-winged like cicadas, that spiral down to the ground, sometimes getting caught in a beam of light.” The forest floor is full of them now, Franson continues, “as if the trees threw confetti everywhere.”