 And this series is an ongoing partnership between the Library of Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. She's the Executive Director of that organization. We've been doing this for almost two years. We aspire to bring a diverse group of speakers to share different aspects of the work that can be made, made towards greater endurance and sustainability. And we typically meet here in the Ryan's Auditorium on the 4th Wednesday of the month at around 5.30 p.m. Next month, we're really excited. We're partnering with several other area organizations. We're going to be screening the documentary in Donland at 6 p.m. on October 24th. So we hope that you'll come and join us for a free show in this movie. It's a moving and groundbreaking film about the Maine Wabanaki Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first of its kind in the nation. And we're pleased to welcome two special guests who are integral in the creation of the film. And we will also be joined by students in the telling room. And we'll be presenting pieces created specifically for the occasion. Tonight is sort of our kickoff for the season. We're very pleased to have Nat Neal right here. He co-wrote the Naturalist Notebook. And he's a professor at Bowdoin. And tonight he's going to describe the origin of the project and the joy of the challenge and fulfillment of keeping a systematic future drill. I'm just going to introduce him. Hi. I'm Jess Burton. And I direct the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We're an organization based here in Portland. And we work with 19 land and water conservation organizations that focus their work in Southern Maine. We provide services to those organizations. And we also provide a space for them to work together to think about cross boundary and broader conservation projects. So basically our core is sort of about relationship. And that's what is so special about our relationship with the Portland Public Library and the series that we partner with them to produce. And the variety of features we've had over the last two years has been tremendous. And we're just so excited to be thinking about future topics. Any of you in the audience is a speaker or knows of interesting topics that couldn't have a voice here in Portland. Please contact one of us at some point either today or if you can reach out to us by email or phone. So we're thrilled to have Matt tonight. We've been waiting. He scheduled this a little while ago and we're really excited. And we've been waiting for this. So Matt is the co-op with Baron Heinrich, one of my favorite authors of all so. He is the vast professor of natural sciences at Portland. And the 2015 Wunderga winner of the Ecological Society of America's Odum Award for Excellence in Ecological Education. He is the author of numerous scientific publications. Oops, he's much cheaper. And the co-editor of Monteverde Ecology and Conservation is going to travel about the forest. He recently released a very exciting project which you may have heard of called Nature Moments that people mark a little bit about. And he's about to head out on an adventure to Columbia to teach there performance. So we're thrilled to get him in this window of time. Thank you. Thank you, Jess. Thanks, Nate. Well, thanks everybody. If I speak like this, can you hear me okay or would you prefer me to be behind the mic? All good like this? So it's an intimate crowd. Let's make this informal. Feel free to pepper me with questions. I'm going to actually pepper you with some questions and quiz you. I've had decades of being a university professor, so I just can't quit. And I see a whole bunch of pupils here that I'm going to put to work. So what I'm going to do in the next 45 minutes or 50 minutes is to give a very brief overview my perspective on nature journaling. And then I want to talk about the origins of this book project with Baron Heinrich. Give you kind of a boil down five tips on how to be a naturalist. I'm guessing there's some pretty good naturalists already in the audience, and you may have some of your own tips to share. I'll show you one of the Nature Moments to kind of give you a sense of the progression of my own thinking. And more than that, my own sense of the importance of putting knowledge to action or just getting involved to try to make the world a better place. And then if there's time and you still look like you are ready for some more, I might do a very short reading from the book. So let's start with just a little bit of biology. I went to a talk the other day by Tom Fleischner, who's the director of the Natural History Institute in Prescott, Arizona. And he cited a paper which I just loved. It was published in 2015 in the Journal of Seedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences on one of the most prestigious scientific journals. And the conclusions of the authors after a controlled experiment was that going on nature walks and thinking about nature reduces the frequency of morbid ruminations. I love that term. It's a fairly secluded term. But essentially it's a precursor to the nature of mental illness. So if you have morbid ruminations about the state of the world these days, go for a nature walk. You take some notes. And this book may give you some guidance about how to do it. I'm sure you can check it out at the library for free. And I've got one of the Nature Moments that tells you how to make your own for free as well. I decided to write this book after I reacquainted myself with a book I didn't even know I had been taught from. Anna Comstock wrote a book called The Handbook of Nature Study in the early 20th century. And I'm guessing from some of the people my age here that you probably either read this book or taught like I was by somebody who read this book. Is anybody familiar with this book? Well, and the origins are really quite interesting. This book is a giant book. I'll make a comment about that in just a moment. But its origin was a series of pamphlets that the New York State Agriculture Department produced because in the late 1800s in New York a lot of people were leaving the countryside going to New York City and there was an agricultural depression. It simply was not enough food. Farmers were not producing food for the many people who were in the cities. And people seemed to be losing touch with nature. So they thought a way to inspire young and future farmers and solve this very real food need, food shortage need was to turn young people onto nature. So these little pamphlets began to know how to track, how to make plaster casts of raccoon tracks. Remember that? I don't remember that. Or how to spatter a toothbrush dipped into ink on a screen with that fern on white piece of paper and then lift the fern and it was beautiful. Silhouette of the fern. That's all in this series of pamphlets. And Anna Constauk put it together into this handle of Nature Center. She says something very interesting at the beginning of this book. It's 887 pages. It weighs several pounds. She apologizes for the length of the book. It does not contain more than any intelligent country child of 12 should know about his environment naturally and without effort. So she just expected and really anticipated that people were losing the ability that everybody should know this, that they didn't understand essentially ecological literacy. So this sort of is an echo of what many people talk about today. But I think 100 years ago she was despairing about what people did not know about nature. They knew I had a lot more about nature than I do today, most people. So I thought, okay, well, what can I do? What do I know that can maybe help people re-engage with nature? And I thought nature generally was a good place to start because it's something I've done for pretty... I won't say intently or intensely because it's actually it's a very easy thing for me to do. But with some concentration I've been doing it for a little over 30 years now. And I was curious about the origins of nature generally. It actually goes back before Thorough. I'll make a comment about Thorough. But Gilbert White was one of the first formal nature journals. He was a British parcel. And he referred to his very parochial view of the world. But he didn't mean parochial in the kind of negative way. He meant parochial because it was a country parish. That's what the term referred to. And he knew everything about nature in his parish. And wrote it down in the Natural History of Sulphur, which is actually one of the most widely published books. It's not all that well known today, but it's had more than 200 editions. We credit Gilbert White from these late 1700s as being one of the first nature journals. But the more famous one, more familiar one for Americans anyway, is Henry David Thorough who published a journal that had a quarter of a million words in it. So it was like one of the points I want to probably the major point that I want to leave you with is that the way he did his journal was historical, epic, crucial for literature and philosophy and for the foundation of conservation, but actually was way too wordy to be useful as a way for people to nature journals. So I'm going to make a point that a lot of what you will read about how to do a nature journal, is not the way to increase your understanding of nature. It's a great way to avoid more illuminations and to put stuff in, but not a good way to pull it out. And Thorough realized that himself laid with his life after he started to become exposed to Darwin's origins in 1859. So quite late in his life and he began to think around the scientists at the Museum of Comparative Psychology at Harvard. I'm not even positive it was called that then. And he went back to his journal and he started to pull stuff out on the boarders and out of these sifting through these quarter of a million words. And he produced for the first time now a really workable way to synthesize his observations, very careful observations in nature and he produced tables like this. When I first came upon this table which was actually late in the writing of our book, I thought, oh my god, Thorough has scooped me again. Because this is very similar to the format that we use. And what he's had across the year, about the years, 1852, 1853 and so on, actually interestingly, has given me a mug with water in it that says, I love spreadsheets. And this is a spreadsheet. That's actually Thorough pulled this stuff out. And he was interested in when white pine, that's his handwriting on the left, and I'll just type to the right so you can read it a little better. When white pine is fine with pine it's in the converse, lots of broadwood trees leave that. So this is this table of when they leave down into the years. So there's an early exercising in mindfulness about a simple thing, like when do you see a fresh green foliage of converse? And does it differ between years? And the only way to answer that question about having to read a quarter of a million words is to pull it out and put it in a table and then scan your eye up and down and left and right. You can compare between species, you can compare between years. So that was a real breakthrough really. But again, even though he's using data from 10 years before he died he actually didn't synthesize it until the early 60s, really his last few years. So there are lots of wonderful books out there about how to be a nature journalist. You may own some of them, you may love some of them I own a bunch, I love them as well. They've taught me about drawing and they've taught me about reviewing my innermost thoughts and yet I don't find them useful. They haven't actually taught me to be a observer of nature. Or at least they haven't allowed me to put my thoughts down in the way that I can then distill and predict the future because I understand I can start to feel the rhythm of nature. I'll show you what I mean. Kind of what's good and bad about this kind of traditional book. Here's a page from one of these How to a Nature Journalist. And it's got a little bit of everything. It's got lovely watercolors. I wish I could have an artist like this. It's got kind of a track of handwriting and a little bit of anecdotal, a little bit of philosophy. But some good, very good, there's some good quantitative science. So for example, if you focus in here, here's something, a 1 in 4, the ground problems, you came up close, you got a little bit of behavior. So that's actually in there. But you can see that even pulling this little bit of information from conservation is a little bit of a later, not just pulling out, but actually even writing it. If I had to write a page for every day that I'm going to look at nature, I would give up sort of the way I gave up with all those many diaries that I had as a teenager. I imagine something like that same thing. It was starting this summer in your book and you were so excited and you got about four pages in and you just ran out of gats. That's kind of the problem. I'm all about not nothing but smoothing it, making it super easy because that's the only way, at least for me, that I'm going to pay attention to nature over the decades and that's where you really start to see pattern in nature. In 1989, my sister, an authority Stevens, who's a wildlife biologist in British Columbia gave my wife and me, more actually my wife, but I quickly co-opted it, what she called a ten-year gardening journal and it wasn't about natural history, but I realized I could not really write down when we plant onions and when we harvest tomatoes, but I can start to record when I hear first robin singing in the spring or wood frogs calling, or the first robin. So I started and kind of took this journal over and just kind of came under this format as far as I know pretty much on her own. My original journal that I co-opted here looks like, is that lying flat, you have 10 days across and 10 days, 10 years rather down the side with a little box, so that's all you get to write. Now you could always put a little asterisk and cross-correlate with a journal or a book of watercolor sketches, something that you have and say you see page 14 of your journal or you pour your interval thoughts or you actually do a pen and ink sketch, but these little squares don't give you much space to write more than a few abbreviated observations and that actually is a virtue as it turns out. So there are 100 squares open at a glance. After 10 years I wrote the torii and I said, ooh would you give me another journal? I've used that one out and after 10 more years would you give me another one? And so I've actually put it up my request for the fourth decade of journals. I liked it before better than our books. It has more squares and I'm used to that. So I decided that I would approach Eric Heinrich. I'd known him when I was a graduate student at the University of Washington. He was at Berkeley on the faculty before he came to the University of Vermont. And then we kind of reconnected when we were both in New England. And I said, I got a great idea for a book. I essentially want to tell people about nature journaling and I want the book to be kind of, basically it's about the naturalist. It's about the owner of the book. It isn't about us. And we'll write a little preamble that would be kind of like the instruction manual to a lawn mower if you look at it once and then you file it away and then the rest is for you. So that was the original idea of the book. I said, I'll do all the work. What I'd love from you is your observations as a naturalist, your gravitas, your name and some of your sketches. And he said wow, fabulous, no work book and all I've got to do is give you some sketches. So he handed me a thumb drawing. And I took it back. I put it in his cabin in Well in Northern Maine and turned out that the thumb drawing had 900 watercolour paintings and nobody had ever seen them before. And he had just been caught. He showed me his first journal. He has been nature journaling longer than I have. In fact, he began his nature journal when he was a 12-year-old boy and this is a close-up of his nature journal. He just came from Germany. His family had fled Poland during the war. If you haven't read the Snoring Bird, the biography of his father and a bit of an autobiography is just a beautifully told story. His father actually stole mouse traps from the Berlin Museum and used it to capture rodents so he could feed his family during the food shortages at the end of the Second World War after the war. He immigrated to Maine in the 1950s. Baron is just learning English so you see a few arrows there. You'll see a few titles here on his shoulder. One that I think is most charming is that he's found a messed up red-shouldered hawk and he's monitoring it and he says the eggs are slightly hatched and by that it was incubated. He didn't know where it was incubated so there was partial development of the eggs but he just reached out from where it hatched. That was the origin of this project. It was published in October 2017 and I think we probably started writing and organizing about two years, two and a half years before that. Any book authors here or anybody with ambitions to be a book author, I'll just tell you one more thing about this. I got online and I published a book, a scholarly book before but I hadn't published a more popular book and I didn't really know how it went about finding a publisher and persuading them to take on the project. So I got online found out how to write a book proposal and followed what it said and sent it off to Houghton, Newfoundland and some of the major publishers got a few little bits of interest but at the end of the day, nobody wanted to publish it. So I was about to give up and someone mentioned this small publisher to me and that was the first time that the editors, the acquisitions editors really just said oh my gosh, this is fabulous. I'm telling this story by the way this is a story about perseverance. So don't give up. If you're an author and you're getting rejected, the point of this story is don't give up. So I didn't give up. I finally had somebody interested and I went and met with them. They just said, this is dynamite, let's go, go, go. I went back to my office two days later and they wrote an email saying we're so sorry to disappoint you the editor says we just don't have the bandwidth right now. And that was sort of the end of the road. I knew I had a good idea but I couldn't find anybody and several people were also saying why would you want in the 21st century a handwritten journal when everybody's using dapplers and the clock. So I just hadn't found the right match. This was the last shot. I thought, okay, what the heck I'll ban any publisher and give it to my friends and anybody who's interested. A week or two after that one of the acquisitions editors from the main publisher wrote me and said, you know, have you tried a story publishing part that's in North Adams, Massachusetts? This is the kind of book they love. I didn't want to mention it before because we wanted to publish it. But since we're not going to try that anyway. That's the way that I'm publishing it. My baron, who has published more than 20 books saw the galley proofs in the way they treated the color of his illustrations. He said, what am I doing with problem network? I should be going to the story publishers. They were fabulous. But it was like the 15th publisher that I wrote. Stick with it. Go get your new book. This is an example of one of the illustrations that was on the Sun Drive and I knew, oh, this is a different book than I thought. It's not going to be a long or instruction manual but we're actually going to we're actually going to build a structure down there that's going to be even more useful and more beautiful. So this is us having brainstorming. We decided to we're both teachers and decided to dedicate the book to teachers. Our greatest natural resource I really feel that more and more as we kind of go into kind of funny dark ages where we don't know the difference between fact and opinion and falsehood and it's all getting learned and the experts are to verify and our only salvation is for everybody to drop what they're doing and become a teacher. We need teachers, we need good teachers and we sometimes don't appreciate our teachers in our public as we should. We also decided very nice and saw that kids are through college and their house is paid off to donate 100% of the wealth used in the book to conservation and environmental education. So my portion I'm donating to Maine Audubon the Organization for Tropical Studies a lot of work in Costa Rica where I've done work and Massachusetts Audubon just where I kind of cut my teeth as a naturalist, as a boy and Baron is giving his to the Forest Society of Maine. So if you're not members of the Audubon Chester down the road Gilson Farm is a fabulous resource and you watch busloads of kids coming from all over the state, the Liston Auburn, Portland and they are doing a fabulous job in environmental education so they deserve our support. So let me describe the structure of the natural history journal in our book. It's very much like my sister-in-law's journal, except it has only four days per page, so eight across the top and only five years instead of ten. And I don't know why a story helps you push that it's a smaller format than my original spiral bound journal made by my sister-in-law. So that's part of the constraint. Maybe they wanted to sell twice as many and therefore it's only five years instead of ten. I think though what really pushed them was that they saw that the average person who may not yet be a naturalist or may not have had any experience with nature generally would look at a ten year project but that's daunting. I'm not going to do that. But I might be able to do five. So many of them, that's the structure, eight days across, these are bi-flat bindings that you can just cross for five years. And the advantage of this, but I'll show why this spreadsheet format is so useful. So these are some actual data from my journal. I transcribed them onto the format of the naturalist notebook of the book itself. These are the actual things that I had written in the squares. And you can see it. First of all I don't write much. I don't write much because I don't have a lot of spare time. I suspect you don't have a lot of spare time. I keep my journal right by the kitchen window where I eat breakfast every morning and I can eat a piece of toast and I can write with my right hand when I see something. So I don't write much. I do it fast. I use abbreviations and I save my feelings for another book perhaps. I'm just about feeling the pulse of nature. I want to learn the rhythms of nature. So I use abbreviations typical of ornithologists too. They'll take letters. So black cat chicken for example. B-C-C-H black cat C-H chicken. I want to show the advantage of a spreadsheet approach here. Now you've seen this already. Pick the pattern out. Y-R-W-A stands for Young Rumped War Blur and Merlin War Blur. And rather than writing out today I saw the first in writing out my RST. I just do one ST of Y-R-W-A and I know what that means the first yellow rumped warblur. There's a glossary in the back of our book so you can actually have with an alphabetized all the letters of the alphabet and you can put in your abbreviations and define them there. So if it's at all ambiguous I really encourage you to do that. So in 2014 I saw one on the 25th of April and then this is a bird that tends to show up these days under these three years in L.A. but not a surprise the bird is here but I can kind of fine-tune it and quantify it. And the reason I came is that I can scan my eye over a page. With my original 10 by 10 journal if you were to ask me when did Red Wing Black Reefs come back to my house on the Durham road in Brunswick over the last 30 years I can tell you in less than two minutes I looked through all to do that because each year has this ever huge road and you've got to thumb through it but in a spreadsheet it's really great and what's nice about it is that then you start to associate things so I now know that when I see forsythia coming in the blue I'm about to see yellow-run rollers which actually kind of look like forsythia they have a little bit, they're called butterflies it's another name for that so you start to associate things when I hear green frogs in August start to replace bullfrogs I know to go out to look for raspberries that's when they ripen so it gives you it connects things in nature in a different way and it would you might lose that now again as I said we got some pushback from people about why in the world do you want to take out a pencil when you could type and write a journal when you can put it in the cloud and share it like everything else with everybody in the world and it actually gets great there's no reason you can't do both so there are some fabulous citizen science websites, e-bird iNaturalist are terrific and in fact this is really one of the most amazing times to be a naturalist I would say in the early 21st century the first time in history I can go out in the woods I don't have a cell phone but if I had one or if I'm with someone who did have one and I saw a small moth in the woods I can take a picture of that moth upload it to iNaturalist or one of the Epidopterist websites and have a team of experts come to a consensus of what species of moth that was while I'm in the woods in 10 minutes early in my career as a field biologist if I want to know the name of an unusual insect I would have to collect it kill it, pin it put it in a box, nail it to Washington to the systematic entomology laboratory and hope that six months later I would get an opinion back for one person so it's a great period to use technology to take pictures to upload your data to participate in these important citizen science projects it's also a great time maybe an important time not to share everything but not to feel compelled to share everything I hate to tell you nobody probably cares when they're precipitating more backyard flowers just like they don't care about mine I care so it's sort of a it's not a private thing but it's a personal thing I also think and I have some empirical data as a teacher when you stop and write things down as opposed to when you type especially in a distracted way it actually takes knowledge and memories and lodges them in a different portion of the brain that actually makes them more easily retrievable I find that when I write things down I actually remember it longer than when I type and I know it's true for my students so it isn't just old people it is, I think it is the human mind when you first make up and you have a dream you can remember your dream for about two minutes when you first make up and by noon it is strong and I think that part of the brain when we store dream dreams is the same it's related to part of the brain where we have memories that are only digitally reinforced so upload your stuff share it on this is a local website but I think it is a place where you can get down putting a speed bump in your life and writing things down so let me show you what you can do with a spreadsheet like format and just a simple easy to do easy in and easy out that's the important part so I've been recording since 1991 when I see the first frost in my backyard from my kitchen window and I'm going to zoom in on these days and you see a couple of gaps and that's okay those are sabbatical years or I just wasn't paying attention I just didn't do it but that's okay there's no guilt here with this when you feel inspired to put stuff down when you don't have the time or inflammation you don't so take a look at these numbers here's the sequence beginning in the early 90s and then I jumped down in the year 2017 this is the date of the first frost so here's my first question for you if you look at these numbers what are you, or these data, these dates it looks like things are changing what way? what way? we're not, well look at the date today September 26th that's crazy, people are in shorts you didn't used to be in shorts in the early 90s I'll make this there I've had several days of frost dating by this point but now it's fairly routine to be early mid-October even late October before you get your first frost I remember when it snowed September 30th and here is something that I do in my unabredated notes if I make an observation that looks odd spring paper calling in January but I am sure it really was one I put an exclamation mark I just learned myself to the fact that if I go back and look at that a year later oh that wasn't just being dyslexic or a title that really didn't happen so it really did snow September 30th, 1992 so we had some September snowfalls and October snowfalls but now it's often mid-November so this is something that came in my own backyard trust but verify about climate change my backyard climate is changing so my observation would test the hypothesis and rule out the fact that climate change is a fraud at least based on my observations of animals and plants and frost it is getting warmer in the fall really I had a lovely conversation really a remark that someone came up and told me after finding the book a woman from New York said I was not brought up to be a naturalist I had no idea even where to start but I just had a feeling that I should know more about my neighbors' plants and the animals around me and she said you know I read the book and the book said oh you can do it start wherever you are she said okay I didn't know where to start I started by writing down the temperature on the thermometer every morning that was my way of engaging nature and she said the oddest thing happened after several weeks of doing that I started to snow flowers and to hear birds singing well similarly I started with kind of the obvious stuff and you know the birds the flowers and trees but I started to branch out now and I found that actually my capacity to be interested in and knowledgeable about curious about other groups of organisms that I thought were climate I didn't pay any attention to them or thought they were difficult so dragonflies are something I started to pay attention to I have another reason to do that they're my plan B when birds go down the tube dragonflies are kind of like birds they're very colorful, territorial and active today they don't sing but they do just about anything else that's cool so I decided okay I'm going to learn about dragonflies and here's another thing you can do with your journals is to pull out the analogy or the timing across time of different species of dragonflies so they're now great field guides to dragonflies of the northeast and actually the west and what I've done is just a way to show you 20 odd species of dragonflies through my backyard and the period of time where I see them and I want to put it out a couple of things this is the first great big dragonfly that you will see upon in New England and I didn't really recognize this until I started to pay close attention anybody know why they show up they actually show up probably a week earlier than American emeralds anybody know why this big species of dragonflies shows up first this is something I learned just through the journal turned out they're this group they're the only migratory dragonflies they actually winter down south and they come back they don't have to emerge in metamorphosis from the pond they arrive as adults having migratory from the south so that was interesting and the other thing I like to focus on and really glad that I learned is right about this time of year and for another month maybe a month and a half if you sit next to a pond or actually in a field these companionable red dragonflies will land on your knees well I now know that they are meadow walks cherry faced meadow walks have a cherry colored face and they and the autumn meadow walks are some of the last dragonflies that you'll see most of the early bullchains see they just dig up and they overwinter as a nest in the pond so good way to kind of expand your view of nature okay so now we're going to work again these are actual data of a different sort from my own term compiled from the late 80s to 2016 and what I applauded is here on the X axis here the horizontal axis and the data appears on the Y axis or the vertical axis so each of those points represent a particular year 2000 and a particular time where something appeared okay everybody follow what this is so tell me if you were describing this pattern to somebody on the telephone hey I'm in a presentation I need to answer the number question number two here here's what I've seen how would you describe this species one is starting to work here earlier yeah it looks like there's a little bit of a this red line is kind of dipping suggesting as you get more recent years it's coming earlier good in a predictable way or not there's a huge bit of variation you can't tell me in 2018 it's just going to be earlier or later you can't you'd be hard pressed to say I would not bet on that it looks like it's coming earlier and earlier and it's highly variable between years so this should be making you think a little bit about the biology and kind of going through your mind who could this be let me contrast that with species two another species vaccine scale slightly different dates but the same number of days I think that's a 30 day period there and same years how would you describe this one much more consistent much more predictable much less variable and you see a trend towards earlier anybody want to make a guess what these two species are yeah Canada news super guess and essentially you're in the right group mainly it's a bird and it's a bird that might be how about the other one Robin sorry Robin it's a little weird because they actually do over winter here despite what I said about the first Robin song in the spring it's not a Robin it's not an aura sorry that's a terrific guess so this is Wood Frogs over the top and Baltimore Whirls down at the bottom Wood Frogs spend the winter in shallow depressions not far from the pond where they're going to breathe very temperature dependent very snow level dependent Baltimore Whirls spend the winter in northern South America Central America their timing of their return is queued by David which has not changed over the last 30 years so this is a species biology is driven by temperature this is a species biology is driven by photo period is there a question about this do you ever use the technique of Brom door days yeah that would be a fabulous one too I don't for this it's normally done on the plants of course but it would work well here because I'm sure it's correlated with Wood Frogs come out at least in our pond we're more of a pond it's free of ice and it's above mid 30s high 30s that's when they come out and I'm sure that would be correlated with and also when there's just the snow it's mostly nothing with horticulture but a lot of fly fisherman would use it that's a great example that horticulture and you could label those too and learn about the pattern of leisure I have to tell you a funny story so all tomorrows come back to my house just about every year I couldn't believe my eyes two years ago I got an envelope in a mail from a mail carrier to take the Brunswick Times record find newspaper and she was offering a free subscription year subscription to the Brunswick Times record if you could guess when Baltimore Royals showed up in her back shop I thought man this is shooting fish in a barrel this is so easy anyway I was off by one day I didn't win the prize but I thought that was going to be easy so there could be some monetary so let me turn to five certain tips about being a nature journalist and a lot of it is simply repetition of what I told you before keep your records being easy as I say this is where I have breakfast there's my journal, there's my cereal there's my pencil I have a pencil and a journal couldn't be easier I spend no more than 10 seconds writing each of these observations then I get back to my busy day I'm looking out the window and it's super easy I'm usually a disciplined person so that's what's let me do this for 30 years not just effortlessly but with real pleasure do simple experiments this is something we don't I think teach you a model enough rather than just sit back on a couch and look at nature and say isn't it grand and watch nature videos I go out and mow a little half full not the whole thing and then go sit back and watch what happens or put up a bird mouse those are all experiments or snap a twig and look at the frogs of sap that come out uncountable and then do it again a week later this is how you I think engage with nature and you really can learn tremendous amount kind of a more experimental engagement Baron Heinrich is one of the most natural experimental scientists I know you pick this up in all of his books but when we were visiting once I looked out the window or I just haven't noticed some activity to my left and I looked out it was clear he had a bird feeder of some kind but when I went more closely can you see what he has on the stump he's got a couple of mice that he snapped in his cabin and while we were looking at him he came down and plucked the fur as they used to line the nest so that's actually a useful thing to do if you happen to snap a mouse don't just leave it in the trash that's what happens next make friends and know things about nature that you don't some of you may have known San Ristich the great mushroom guru I just love walking upwards with him Ralph Pope is someone else he knows a lot about liking and losses which are hard groups to learn on your own so if you can find a friend who knows more than you or someone who knows about birdsong and you don't stick with them bring a pad and a pencil there's a whole world about really loving people slightly eccentric who do field biology this is the annual gathering of the main mycological association if you haven't been on a little bit of forex you love them and they are super welcoming to people who know nothing and each one of the members will take you into their main and just teach you all about the mushrooms kind of like doing experiments and use all of your senses I had a student at Bowman who had come from Seattle and I think her family was also quite urban back a generation or two and I had a catapult and I wanted her to touch it or at least look closely at it but she was nervous and she was standing back and I said how would you even be able to know how many legs this thing has you weren't a little closer and she said I would Google it but you want to get close to a lunamoss and Kenny and then you can recognize the difference between males and females males have these very plubos and teni to pick up small pheromone molecules at low densities in the air and detect demons so that's just a matter of being attentive being close to things and then finally pass on your knowledge and put it into action I'm going to give you an example again in my backyard I have wood frogs this is an on just a stone stroke from our house and as you now know they mark a very equal lead pulse in a physical pair and what's called a plexus I think females is called a plexus here's a little attention to the female support then and every year I go and count the egg masses in my pond and I record when they come and it's so easy to hear so it's simple I can sit at the kitchen table again I hear it and throw it down I'm also sure you have sex wood frogs do you know how to tell me else what females are actually all you need to see is that the thumb they're like papayas muscular thumbs and the reason is that when they get a female in a plexus other males try to butt them off and dislodge them and so it's natural selection natural selection that's favored the evolution of super muscular thumbs in 2014 we had a banner year eggs we had 650 egg masses in the pond each egg mass has about 800 eggs and hatching success was really high because the leech populations that year were fairly low so there was an absolute river of tadpoles swimming around the pond and on June 14th I believe it was at 5 in the afternoon my wife went out for a swim in the pond and came back to the house and said every stroke I took I was getting tadpoles there are so many tadpoles this year in that pond I went out one upon the next day 20 hours 20 hours later and this is what I found every single tadpole in the pond was upside down showing me its white belly and the floor of the pond was littered with corks so I did what any of you would do just grab a couple corks and put them in the freezer and go out with some polygraphs and I counted the density of dead tadpoles and estimated 200,000 that had died in a 20 hour period and then I got online and I thought ok what could have caused this who could help me understand this and this led to the easiest scientific paper I ever wrote over the weekend practically in collaboration with Matt Gray at the University of Tennessee he's the world's expert in amphibian diseases specifically, rhinovirus and he did the molecular biology he said if you happen to save these specimens I said of course they're in the freezer I'll ship them to so he did the molecular biology PCR and quantified the rhinovirus and said they came back glowing so we published this paper which got a lot of press because it was about death which is always popular and it was a sudden, well-quantified and we knew what the cause was because it used to lie on the floor and what this has done is actually changed the way the individuals in wildlife now monitors our own pools it used to be they would get citizens to go out and look at pools, count egg masses and then you're done but you're not done because you need to return a month and a half later to see if the pond actually produced any surviving animals this is my grandfather and he was of a generation where he was sort of a gentleman hunter and I have four older brothers and when we all reached the age of puberty he imagined puberty he would summon us one by one down to his house and presented us with a shotgun and then take us out in the woods and fire off him up around and show us how to be safe and manly with guns so I was a fit of five boys in a row and when I came instead of a shotgun he gave me a double barrel pair of binoculars so that's kind of how I got my start and he taught me instead of how to shoot a gun he also later taught me how to recognize birds by their song and just for 12 year old boy absolutely magical just to wind it up now I'm going to end with a nature moment but after we published the book I read this poem by Mary Oliver this is just one of the stanzas of the poem called Sometimes and this actually scooped us as well this is the book pay attention be astonished and tell about it there is some urgency the Oxford Junior Dictionary which used to have the words acorn, pasture and fern needed to make room so they dropped those words and replaced them on log with snail and kind of paste so if we're going to listen to Anna Comstock we really do need to remind the children what a fern is and what an acorn is so the last thing then I'll end with is a one and a half minute video I took off last year and decided that in response to cuts of the environmental protection agency and kind of despair about support for conservation and environmental quality then I would try to make a video every week in my backyard about some aspect of nature and I actually made it this morning I was working in the very last long time I thought I would just show you one you can find these very easily on the modem website or the mainautomotor website or on youtube and they're just called nature moments so just google nature moments modem or nature moments mainautomotor and you'll find them so this is one of the I did you are on facebook I've seen you there I didn't do it though I didn't breathe it out or book face as my mother must have you noticed how much of the world is covered in lawn it looks pretty but think how much time we spend mowing it and how much gas we burn the lawns seem a little lifeless I wonder what would happen if you didn't use any pesticides or fertilizers and just let your lawn be for a little while when I tried that experiment the next thing I knew three dozen different kinds of flowers appeared out of what I had thought was a monoculture of boring grass mints like this heal all delicate bluets lemon butter cups lacy arrow it's true that most of the flowers were actually not native to the US they were originally introduced from Europe and Asia but that's okay they added to the biodiversity of my backyard and check out what I found visiting the flowers purled crescent butterflies bumblebees crab spiders eating hoverflies they in turn provided food for the pair of Phoebes that nested on our porch the original inspiration for lawns came from the manicured estates of the French and British aristocracy visible proof of their wealth and leisure in America the tidiness of your lawn is almost seen as a reflection of your moral character what better way to demonstrate that than to share some of your lawn with other animals and plants we have time for a few questions if you're happy to answer any questions hear your own thoughts two things one is the omega opium this flower serves a vital natural writing in Boston I think so anybody that's interested in that I know a lot of imagination and there's a book with all the echoes psychology but it's about living with creatures and your writing and hopefully available in the library what's that it's called echoes psychology it's the second edition we'll get on behind the break yes so we did the experiment of letting our first yard grow and I actually know about this whether I should scatter seed or plant something anyway we'll see what happened we had a few flowers early and then the top dry part of the summer and mostly just had the grass so the knee high beautiful we did have a rain chanterelles up here in the bottle and little blueberry bushes but not a lot of flowers so we're now coming to the end of the first summer would your advice be to now maybe scatter some native mate a lot of flower seed understanding that only a small fraction will take or just let it go in November and let it go again I'm all about bees so I personally would not plant it but if anything wrong with planting I think it's great I might instead personally do a little experiment I might mow a little square in the middle and I might even tear up the soil to expose some mineral soil it sounds like you've got blueberry it's either rocky or pretty dry so it's different from ours we also started with a pretty ratty lawn but I counted 36 last year I've been there double that and I bet you also have some interesting grasses too so totally up to you what the aesthetic is if you like that but I don't think you need to plant it I think you'll find especially if you dig up the mineral soil you'll find milk and seeds are going to come in and you can also by the way if you have fastidious neighbors or something you can just put a border of mowing through it and then mow a little a little samba like s through it a path and then it looks intentional and quite lovely I like it you're not spending the weekends mowing and it's interesting they're learning your dragonflies so we did mow the border and we actually put a sign up that said the pollinator project because I started to complain about it being uncamped they might see that there was a problem maybe hopefully you'll start a bath and then we'll spread your neighbor we're both our neighbors but we have started to yeah you have lots of flowers talk to them they have lots of flowers and butterflies they have lots of flowers and he's a university professor of Minnesota who set fire to the bull and then put a half a pack of sign up because she got something well fire actually that's another treat and it gets back to doing an experiment now all this is good when you mow you've done an experiment when you stop mowing you've done an experiment this is experimental science it's paying attention afterwards we haven't mowed for a long time and we've watched the plants migrate that's I don't like watching plants migrate I know but it's great fun now I see these put in rain-light emerald bonds especially when I go into one of the big box stores and I see the rows of poisons I they're what? they are and stuff is deadly and they're really quite bad I used to teach a lab when I first joined the faculty there 30 years ago where we'd take the students out and we only had an hour and a half to collect caterpillars in September the exercise was to record large samples of caterpillars in different micro-habitats look at the behavior, the color pattern the camouflage the warning color I went out to film caterpillars during the last few months and we split up we looked for an hour in August we could not find one caterpillar and that's when you probably go to butterfly members butterflies in general are so much scarcer than they were three years ago and the way scarcer they are than much other it's pretty astonishing but I think it's because people's lungs are just fresh poisons but that's psychedelic and they roll down the path every time they roll they take a butterfly and they say remember when you're used to the fire toys I've read about all this stuff on Facebook all the time and the other thing is if you do find that you do have literary wishes that means you have a sit in soil throw on a little more peat throw a little soil acidifier and encourage it if you have lawn underneath your trees throw down peat or a little bit of soil acidifier and the moss will come out it will be so happy and that number 5 of soil will be sour and the grass will hate it and people will just try to throw away and you don't have to throw moss that is a soil acidifier I was just wondering you showed us that your butterfly it was a pearl or something pearl crescent I saw them in I think that one was super calm like green lids, pearl crescents some of the frugal areas are still around but what did they do the diversity is way down did you see anything like this this year? usually I see a number in the spring I would say less and less each year I'm now quite excited to see them and they used to be the commonest one of the commonest early butterflies I saw them last year we used to have populations do tend to cycle not to remain example because I was just bearing about them for a couple of years and this has been a great summer for them I pretty much do the same thing you do with my journaling a lot of times I take a bet about when the ice leaves so I would bet on the first snow when the ice finally gets from the back yard that can never get to the sun but we didn't talk about anything indoors lately I've had a lot of ants in my house every year I write from when the ants come and I just sit here because I have to take all my sugar jars and put them in the same place and get them tight big lids and take the honey but have you ever looked inside your home for the spiders and the bugs inside? I have and there's a major moment entitled house invaders I don't know much that is so the long-legged silver spiders in our house lady bird eagles and then the question con for sea bugs those are the big three that we really can concentrate on but the ants are fabulous and you get this great succession of ants in your busy art kitchen over the course of the day so exactly the answer what's the most surprising notation that you've made in your journal? oh wow I'm going to look for two or three exclamation marks and I'm going to find it it would take me a couple of minutes but I can answer it if I had it I think this isn't that surprising first time I saw it I was surprised but now I can realize it's pretty good and that is thunder storms in January you go into the water cooler at work and late January oh my god, did you believe it? it was the first one in 2016 and in 2013 that it's regular that's what happens what else? oh gosh, I'm probably a little bit of a blank I don't know, the fun thing is this isn't all that surprising but it's one of those discoveries that is fairly fresh for me I've learned where a Phoebe spends the night in our backyard and I just stumbled and I flushed by mistake and I was doing some chore in the evening and I came out of the shrub so the next night I went out and looked in the shrub and he sits on the same twig every single night so I just love to go out with a black fight and see, yep, he is still there I can't believe he sits on that twig so yeah two questions, one is do you know what caused the random plastic? right so Rana is the scientific name for the genus of it's no longer used of wood frogs, bullfrogs, green frogs, that's Rana so it's a virus that attacks frogs and it came over from Africa probably with African clawed frogs the Xenopus and they used them in laboratory research and also permanently from pregnancy tests so that brought the virus over and got out in the late 1980s and started to appear in the wild in the 80s and 90s and now that we're paying attention we realize it really is a big problem I would be very sad if the spring comes when I don't hear good frogs but it's very hard on the wood frogs and it's very hard on the spotted salamanders and part of the problem with this virus is that it's tolerated by green frogs and bullfrogs and pinked turtles so they harbor it and so it's not as if you could wipe out a population of wood frogs and you could wipe out the virus the virus sticks around so what will save the wood frogs is going to be the evolution of resistance to the virus so hopefully there are some genetically distinct wood frogs with the capacity to survive this virus and your second question it's been a source of conversations on Facebook people I know and I've witnessed it myself unbelievable amount of dead squirrels on the road I just wondered if you had any that's a function of an unbelievable amount of live squirrels this year that are enforced by high population density forced to disperse and people are also seeing not just dead squirrels on the roads but squirrels swimming across the lakes and rivers I saw it for the first time this summer that was a weird sight so it's all about at least this is my understanding it's all about the fact that last year was a huge acorn year and beach mass year so I am quite positive that the squirrels are going to take it in the shims this winter it doesn't look like it there's going to be much winter food so they had high survival last year and whenever you get that the interactions between males young, subordinated males are forced to disperse across the road they get killed in one of my digital moments by the way called outsmarting squirrels which is about how to outsmart a giver feeder I put in a plug for examining road kills actually and I learned some cool things when I picked up some dead squirrels so I invite you on the drive home and you see a great squirrel scoop it up look at their nails look at their tones they are not as long as mine but they are very long and that explains how they can lead through the air and catch a branch in our tunnel thank you I have a question about Bea who is in second grade maybe she would love to journal any advice for a second grader make it easy make it fun and not be the way I was with my kids maybe a little bit too heavy can it in the end our kids came around and loved nature but they made through all their eyes having two tears of water so yeah just fun activities and at their own pace and I guess the really important thing is to for a moment pretend you are not afraid about deer ticks and let them get in the leaf litter cover themselves in leaves and then just do a little tick-jacking in the end of the day but don't make them afraid of nature that's the best the rest of it it's so natural to be curious about nature as a child but when you see so many parents just mentor caution oh no, sometime later I don't know, any other parents have any suggestions for how to make people enjoy nature but one of my favorite things for the fall is the cat surgery when the leaves get really dry they smell like cotton candy so it kind of just assimilating it to like cotton sweeteners cat surgery cat surgery is it ornamental? I think it's not needed but it's got your honey it's got Japanese ornamental I don't know it's pretty well configured it doesn't have a relationship to anything here that's right, so it wouldn't be a good test for insects these interdust species tend not to be but it's got a good smell there's lots of things smell I mean cherries and twigs in winter that's a great idea that's a nice bad news yellow birch get the kids to smell things and taste things I don't taste the quaking aspen taste nasty I'll never forget it but I also fear his headaches because it has salicylic acid in it but it's just those sorts of vivid experiences I think are I can remember so vividly someone hypnotizing a blue jade and he laid it on the ground and it was that he hypnotized the bird he caught it in the mist and it took the bird out the bird is struggling he stroked it gently on the breast and he laid it on the ground and took his hand away and the blue jade sat there and I have done this hundreds of times because it was so memorable to me and then he just said take your finger and hold it and it flew away those sorts of simple things I think can really sort of charge the light is it that very terrified like those fainting goats I don't know my hypothesis has been it's an adaptive reaction if you would say I've been pinned by a Cooper's Hawk and it's put his wings on you and it's pressed on the ground or a fox has its paw on you and then the fox grooms himself because you're not moving so they just plate in but I don't know they totally conk out Robbins you can do it too go in that lunch try it if you've got a bird in your garage or something just capture it squeezing the breathing of the chest and put their back on your palm so that's the way to hold the small bird and then gently stroke their brass without touching their feet you touch their feet and resets them so you just gotta touch the brass softly and get softer and softer until I'm not even touching them and then just like you're shoving a pancake off of a spatula get them on the ground on their back send me a video I'm sorry I did you're a fine bird I came in Tokyo I think I must have done that and the bird actually this was in the nights ago and there was a guy who kept doors open and the bird just went back and ate the Cheerios under my table he went with a fell and then did it for a year and he came back with his child child I don't know they didn't know that because it was he had flown into the house and captured it and I must have done that he killed it you were probably just kind of comforted and were hypnotizing as it turned out well thank you very much thank you