Preparing our citizen science skills for spring

At a training for a new citizen science initiative in Mount Auburn cemetery, Conservation and Sustainability Manager Paul Kwiatkowski, defined phenology as "the study of life cycles of plants and animals and their relationship to weather and climate." Our goal, which should be important to not only the scientific community and the Mount Auburn community, but all humans, is to observe the cyclical back-and-forth influences of habitat upon wildlife, and see how the timing of changes in trees and the ranges of communities shift in response to climate change.

Coming off the warmest year ever recorded (by 0.25 degrees C), we're all chomping at the bit to get out there, to SEE what the trees are thinking about all this. Today, Leap Day, the last day of February, the high temperature was 64 degrees in Boston. We walked our data trail, finding the "merlot" markers indicating the tree specimens we would be studying, and peered through binoculars up, up at the buds of the red oaks, sugar maples, and gingkos, whose branches were too high to inspect closely with fingers and eyes. The rays of sunlight warmed our backs and at times caused us to shade our eyes. Spring felt impossibly near. We didn't see any "buds bursting", the first phenology stage we would be looking to record on our data sheets, but you could almost feel their energy brimming in those bulging tips.

We gathered cuttings of branches: paper birch, silver maple, maidenhair tree, observing the various shapes and sizes and colors of their buds. We made them into bouquets of twigs to bring home and put in vases with water. According to Brooks Mathewson, the ecologist who shared slides of his observations of birds responding to the timing of insect emergence (who respond to the first unfurlings of leaves), we can watch our branch bouquets bud-break, bloom, and leaf-out in our own kitchens.

We were a small battle contingent of climate crusaders. We were on the hunt for signs of spring. Though we were loving this weather, we know that no one knows what will happen as the Earth continues to warm at this rate. But we will be there, establishing our baseline, to help find out and sound the alarm as soon as the trees tell us the story.

The Persistence of February

February is the month of the Cold Moon, said my naturalist guide Boot Boutwell, who shared this during a winter plant identification walk at Bellevue Pond in Middlesex Fells this morning. Last night I noticed that moon, a bulbous waxing gibbous, bright bright next to Orion in a black sky, standing in the front yard of my parents’ house in the southern suburbs. The sky at my home is never this black. The moon glow felt like a spotlight from straight above, its aura forcing me to stop and look up and around for the source, presumably because I’m not used to moonglow in my neighborhood a mere 20 miles north from there.

I walked down the Somerville bike path, my stride vigorous—a girl’s best defense against the cold. Though the day was full of sunshine, the cold consistently nipped through. I guess this is just the persistence of February, fighting to keep winter tight under our chins.

I thought about the little bits of art and culture that hide along that very popular path, in a town of quietly creative, irreverent people. The

ornate design of a stone paver that began a little path to nowhere. The stack of ice tablets someone had constructed next to its apparent source, a large half-frozen puddle that reminded me of a vernal pool, if one could exist on asphalt. A sticker depicting a rodent with an Egyptian headdress placed too high on a lamppost for someone to have done it without a ladder. The googly-eyed sock puppet with red scarf adorning the fencepost of the community garden entrance. On a nature walk of Somerville, these little tidbits would be the flora and fauna of our offbeat local culture, the staples of a vibrant ecosystem of humor and questioning.

Compare that community with the Fells woods this morning, attended by Boot, the lively jester of the winter woods, with his black knit hat slouched and crooked like an elf’s, and the group of elder women who all seemed to be Boot’s biggest fans, sporting knowledge they’d learned from his previous walks and a jocular familiarity with one another’s names. The treasures we inspected were all members of the plant kingdom, but each spelled a story of survival just the same as any piece of human-created art.

We learned to look closely for terminal buds on branches, and inspect their color, shape, and size. We looked for “leaf scars” showing where leaves would be growing in warmer seasons, and noted whether their placement was opposite or alternate. Even the size of a leaf scar tells a story: a larger “shield-shaped” leaf scar, such as that of the ash tree, is indicative of compound leaves, which, having more surface area than simple leaves, need more water, and therefore have a larger stem for transporting the larger volume.

We used the few deciduous leaves still clinging to branches, called “marcescent”, as further clues. The only marcescent species we found were white oak, hop hornbeam, witch hazel, and American beech. Why do some plants hold on to dead, dry leaves, while others efficiently make themselves bare? That I never found out, and will have to keep searching for that answer.

Other plant accessories to inspect? The thousands of acorns littering the ground tell us it was a “mast” year, which comes every 4-8 years and is a cruel ecological strategy for oak trees to boost the predator population (squirrels, acorn weevils) one year, only to facilitate a die-off the next year when the acorn production dwindles. “Galls” on witch hazel leaves, shaped like little witch hats, are like little houses for female aphids, who shelter and lay their eggs inside. The burly burrs of burdock plants, the balls of Velcro that hook onto we mammals for rides to a good place to plop down and grow. (Boot showed us a sad picture of a bird who got stuck in burdock burrs and perished, it was so trapped).

My favorite way to identify a plant is the sniff test. We smelled three wonderful smells: the citrus-mint of sassafras, the wintergreen of black birch, and the spicy brew of spicebush. I want to collect all of them and make a nice tea of all three. Yum.

We slowly made our way around frozen Bellevue Pond. We heard a woodpecker and a few chips of a familiar songbird I can’t identify. We happened upon some folks with kids, dogs, or maps, all happy to be here on a cold winter Friday. We’re alive, everyone was quietly whispering, even the naked trees and bare plants. We are hiding, dormant, but our buds are here waiting until the Earth progresses a little farther on its orbital path, tilting the Northern hemisphere closer to our Sun, into the path of more direct rays of heat-giving light.

Awareness

 “Audubon’s real gift to us is awareness. And in that awareness is the beginning of all true conservation.”

-from Audubon, the Film

The air was warm, yet the trees were dressed only in their winter bones. The paths were thick with the mud of a false spring. As we traversed the tongue of land between two freshwater reservoirs, white ribbons of water on either side of us gleamed through the stripes of bare trees. Patterns of icemelt fascinated my eyes: swirls, dashes, almost violent-looking collisions between zones of ice and water. Or was the thawing process gentler than it looked? Thick bitter ice hanging on even under the glare of un-January-like sunshine, but then the edges relent, easing themselves into a bath of adjacent meltwater, and the swallows of the lake welcome the previously frozen into its deep, dark belly.

It was a short walk that day, the first in quite some time. Hibernation comes so naturally when you live in the concrete confines of a city. The Middlesex Fells are only a 15-minute drive from home, and though the thrum of the expressway is never far from your ears, one can get lost in a new world of towering white pines and constant surprises of water views. Mostly, though, it feels like arriving home after escaping jail. Between the branches and boulders, the rock upon which you sit to contemplate the shifting lakes, and the dappled light only possible in a true forest, peace and understanding waits.

Though guilt does arise. I wonder what has taken me so long to get here? How could I forget myself for so long? Later, I watch a trailer for a film about artist and naturalist John J. Audubon. I see a man who dedicated his life to immortalizing beautiful creatures, to observing them and sharing them with the rest of the world. “A man who genuinely changed art and genuinely changed science”, he taught the rest of us to see what we couldn’t see. To be aware of what we didn’t know was there. Where else do art and science cohabitate more inextricably than in the depths of wilderness or even the odd urban forest? Back in our compartmentalized human-built grids, we are forced to choose a direction, rather than drinking from all senses, all directions, like in a moment of stillness at dusk when a wood thrush’s ethereal call echoes and bounces alongside fading sunlight in the trees. Unlike the forest, the choices in our world seem to carry so much finality to them, so much consequence. Even when you’re lost in the forest, you can turn around and retrace your steps; and yet, though your progress is backward, it seems as if you still receive as many gifts on your way out as you did on the way in. But when a choice is wrong here in “real life”, it can bring you to more and more confusing places, tangling you up in a tight knot. Blocking out inspiration and truth.

Awareness is elusive. And by definition, then, so is the conservation of the self. The only thing I can conclude is that one’s awareness needs guidance, a teacher or mentor, to be constantly maintained. John J. Audubon, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau: somehow they all maintained their own awareness, and became teachers to the ones who needed external guidance. How few of those mentors exist now! Where are the voices that cry out in our modern world that all goodness depends on saving ourselves and saving the wild? There are activists, yes, and environmental initiatives. But how many people truly know the wisdom of the forest? How many go to sit on rock and ponder- not only to bag a peak, or bike a new trail, or walk the dog- but really just sit and listen with all one’s senses? And how many of those actually share this wisdom loudly enough to be heard above the noise of the city? Is it even possible, though, for those enlightened voices to be heard? Is it too late?

The progress of our world is spectacular. In our societies, we are inching closer to freedom among people, to equality of ideas. One wouldn’t want to erase such progress and turn back time. But if I could at least travel back to the days of the eloquent and celebrated naturalists, and bring a few of them with me to present day, I would. The world needs them more now than ever.