Category: Nature

Summer reading: nature books for kids

Last week, I led some ecology programs in Maine with kids of various ages, including with the “Sand Diggers,” a group of children in preK-K. A few days before we drove up to Maine I checked the weather forecast. The National Weather Service was predicting rain most of the week, meaning we might be indoors much of the week. Uh oh. All my lesson plans for the Sand Diggers were for outdoors activities. I decided to get some nature storybooks to provide some indoors activities with the Sand Diggers.

I found a couple of good books at a nearby Mass Audubon sanctuary gift store. Our local bookstore didn’t really have any nature-themed picture books. So with the help of my librarian sister, I placed on online order for seven nature-themed picture books. Amazon was the only online bookseller who promised delivery in time for our trip to Maine; all I had to do was sign up for a month of free Prime “membership.” Of course, only one out of the books I ordered arrived before we left for Maine, typical of the poor customer service offered by Amazon. (Needless to say, I canceled my Prime “membership” before I had to actually start paying for that kind of poor service.)

Enough about Amazon, because this post is not about how horrible Amazon is. It’s a post about nine nature books for kids, all of which I think are pretty good. Capsule reviews of each book are below, with the best books saved for last.

The nine storybooks arranged on a table.
L-R, top row: I Can Name 50 Trees Today (the only book shipped on time by Amazon); The Lorax (shipped late by Amazon, but I got a free used copy from a Mass Audubon Little Free Library); Celia Planted a Garden (shipped late by Amazon); We Are Water Protectors (shipped late by Amazon); Light the Sky, Firefly (purchased from Mass Audubon).
L-R, bottom row: Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt (shipped late by Amazon); Over and Under the Pond (shipped late by Amazon); Hike (purchased from Maine Audubon); The Hike (shipped late by Amazon).
Amazon shipped just 1 out of 7 books on time. Thank goodness for Mass Audubon and Maine Audubon, so I had books to read to the Sand Diggers. Support your local booksellers!
Continue reading “Summer reading: nature books for kids”

Saco Heath

Alex, Patricia, Carol, and I took a walk toady across Saco Heath, a peat bog that’s owned by the Nature Conservancy. We walked most of the way across the boardwalk, stopping frequently to look at unusual wildflowers — wild cranberries, pogonias, bog orchids — and other plants.

The fog, low clouds, and light drizzle made it feel like an alien landscape. We wanted to spend more time there, but we only had an hour. Sometime I want to come back and spend half a day enjoying this unusual ecosystem.

Three people walking along a boardwalk through low vegetation
Halfway across the boardwalk

Encounters

Carol and I went for walks in two wildlife sanctuaries today: the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary and the North River Wildlife Sanctuary, both in Marshfield, Mass. Usually when we walk in wildlife sanctuaries I spend most of my time looking at plants, especially flowering plants. But today, without trying at all, we wound up seeing a quite a few animals. Here are three of them:

Two raptors in a nest built of sticks.
Adult and juvenile Osprey (Pandion haliaetus)
A beetle on a leaf. The leaf has pieces gone from it, perhaps eatne by the beetle. possibly
Red Milkweed Beetle (Tetraopes tetrophthalmus) on Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)
Turtle mostly submerged in water.
Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta)

Each of these three animals is what I’d call charismatic. I’m not quite sure what makes some animals more charismatic than others. Animal charisma is not a matter of being cuddly — none of these three animals could be considered cuddly. Nor is animal charisma a matter of being cute — a baby Osprey might be cute, in a fierce flesh-tearing-beak sort of way, but a Red Milkweed Beetle is not what most people would consider cute. In fact, being cute and cuddly is almost the opposite of being charismatic. Cuteness and cuddliness feel controllable; charisma does not.

Humans remain my favorite animal. At the same time, I think it’s good for us humans to encounter non-human animals. After all, for most of human existence, we lived in close-knit human communities while being surrounded by non-human animals — a distinct contrast to our current existence, where we are alienated both from other humans, and from non-human organisms.

Endangered

Earlier this week, Carol and I walked on a beach in Maine where we saw two endangered bird species, Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) and Least Terns (Sternula antillarum).

Small sand-colored bird, standing in the sand, covering a chick with its wing.
Piping Plover with a nestling
Small gray and white bird nestled in the sand, perhaps sitting on a nest.
Least Tern — this bird remained stationary while we watched it, and may have been on a nest

Both these species nest on the beach above the high water mark. Nesting in the sand was a useful evolutionary adaptation for most of these birds’ existence. However, in the last hundred years as humans have used beaches more and more heavily. Many former nesting sites have either been eradicated. Other nesting sites see such heavy human use that nesting success has dropped precipitously.

Take the Piping Plover. The main strategy they use to evade predators is their cryptic coloration — when threatened, they squat down in the sand and are almost invisible. But this adaptation is counterproductive when the birds encounter over-sand vehicles (the birds and their nests get smushed), or off-leash dogs (the birds are found by smell, not sight) or oblivious humans playing on the beach (again, the birds get smushed). Then when some humans try to enact regulations to protect the birds — like restricting dog-walkers’ access to nesting areas, or prohibiting over-sand vehicles near nesting areas — many humans don’t comply with the regulations. So at another location in Maine this week, I saw a human with an unleashed dog standing right next to a marked nesting area where a few hours I had earlier seen a Piping Plover.

This is an example of how land use change and human overpopulation have caused rapid species decline over the past several decades. Now we can add another threat to these two species. Global climate change is already causing rising sea levels. If sea level rise continues, the preferred nesting locations for these birds is going to disappear.

It’s easy to sink into despair and imagine that these two species will be extinct in the next couple of decades. But while I’m not optimistic, there is still hope. Because even though humans are pushing these species to extinction, it’s also possible that they can be saved from extinction by careful human management. For that reason, I’ve decided that “management” is my new synonym for “hope.”

Tiny flower

Medeola virginiana, sometimes called Cucumber Root or Indian Cucumber-root, is in bloom in the woodlands around Cohasset right now. As the name implies, the small root is crunchy and white and tastes like cucumber — but you kill the plant when you dig it up for the root, so I stopped foraging for it many years ago.

The flower is tiny, maybe a centimeter or two across. It doesn’t look like much until you look at it through a magnifier:

Close up of a tiny flower, with a deep red pistil that terminates in three parts that are longer than the petals, and with greenish-yellow petals that curl back from the ovary.
Front view of Indian Cucumber-root flower through 10x hand lens
Same flower as previous photo, but a side view.
Side view of Indian Cucumber-root flower through 10s hand lens

Of interest to very few

I use the iNaturalist app regularly. Its developers call it “social media for naturalists.” But iNaturalist (called “iNat” for short) is also used by scientists to gather data. I’m interested in how iNat is both social media, and citizen science / participatory science. With that in mind:

Here are links to a sampling of published papers about scientific use of iNat:

Also of interest: “Assessing the accuracy of free automated plant identification applications.” It’s not clear whether this paper assessed the full iNaturalist app, or Seek by iNaturalist. The Seek app uses only machine identification, while the iNaturalist app also includes human review of machine identifications. Regarding this paper, one of iNaturalist’s developers writes (on the iNat Forum), “…their descriptions of it sound more like the iNaturalist app, not Seek by iNaturalist.” Either way, it looks like iNat provides excellent identification.

Finally, iNat users have the option of choosing several licenses when uploading photographs, ranging from full copyright protection through Creative Commons licenses, to public domain. But choosing full copyright protection means that scientists are not able to use the uploaded iNat data. Therefore, if you want to do participatory science using iNat, you need to choose a license that allows your observations to be translated to the GBIF standard. Public domain up to Creative Commons BY-NC licenses can be translated to GBIF.

Killer

Beech leaf disease (BLD) has arrived in Cohasset. I’m seeing leaves on American Beeches withering and dropping off both in Wheelwright Park and in the Whitney Thayer Woods. In some places, stands of beeches have lost so many leaves that it no longer feels like you’re walking in the forest.

Withered leaves on an American Beech sapling.
American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer woods with BLD

A scientific article from two and a half years ago — Sharon E. Reed, et al., “The distribution of beech leaf disease…,” Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 503, January, 2022 — found that BLD is a worse threat to American Beech stands than two previous invasive pathologies, beech scale (Cryptococcus fagisuga), and beech bark disease (C. fagisuga and Neonectria spp. complex).

Withered leaves on an American Beech sapling
American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer Woods with BLD

An invasive nematode from east Asia, Litylenchus crenatae, is always present when BLD is present. But a scientific article from Sept., 2021 — Carrie J. Ewing et al., The Foliar Microbiome Suggests that Fungal and Bacterial Agents May be Involved in the Beech Leaf Disease Pathosystem, Phytobiomes Journal, pub. online 29 Sep 2021 — also found that organisms from four bacterial genera — Wolbachia, Erwinia, Paenibacillus, and Pseudomonas — and one fungal genus, Paraphaeosphaeria — are always present with the nematode when BLD is present.

A few withred leaves among healthy leaves in an American Beech sapling
American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer Woods with BLD

From what I can gather, our understanding of BLD is still incomplete. However, a few things are quite clear. The University of Rhode Island suggests a couple of strategies to try to save trees from BLD: heavy applications of phosphite fetilizer twice a year, and/or application of pesticide to kill the nematodes. If trees with BLD are left untreated, they will die within 6 to 10 years. Since we cannot treat most trees in our forests, we can expect most infected American Beeches to die within a decade.

Yet another reason for eco-grief.

And this is another reminder that as dire as the situation might be with climate change, invasive species are also devastating our New England forest ecosystems. A hundred years ago, we lost our American Chestnuts to invasive Chestnut Blight. Fifty years ago, we lost most of our American Elms to invasive Dutch Elm Disease. We’re in the process of losing all our Eastern Hemlocks to an invasive insect, the Woolly Adelgid, and all our ash trees to another invasive insect, the Emerald Ash Borer. Now we’re losing all our American Beech trees to yet another invasive organism.

Yes we need to stop climate change, but that’s only a part of the threat to Earth’s life-supporting systems. There’s a lot of work for us to do….

Orcas having fun

Orcas off the Iberian Peninsula have been ramming sailboats, and have even managed to sink three boats, according to Live Science. Humans who claim to be experts on orcas think they know the reason why:

“Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a ‘critical moment of agony’ — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. ‘That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,’ López Fernandez said.”

I’m mildly skeptical of this explanation only because trauma has recently become a popular human explanation for everything. I don’t mean to minimize the effect of traumatic events on humans (or other organisms). But I’m reminded of the mid-twentieth century when, under the influence of Freudianism, sex was the popular explanation for everything. In that time period, trauma was not regularly invoked to explain mammal behavior, so I can imagine mid-twentieth century cetologists explaining orcas sinking boats as somehow being motivated by sex.

NPR reported on the same story, with some additional details, including the fact that orcas seem to like biting sailboat rudders:

“Jared Towers, the director of Bay Cetology, a research organization in British Columbia, says ‘there’s something about moving parts … that seem to stimulate them…. Perhaps that’s why they’re focused on the rudders….'”

Ultimately, we humans don’t know why orcas are ramming sailboats and biting rudders. (Actually, we really know why humans do many of the things we do.) I suspect this has become a news story mostly because humans who are part of Western cultures get worried when other animals threaten us or make us feel that we might not be the apex predator. This attitude is in part due to the influence of Western religions — both Judaism and Christianity have a sacred text that claims that a deity gave to human beings the right to have dominion over all other living beings. But orcas have not read the Bible, and they didn’t get the memo that humans are in charge.