When we went to our local frog hangout this week, Pamelia took this gorgeous photo of newly laid eggs.

Illuminated Frogs' Eggs, Duck "Teeth" and More on that Boston Photo

April 19, 2013

Each starts as one cell, then divides into two cells and then four cells and then eight cells and on and on in a beautiful illustration of nature performing mathematics: 2 raised to the umpteenth power. Frog's eggs usually look like a dark, globular mass (or, if you will, dark, globular math), but the other day they shimmered and sparkled with clarity in the late-afternoon sunlight striking our local vernal pool. Pamelia preserved the moment in these photos. I think they're cool.

We knew that the eggs were freshly laid because they hadn't been there the day before.

This is a close-up from one of the pictures. Note that the eggs have slots on top, as if they're meant to be split into four. The also resemble chocolate morsels.

Other Bird News This was a first: I received an email request yesterday asking for permission to use one of my photos in a nature video about ducks. We'll let you know when the video (which is going to be a humorous but educational one for kids) is available. The picture, which ran with a 2012 blog post about the death of a duck by our house, is below.

This is the shot being used in the nature video. The duck had been attacked by a goshawk by our house and had just died. Those aren't teeth; they are lamellae, which are used for filtering food from the water.

Buffleheads arrived two days ago. That's a male on the left and a female on the right. They're quite small and dive for crustaceans. They nest in holes in trees—yet another reason why it's animal-friendly to leave old, and even dead, trees standing … — Buffleheads arrived two days ago. That's a male on the left and a female on the right. They're quite small and dive for crustaceans. They nest in holes in trees—yet another reason why it's animal-friendly to leave old, and even dead, trees standing unless they're a danger.

The first purple finch of the season just showed up.

The Boston Photo (and Afterwards) Those of you who follow The Naturalist's Notebook's Facebook page—or read the Mount DesertIslander newspaper—know that Pamelia and I experienced a freaky coincidence last Monday, the day of the Boston Marathon. At about 3 p.m., as we walked along the shore of Maine's Western Bay, she found an unusual shard of sea glass with BOSTON embossed on it. It made us think happily of our recent trip to that city, and made me think of the marathon. The piece was beautiful, so I photographed it against the sky.

Back home about an hour later, I turned the computer on to download my photos and learned the horrific, almost unbelievable news from the marathon. I checked to make sure no one from SI had been hurt. When I put the photo and story on our Facebook page, it was clear that people needed to express their shock and sadness over the bombings. Many of them shared or commented on the photo. One suggested that we see it as a symbol of Boston's resilience in the face of tragedy. I liked that perspective. The sea glass (which has 1850 embossed on it as well) had survived many years of battering by the ocean and had come through it looking beautiful. In the end, more than 26,000 people viewed the photo on Facebook, and the editor of the Islander emailed and asked if the newspaper could run it. The picture appeared on the front page.

The Boston tragedy and the story of the perpetrators continues to dominate the news and to strike a personal note with the two of us. In November we were in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia; on the other side of those mountains is Chechnya, home to the two brothers' ethnic roots. One of the brothers shot a policeman at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by the school's Stata Center, where Pamelia took my photo last month (below). I didn't even know the name of the architecturally distinctive building until I read a news account of the shooting.

Pamelia took my photo in front of the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Building at MIT.

The decisions made inside human brains are fascinating and, in cases like this, horrifying. We're currently creating a brain room at The Naturalist's Notebook because we're among the many people eager to explore and understand the human brain. What neural connections or malfunctions make a person kill? What brain mechanism makes a person love? What makes a person rational or irrational, or even able to define what it is rational? What leads us to perceive a shard of old glass as a symbol of life, death, sports, terror, humanity, inhumanity and an entire city? The answers lie inside our heads, inside a five-pound organ that is more mysterious than the entire universe.

The Sun Room at The Naturalist's Notebook is still evolving, but it keep looks cooler (and hotter)...

Answer to the Last Puzzler 1) Sir Francis Bacon died from pneumonia he developed while studying how freezing of meat can help preserve it.

2) The two cones in the photo are from a white pine and a white spruce.

Today's Puzzler Match the quote to the naturalist who said it: a) Jane Goodall b) John Muir c) David Attenborough

1) "In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks." 2) "My mission is to create a world in which we can live in harmony with nature." 3) "I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving."

Two Notebook-friendly naturalists hiking in Acadia National Park.

Guest Blog: Harvard's Michael R. Canfield On What Naturalists Carry

July 23, 2011

We are such fans of the new book Field Notes on Science & Nature, edited by Michael R. Canfield, that we asked Michael to write a guest blog for us. Michael is a lecturer on organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. As he explains on the book's website, he is "fascinated by the history of biological exploration and how scientists and naturalists record work in their field notes." Field Notes On Science & Nature is filled with examples of the sketches, notes, paintings, photographs and calculations done in the field by some of the world's leading scientists and naturalists, whose essays take the reader on a fun and enlightening journey through the world of natural history. Michael himself is a field naturalist and scientist. As he describes it, "My research investigates the evolution of flexible developmental pathways in geometrid caterpillars, or, to put it simply, how the camouflage forms of caterpillars can be determined by what they eat."

Michael's book (available at The Naturalist's Notebook)

A caterpillar (not one of Michael's specimens) explored the Notebook deck this week.

WHAT NATURALISTS CARRY
by Michael C. Canfield

You might think that it would be hard to fall in love with a hammock. After all, a brief perusal could suggest that these devices are no more than a bit of fabric and a tangle of ropes. The naturalist and explorer William Beebe, however, would urge you to think otherwise. He was so attached to his sling that he wrote a 35-page ode to his hammock in Edge of the Jungle (1921). It turns out that for this hard-core naturalist a simple military supply hammock was wholly inferior, and he felt a true field worker needs a hand-woven indigenous hammock. And not one created by any of the peoples of the Neotropics, but one carefully crafted by the Carib peoples of the islands of the Caribbean. Beebe clearly was attached to his gear.

I recently participated in a symposium to remember the legendary New England naturalist Les Mehrhoff and observed a modern example of this phenomenon of gear attachment. In this case, almost all of the presenters wore a hand lens around their neck, and described how they, like Les, would be naked without this critical tool for studying nature. Unfortunately, I never got that memo and presented, so to speak, in the buff.

There are certainly many things we naturalists carry in the field that do not rise to this level of trusted and essential equipment. There are vials, jars, plastic bags, binoculars, camera equipment, and all manner of fancy nylon- and Gortex-inspired clothing. A waterproof-breathable jacket is nice to have in a storm, but certainly the likes of John Burroughs did just fine without this along with almost all of our current gadgets. However, a few things do transcend the inanimate and find the place of a loved and trusted friend.

Over our time in the field these trusted implements are either actively chosen or slowly rise above all of our other less important gear. It might be a pair of boots that has saved our skins from snakes or slippery slopes in the rainforest, or a hat that fended off brutal rain pellets on a mountaintop crackling with lightening. These holy items have kept us company and served us well on many adventures, and I think that each of us has one or two, regardless of whether these intimate relations are revealed to others.

My most trusted and important piece of gear is a field notebook. A small notebook, paired with a simple pen, allows me to record observations and sightings to which I can return years in the future, either to access data or relive adventures. It provides a rigorous companion who forces me to focus on really observing nature, because to sketch, draw, and describe an experience in a notebook takes concentration and investment. And the notebook page can be a wicked critic. When my ideas and output are poor, my companion holds me accountable. But when I have stayed true to the tradition of note-taking that stretches back three centuries, my notebook stays open and lets me know that these records will remain in the spiritual company of the records of so many other naturalists who have worked to understand the complicated riddles of nature. Regardless of whether you are already engaged with hammocks or hand lenses, hand-sewn boots or fancy parkas, I recommend a trip to out with a field notebook. You may be surprised to find a lifelong companion. **********

Jane Goodall News

We just learned that Lilian Pintea of The Jane Goodall Institute is coming to the Notebook in August and will give a lecture on Jane, chimpanzees and the new technology that is changing the way species populations are mapped and studied. "I absolutely love your Notebook and what you do," Lilian says. Stay tuned for details about the event.

Here's a sample of the work done by the children in Kathy Coe's papermaking workshop this week. Kathy's nature-themed workshops for kids will continue every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday all summer.

A yellow jacket made off with the head of a nearby smooshed caterpillar during our Earth News workshop.

A Little Squirrelly
As you know if you've ever encountered one, red squirrels are feisty. They loudly chatter at us—seemingly telling us to get lost—even when we're filling the bird feeders at which they dine. Friends staying at a nearby cottage this week weren't used to taking such verbal abuse from small animals, but we assured them that it's normal. Here's a short video that shows how fearless red squirrels can be:

Answer to the Last Puzzer:
Match the great naturalist to one of his quotes. Answer: a) “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”–John Burroughs (1837-1921) b) “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”—John Muir (1838-1914) c) “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ ”—Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)

Today's Puzzler:
To which animal group do lizards belong? a) amphibians b) reptiles c) invertebrates d) mammals

A Cool Thought for These Hot Days:
This week is the anniversary of the invention of the ice cream cone. The cone was born in a flash of ingenuity at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis when ice cream vendor Charles Menches ran out of bowls. A nearby concessionaire, Ernest Hamwi, rolled one of the thin Persian waffles he was selling into a cone shape and offered it to Menches. And we remain grateful.

As we reached the water, the first stars were just beginning to appear overhead.

Exploring at Night

April 19, 2011

What typical daylight activities have you tried after dark? Swimming? Running? Cross-country skiing? Eating breakfast? This week I took a night hike with a group at the Blue Horizon Preserve, a new Maine Coast Heritage Trust property off Indian Point Road on Mount Desert Island. The weather was too cold for any wood frogs to be singing, but under the illumination of a nearly full moon, our group enjoyed a one-mile round trip to the edge of Western Bay.

The buzz when I arrived was about a cattle egret. Various group members had seen one—hundreds of miles farther north than usual—the day before at the Babson Creek preserve a few miles away. Cattle egrets often hang around herds eating insects that would otherwise pester steers and cows. They're a cool-looking type of heron.

As we began our walk, we talked about vernal pools and woodcocks (didn't see one) and studied the remnants of a bigtooth aspen that pileated woodpeckers had been dismantling. Humans have evolved to be extra alert—if not outright terrified—when exploring in the dark, but with 19 people in the group, this was a wonderfully relaxed stroll, with participants ranging in age from roughly five to eighty-five.

A sign at the trail head: To put it in golf terms, if your dog takes a drop, you must pull out your No. 2 iron—even if you consider what's in front of you an unplayable lie—hit INTO the woods.

After lingering on the shore of Western Bay, where we checked out the entrance to a fox den and watched stars come out, we headed back. We stopped to look at the moon through a spotting scope that made the crater-pocked surface especially dramatic. There was time to think about the vastness of the universe or the tininess of the spotted salamander eggs in a nearby water hole. Or just to let creative thoughts swirl through your head like a breeze through the trees. As Mad-Eye Moody growls in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, "Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas."

Cars and Stars
Lots of people in Maine drive Subarus. They're good in the snow. Maybe we'll buy one ourselves someday when one of our clunkers (currently ages 15 and 11), gives out. As our group looked up at the stars during our walk, someone mentioned that the Subaru logo is based on the Pleiades star cluster, which is part of the constellation Taurus. I'd never heard that. I looked it up and found that Subaru is in fact the Japanese word for the Pleiades cluster. The logo has six stars, which represent the merging of five smaller companies to create a large one, Fuji Heavy Industries, which manufactures Subarus. Seemingly every major culture since the Greeks has attached symbolic meaning to the Pleiades cluster, because it's so prominent in the sky. Here's a look:

Whether or not you like the cars, you've gotta love the stars.

The Pleiades. Usually 6 to 8 stars are easily visible. The ancient Greeks referred to them as the Seven Sisters.

Bird Watch:
A hermit thrush has been singing to us lately. Have a look and a listen:

Answers to Last Puzzlers:
Nature-word jumbles:
a) shark (khars)
b) jaguar (guraja)
c) mushroom (hommsour)
d) mosquito (oomuitsq)
e) wetland (lawnted)

Today's Puzzlers:
1) Riddle: What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment but never in a thousand years?

2) Another riddle: What holds water yet is full of holes?

3) Below is a photo of a common tree that (at least when young) holds onto its dead leaves through the winter. We saw one in the dark, and its leaves almost glowed. Do you know what type of tree it is?

What's the tree that won't let go of its leaves?

Birthdays:
John Muir, the Scottish-born naturalist, would have turned 173 years old on Thursday. He didn't do much in his wilderness-loving life, other than inspire millions with his nature writings, save the Yosemite Valley and the great sequoias, earn the nickname "the Father of the National Parks" and co-found the Sierra Club. He summed up a lot in one of his most famous quotes: "In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks."

Glenn Seaborg, the Michigan-born nuclear chemist who won the 1951 Nobel Prize for discovering or co-discovering 10 elements, including seaborgium, would have been 99 on Tuesday. Seaborg was the first person to produce the elements plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium and californium—most of which no longer exist on Earth because they have vanished through radioactive decay—in a lab. Even though he made major contributions to developing the atomic bomb, launching nuclear power, furthering the cause of nuclear disarmament and advancing nuclear medicine, he is less well-known to today's general public than a run-of-the-mill jilted celebrity girlfriend.

Naturalist Billy Helprin with deer vertebrae that he found along our route. Was this a death by natural causes? The investigator thought not.

CSI: Maine

April 2, 2011

What went on inside the layer of snow that covered Maine all winter? Lots of desperate nibbling and escape-tunneling and hiding from would-be killers. Call in the investigators!

On our first nature walk of the spring, at the Babson Creek preserve in Somesville, naturalist Billy Helprin of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust crouched down like a good CSI sleuth and examined evidence. He pointed to the gnawed bark on several young bushes and trees. An animal did this, he told us. What type, you ask? Cue the theme song from the CSI television series:

Who are you? You are a meadow vole. Meadow voles are also known as field mice, which makes them sound less like on-the-lam CSI suspects and more like cute E.B. White characters.

Beneath the snow, voles had been gnawing the bark of these young dogwoods. But deer also had been chewing off the tips of branches—leaving a different type of evidence.

In truth, of course, they are neither. Though many fruit farmers see them as pests who damage orchard trees, meadow voles are a crucial part of the eco-system. As tunnel-diggers they turn over soil, scatter grass seeds and fertilizer with their droppings and spread a secret ingredient that is essential to plant growth—mycorrhizal fungi, which has a symbiotic relationship with plant roots and helps those roots absorb minerals and water. And—CSI plot twist—meadow voles have a valid reason to hide under snow and soil. They are, if you will, sympathetic characters constantly under attack from murderous predators (a.k.a., naturally hungry meat-eaters) such as snakes, foxes, owls and hawks.

The dangerous-looking suspect: a meadow vole

Our walk with Billy had many other highlights, including his unearthing of bones from a deer carcass. His assessment of the forensic evidence: The deer was a male who had been struck by a car on a nearby road and had hobbled to this spot to die. (The four-doored perpetrator is still at large.) Billy pointed out branches that other deer had bitten off, noting that those branches were torn off, not cleanly snipped. That's because deer don't have upper incisors; they hold the branch between their lower incisors and a tough pad at the top of their mouth and saw/tug it off.

The air was alive with bird songs. Among the many species we saw or listened to were common mergansers, juncos, hairy woodpeckers, song sparrows, nuthatches, black ducks, mallards, blue jays and chickadees. Billy suggested we become CSI associates by keeping an eye in the months ahead on an osprey nest built atop a dead tree and alerting us to the fact that the salt marsh at the Babson Creek preserve is home to a hard-to-spot species called the Nelson's sharp-tailed sparrow.

The real point being that any of us can be a nature investigator just by taking a moment to look at things more closely when we walk outside.

Smear Campaign

I couldn't resist passing along this anti-vole propaganda poster, clearly the work of vole predators trying to play up the threat they face from mouse insurgents. It may be the product of either owl things considered or, more likely, fox news.

Answers to the Last Puzzlers:
1) I'm still trying to figure out what that small Italian bird is. We need some help here, ornithologists.
2) That large black-and-white duck is a common eider
3) Here are the unscrambled words:
a) butterfly (tutyrfbel)
b) dandelion (onidanlde)
c) gravity (vigyrat)
d) python (hyntop)
e) cottontail (aloctnitot)

Today's Puzzlers:
1) Alligators live in the wild in only two countries on Earth. Which two?
a) U.S. and Panama
b) U.S. and China
c) U.S. and Uganda
d) U.S. and Venezuela

2) More words from nature to unscramble:
a) chathunt
b) scluto
c) viewnoler
d) schteunt

Birthdays:
Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of Africa's Green Belt Movement and the first East African woman ever to earn a Ph.D., turned 71 on Friday. Her organization focuses on environmental conservation, especially of trees (of which it has planted more than 30 million), and also on women's rights. Despite death threats, she was a leader in opening Kenya to more open, multiparty elections. Her Nobel citation cited "her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace."

John Burroughs, the upstate New York-born naturalist and one of America's greatest nature essayists, would have turned 174 years old on Sunday. A farm upbringing cultivated his love of nature and rural settings, as did hiking in the Catskills. Burroughs became tremendously popular in his own day for his writing, which he pursued even while working as a federal bank examiner. He was friends with the likes of Walt Whitman, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Thomas Edison. Burroughs once said, "Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion," but also noted, "Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral."

Sophie Germain, the French mathematician and physicist, would have turned 235 on Friday. Hers is a story of overcoming the pervasive gender bias of her era. Her parents didn't want her to pursue math and science (women didn't do those things), but she struck up correspondence with eminent figures in those fields and eventually made breakthroughs in "elasticity theory," which relates to how objects deform and stress under certain conditions. If her work fell a notch below that of history's greatest mathematicians, it was not for any failing on her part. As one modern critic of her work put it, "All the evidence argues that Sophie Germain had a mathematical brilliance that never reached fruition due to a lack of rigorous training available only to men."

Mark Catesby, the English naturalist who published the first illustrated book on the flora and fauna of North America, would have been 329 last week. The volume was called the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands and included plates such as the one below.

Postscript
I can't sign off without adding our voice to the many condemning Bob Parsons, the publicity-seeking CEO of the company Go Daddy, for not only shooting elephants in Africa but also posting graphic images of it on his blog and claiming that he was being a humanitarian by helping Zimbabwean farmers whose crops an elephant had allegedly been damaging. First, as we've learned through decades of conservation work, there are plenty of solutions to such a problem that don't involve killing a highly intelligent, sensitive mammal whose population has dwindled. The number of options is even larger for a multi-millionaire such as Parsons, who has instead made himself into a caricature of an egotistical, ignorant big-game hunter. His lack of remorse—indeed, his defiance—has me rooting for rival NameCheap.com, which is offering a special to Go Daddy customers who want to switch online-name services and have part of their fee go to save elephants.

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