Category: Natural History Etc.

Living almost halfway between the equator and the north pole — the 45 degree North line is a few hours drive away from Amherst, in Vermont — has its downsides in the winter. But spring always brings great relief and beauty. And so many changes mark the coming of spring! You can track the arrival of migrating birds, watch turtles sun themselves on exposed logs, or — with the air so thick with pollen — simply enjoy a fit of morning sneezes.

A few days ago, while walking through the Lawrence Swamp conservation area in Amherst, I came across these skunk cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus). In February and even in March, there was no sign of them. Yet by mid April scores of these low-lying plants carpet the moist, swampy parts of the Massachusetts. Skunk cabbages are named for their pungent odors but I don’t smell anything in their presence. I am always struck, though, by  how vividly green they are (at least at this time of the year) and the very particular way in the leaves open up and curl.

Farther up, I found a section of the forest floor completely covered with skunk cabbages. Coiled spirals of ferns — called fiddleheads around here — will slowly begin to unfurl among them, adding to the visual drama. In fact, if you zoom in and look closely, a few tentative fern stalks are there already. For a few weeks in this patch of the forest, the two species will seem conjoined. But by mid summer, the ferns — equally striking in their appearance — will be tall enough to hide the skunk cabbages underneath. So the seasonal rhythms go!

Update, June 21st: This is how the same patch now looks, with the ferns very dominant.

I’d tried getting into The Diversity of Life twice before — 2018 or 2019 I think — but could not persevere beyond a few dozen pages. I wasn’t ready then for the kind of dense biology content that E.O.Wilson (the famous Harvard naturalist, known for his research on ants) was trying to communicate to lay audiences. In August last year — the beginning of my two semester teaching break — I picked up the book again. This time I sailed comfortably through. I read it over many months, savoring the details. Interesting how content that is so bumpy at one time can feel so seamless at another. (There was also an odd coincidence: I was about three quarters through the book when I heard of Wilson’s passing at age 92.)

The Diversity of Life exudes a kind of mystery that I found enticing. It was as if I’d stepped into a strange new world, not unlike Alice’s Wonderland or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Except that Wilson’s world — populated with  the innumerable lifeforms of our planet and the ecosystems they inhabit — is very real of course. (Innumerable quite literally: for no one knows how many species there are on earth.) In the excerpt below, one of my favorites in the book, Wilson illustrates that to fathom the diversity of life one cannot think of space in “ordinary Euclidean dimensions”. Rather one has to think in “fractal dimensions”, with microscopically smaller ecosystems nestled within larger ones:

Continue reading “Excerpts From The Diversity of Life“

This essay was first published at 3 Quarks Daily.

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The slim, green book Natural History of Western Massachusetts is one of my favorites. Compressed into its hundred odd pages are articles and visuals that describe the essential natural features of the Amherst region, where I’ve lived since 2008. I turn to it every time something outdoors piques my interest — a new tree, bird or mammal, a geological feature.

One section that I particularly enjoy is the ‘Nature Calendar’. The calendar gives predictions on what to expect in each phase of a month; there’s approximately one prediction for every 3-day period. In early November, for example, it says “dandelions may still be blooming in protected areas”, and indeed some wildflowers do retain their bright colors despite freezing fall temperatures. It also says for the same month that “flocks of cedar-waxwings may be migrating through the region”. This was such a specific claim, but it is accurate: I was startled to see a flock of nearly a hundred waxwings swirling around bare trees on a rocky mountaintop this November.

The scientific analysis of such seasonal patterns is called phenology. Wikipedia defines it as “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation)”. It’s a clunky, textbook kind of definition but the gist is clear enough.

I find myself drawn to phenology for many reasons. After thirteen years in Massachusetts, the seasons are familiar, yet each season there are always new details that capture my attention. One year I might realize how pine needles carpet the forest floor in the summer, creating a distinct soft texture on hiking trails; in another I might notice that only the chipmunks disappear in the winter while the squirrels stay active. The number of such details that I am yet to observe seems endless. They remind me that familiarity — and the boredom that appears to lurk beneath — are only mental constructs, that there is always something interesting to discover.

Continue reading “Reflections on Phenology, Species Relationships and Ecology”

Earlier this year, on my usual walk through the UMass campus, I passed by a rock that was on display next to the Science Center. I had probably passed it dozens of times before but never noticed it. (Why do things that we miss all the time suddenly catch our attention one fine day?) The rock – dark grey, about four feet wide, two feet tall, sliced to reveal contours in the cross section – was like others in northeastern US: so common and ordinary, it blended into the landscape. But that day I stopped to look at the plaque that was attached to the rock. This is what it said: 

“Hawley Formation Pillow Basalt. This basalt was erupted from an arc volcano during subduction and closure of the Iapetus Ocean, approximately 475 million years old. Quarried from Hawley, Massachusetts.”  

475 million years! I was intrigued: Was this the oldest inanimate solid body that I had ever seen? Had it always more or less retained its shape over millions of years? And what about the exposed rocky cliffs along interstates and the glacier-strewn boulders along hiking trails which I saw so regularly – how old were they?

I had paid little attention to rocks and boulders, but now they have moved to the foreground of my awareness. They have turned into sources of wonder, quiet messengers from an ancient time. And geology itself, which for a long time seemed like a forbidding science – with esoteric terms such as subductions, mantles and moraines – now seems indispensable to understanding the earth’s deep history.     

Continue reading “Wonders of the Scientific Backstory”

Although I’ve seen a lot of monarch butterflies in my years in Massachusetts, and even traveled to the forests of Michoacan in Central Mexico to watch millions of them congregate the winter, I’d never — surprisingly — come across a monarch caterpillar. But last month, at a roadside stop in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, I finally saw one squirming on the leaf of a milk weed plant. 

If everything goes well this caterpillar will metamorphose into a butterfly and will — all by itself — make the epic 2000-mile journey to Mexico.

The caterpillar sighting led me to check how monarchs have been doing in recent years. A good estimate of their numbers comes not from raw counts — it is very hard to count swarms of butterflies — but from the number of acres occupied by the migrant generation in Mexico at the peak of the winter. That’s the time of the year the butterflies are densely packed together on oyamel (fir) trees. So it’s a matter of identifying clusters of such trees, determining the perimeter of each cluster, and finally calculating the total area enclosed across all clusters. Mexican researchers, led by Eduardo Rendon Salinas, do this on an annual basis.

According to some recent references, the number of acres occupied by overwintering monarchs starting 2014-2015 (the year I visited) reads as follows:

2.79,  9.91,  7.19,  6.13,  14.95,  6.99, 4.9

A lot of ups and downs there with a seeming decline in the last couple of years. In contrast, the average acres monarchs occupied in the 1990s and 2000s was well over 15, and individual years frequently exceeded 20.