This was a crab spider summer, thanks in part to my yard that has finally come into its own after a five year experiment to let it wild itself, with a little help from seed collecting friends. This crab spider was busy eating a horsefly when I found it and then moved on to a Japanese beetle. Beauty not in manicured lawns but in complexity.
Watch and Receive
“Let Nature Be Your Teacher” is a much-loved refrain in the field of environmental education. The line comes from a William Wordsworth poem in which he directs readers to “Come forth into the light of things” by letting nature teach us. What does it mean to let nature be a teacher? In my search to answer this question, I uncovered at least two ways of thinking about this, both of which connect with another line in the Wordsworth poem in which he says, “Bring with you a heart, that watches and receives.”
I walk every day, partly for exercise but mainly because I love to walk. But my walks are actually more about sitting and I measure the distance not in miles but in sit spots. I either walk to my first sit spot (on an easy day) or my second sit spot (on an average day) or my third, fourth or fifth sit spots (on days when I could go forever). One day this spring, I was sitting in one of my several spots in the woods on a sandy beach at Fields Pond in the late afternoon watching the pond grasses extend as reflection into the water when I became aware that I was not alone. I turned my head and met the gaze of a garter snake curled under the root of a tree staring at me as we both soaked up the sun. The snake was almost perfectly camouflaged with its brown and gray mottled bark scaly skin. In this one encounter, nature taught me that snakes (or at least one) bask there to carry body warmth through the night; that the root space was the perfect size for a large snake or other similarly sized creature; and that no matter where I am, I am never alone. From sitting in nature, I have learned the common fragility of dragonfly metamorphosis, the contrasting blue of hermit thrush eggs, the coordinated yips of coyotes calling across an open wetland at full moon rise and many more richly textured experiences. In this first thread, nature is teacher, literally. By cultivating a practice of sitting, we create a space for our heart to watch and receive and we allow nature to show up and teach us things.
In a second, and slightly more removed sense, nature like any good teacher helps us remember. Staying with the theme of garter snake, I recently found a dead one on the road. As far as I could tell, it had not been run over by a car and its body was still warm. I think a bird or cat may have killed and dropped it there. Because I use bones to teach the ecology of animals, I collected it, noticing as I lifted it off the pavement that its belly was swollen. From my previous research, I knew that some snakes bear live young and others lay eggs, but I could not remember which was true for garter snakes. The world is a complex place with lots of information to organize and remember. While I have read about garter snakes, this particular fact about their life history escaped me. That is, until I set the snake in a box to let it decompose so I could mount the skeleton. As flesh gave way to bone, multiple small spinal columns tumbled out and I knew then that garter snakes are viviparous, meaning they bear live young. Now that I have this embodied observation to attach to this fact, I will likely always remember this about garter snakes and carry a deeper awareness of who they are, what they do, and how they participate in the ecology of fields and forests. Nature provides a place to hang our memories, making things we read about real.
When we create a space in our lives for nature to teach, we learn more than we ever knew possible. If we are to preserve the stunning complexity in this assemblage of living and non-living parts through this era of human-induced global change, we must grow our understanding of how to achieve balance. Nature itself may bring the knowledge we need, if we learn to listen with our hearts.
Patches of Place
Early last spring, a curious yellow flower with a translucent stem popped up all over my yard in Orrington, which is just south of Bangor. They were everywhere, lining roadsides, covering ditches, and along the lakeshore. When I first noticed them, I gave them the very unscientific but fitting label “weird dandelions”. They looked just like dandelions, but not quite.
Within weeks, the yellow flowers produced fluffy white seeds, again like dandelions but fuzzier and not as fun to blow into the wind. The plant’s lily-pad shaped leaves emerged just as the flower stems folded and faded. It was about this time that I arrived at the April section of Mary Holland’s book Naturally Curious (by the way, when I was originally thinking about this Earth Notes column, I considered a book review of some of my favorite books and Holland’s was at the top of my list. Summary: one of the best natural history books ever written. If nature interests you, you’ll love this book). I turned to page 62 and there were my weird dandelions–yet Holland informed me that while these yellow flowers are similarly in the aster family, dandelions they are not. Their common name is coltsfoot, Tussilago farfara, so-called because someone else likely looked at their lily-pad leaves during an era when colts’ feet were a more familiar object. I also learned from Holland, because this is the kind of interesting information she includes in her beautiful book, that coltsfoot is also known as clay flower. This proved to be a clue to a mystery I was about to unravel.
Coltsfoot leaves
What stumped me when I first saw this plant was that it was so common yet I had no idea what it was. I am by no means a botanist, but I have a pretty solid place-based knowledge of the plants in western Maine and I am relatively sure I have never seen coltsfoot in or around Bridgton (a letter to the editor would correct this perception if you happen to have it growing in your yard).
Why so common in one place and not another? Orrington is at roughly the same latitude as Bridgton. The climate is about the same and the forests are nearly identical. For an answer to this mystery, I turned my gaze dirt-ward. From the first days of our arrival in our new home, I noticed that the soils were decidedly different, with much more clay than the familiar sand and gravel till of inland Maine. Eleven thousand years ago, as the Laurentide ice sheet melted, my yard where the coltsfoot now grows was at the bottom of the ocean. The fine clay that gives coltsfoot its nickname settled out of the water during this time, while Bridgton stayed well above the tide.
When I realized the relationship between weird dandelions and different dirt, I felt a familiar sense: a connection to the place in which I now live. My story here is how the patches of a place become knitted into an awareness of the broader patterns of a landscape. When we notice the subtleties, we become attuned to changes across space and time. We find a weird little yellow flower and dig into its roots and in turn, it digs into ours. These simple patches of yellow flower and clay soil when stitched together remind us that everything has a story and it is a story of complexity and connections. But for all the complexity, the story of a place starts with a simple observation: I wonder… and the roots grow from there.
Greater Lovell Land Trust, Summer 2011
This post originally appeared in the Greater Lovell Land Trust Newsletter.
It was about this time last year that I was touring all of the GLLT properties with Kevin Harding as he worked to pass on his deep, place-based knowledge to me. He showed me the smooth-barked beech trees with the five-toed claw marks from repeated bear climbs and taught me place names like Otter Rocks and Moose Pond Bog. We toured familiar sites at the top of Whiting Hill and made new discoveries where a fisher clawed into the base of a stump at the Kezar River Reserve. And what he didn’t have time to share, he included in a GPS inventory of Heald and Bradley Pond, which summer intern Parker Veitch took on as a project to eventually upload it to the website. My main goal this year was to work with Tom and the docents to maintain the integrity of the program that Kevin built with such care and skill. After this first year, there are several metrics by which I measure our success in this endeavor.
To start, we offered a full schedule and attendance at all of our programs was high, with an average of 37 attendees at the evening presentations and 12 participants in our guided walks. David Brown drew a crowd, as always, and shared his stories about the Brownfield Bog. Bonny Boatman offered three of her very popular programs. Attendees at both of her talks on the ruby throated humming bird learned that this little animal doesn’t walk, can fly backwards, and is nick-named “the rain bird” (you’ll have to do some research to find out why). She also presented on the bald eagle in a second children’s program at the Charlotte Hobbs Memorial Library. Lynda Thayer and Nancy Hart shared moose stories and stunning photographs, especially of the moose named “Twigs” because he appeared to have deer antlers! I gave a presentation on Nature’s Numbers, and as promised we did not use any calculators. Instead, we learned about fractals, Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean and how these mathematical patterns and numbers help us understand nature. Finally, Susan Sidwell encouraged us all to turn our attention to the plants and pollinators, both for their beauty and importance to the planet. In sum, more than 500 people joined us this summer out on the trail, investigating natural history, and learning about land protection at the annual meeting.
Docents are the heart of the GLLT’s education program. This year, we welcomed two new docents: Carol Gestwicki and Paula Hughes. The docents led walks on Wednesdays and Thursdays at nearly all of the GLLT properties. We started the summer with a special training on natural history interpretation with Dr. Jessica Leahy from the University of Maine, which guided the development of themes and content for the weekly walks. We ended the summer with a docent dinner graciously hosted by Dennis and Ellen Smith where we talked about the program and made plans for next year.
Bob and Susan Winship, Moira Yip, Dennis and Ellen Smith and Mary Adams created and installed a self-guided plant walk at Heald-Bradley leaving from the Flat Hill parking area. Look for the self-guided plant walk at the Kezar River Reserve next year and the permanent self-guided trail at the Wilson Wing Moose Pond Bog Preserve.
I also offered the natural history course again this year. On a beautiful August day, eight of us took to the woods to read the forested landscape at Heald-Bradley Ponds Reserve and search for animal sign at the Kezar River Reserve. Along the way, we discovered stone walls and cellar holes; evidence of glaciers, wind and rain; moose scat and raccoon tracks and much in between.
As much as we tried to keep things the same, we also added a few things this year. The GLLT now has a growing e-mail list-serve where we post upcoming programs, including guided walks, evening presentations and other things we think you might want to know about. If you are interested in joining this list, please send me an e-mail at Bridie.McGreavy@maine.edu. We videotaped the summer lecture series, and our programs will be airing on Lake Region Television this winter. We will have copies available to borrow at the office. Finally, next summer look for two additional programs in the evening natural history series which will be co-sponsored by the Kezar Lake Watershed Association (KLWA) and will focus on lake and watershed-related topics.
I learned this year that the educator position is not a job that one person does alone. The GLLT education program is a community in which docents and participants come together to explore the natural world as a means for encouraging its conservation. I am grateful to have stepped into this community and I look forward to helping it grow in the coming years.
A sphere?
Complexity lurks in the most familiar places.
Avoiding the Dusty Shelf Syndrome: Making science matter for Maine communities
This piece originally appeared in the Lakes Environmental Association Summer 2011 newsletter.
Those of us in the natural resource management world all have them: the technical science reports accumulating dust on our shelves. Next time you are at LEA, check the bookshelves in Peter or Colin’s office and you are likely to find several of these reports. Pull one off the shelf, thumb through the pages and you will read jargon like, “Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL)”, “internal phosphorus recycling”, and “benthic oxygen depletion.” All of these terms are useful for the scientists and managers, like Peter and Colin, who understand how these terms inform land-use decision making. But for many, these words are a barrier that may prevent us from understanding important information relevant for our lives.
In my work on the Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI) at the University of Maine, I am interested in this challenge of how to effectively communicate science. A couple of the questions I am asking include: How do scientists avoid the “Dusty Report Syndrome” and successfully communicate their research to public audiences? How do different approaches to science communication influence the ways in which people think and make decisions about science? My research comes at a time when fostering an understanding of science is a significant challenge, as Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum describe in their book Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future.
There are a variety of reasons why public understanding of science is complicated and one of them has to do with a central feature of the scientific process: peer review. Good science is peer-reviewed and scientists, from the earliest time in their careers, are trained to write for peer audiences who critically evaluate their research for potential publication. Peer review helps ensure science-informed decisions are based on accurate information. We need to know, for example, the phosphorus limits that are part of a Total Maximum Daily Load were derived from a robust scientific process. Peer review helps give us that confidence.
But if science communication stays stuck in the language of peer-reviewed journal and technical reports, the information necessary for broader understanding and decision making may sit on the shelves of the few people conversant in that language. This is why efforts like LEA’s decision maker training program are important to provide people with the information they need to make decisions in ways that make sense and are personally relevant. But this is also where the knowledge of science and the action of management meet. It is not enough to train planning board members in how to calculate phosphorus export and assume that once given the right information they will make decisions to support lake protection. In the same way that the choices about phosphorus export are informed by science, the choices about how to communicate science need to be informed by empirical research. Further, the outcomes of these communication efforts need to be thoroughly evaluated to ensure that program goals are met.
Many scientists spend lots of time and resources conducting their research so it will pass peer review and they spend less time finding ways to meaningfully communicate their work beyond the academic publication. Environmental organizations, like LEA, spend considerable time and resources attempting to communicate science and less time thoroughly evaluating the efficacy of these efforts. This is an opportunity to link different kinds of knowledge and action to genuinely improve public understanding of science. This is a gap I hope to help fill through my research by working with scientists and organizations in Maine communities to find ways to strengthen and expand science communication.
Wilding
I followed her around the edge of Fields Pond, her feline steps precise in the snow. She sat for a moment under a low hanging hemlock branch, her bobbed tail visible in the tracks she left behind. I saw her in that moment, sitting under the branch, her eyes alert in the dim light of night, her whiskers catching the vibration of a squirrel asleep in the tree overhead. She sat, listening, waiting, breathing…and so did I.
