Good Read

    I have a book to recommend to fellow accidental naturalists, curious naturalists, and even professional naturalists:

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society & the Birth of the Modern World, by science writer Edward Dolnick. It is well researched, well written, fun, fascinating, and will astound you with stories you've never heard about the most brilliant minds of the 17th Century. This book is not historical fiction--it is non-fiction with page-turner pacing. I take the discoveries of the 17th Century for granted (heliocentrism, orbiting planets, gravity etc.), but I found myself reading along excitedly wondering if and how anyone was going to be able prove that the sun was the center of our galaxy, that the planets revolved around the sun in set orbits, that a force called gravity kept Earth's moon close by. 

   Dolnick's book brings to life the work of eccentric genius Isaac Newton and also Euclid, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Aristotle, Hooke, Boyle, Leibniz, Brahe, and Halley. Don't be daunted. It's time you remembered more about these men than their names. Here are a few nuggets fromThe Clockwork Universe to lure you away fromFifty Shades of...whatever and into the Light of Reason.

"Science today is a grand and formal enterprise, but he modern age of science began as a free-for-all. The idea was to see for yourself rather than to rely on anyone else's authority. The Royal Society's motto as "Nullius in Verba," Latin for, roughly "Don't take anyone's word for it," and early investigators embraced that freedom with something akin to giddiness....The meetings of the Royal Society in its young days sound like gatherings of  very smart, very reckless Cub Scouts."

In my attempts to explain why clouds are white this year, I read much on visible light and light-particle interactions. I had no idea that the legacy of the scientific literature on this topic stretched back 340 years: 

In 1672 the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions, Dolnick writes, "published a hugely important article, Newton's report that 'pure' white light contains within itself all the colors of the spectrum. The paper, almost as much as the discovery itself, marked a breakthrough. This was, the historian I. Bernard Cohen observed, 'the first time that  major scientific discovery was announced in print in a periodical.'" 

In describing the impact of Galileo's work and the "new science" that showed that heaven and earth were constructed according to a mathematical plan, Dolnick writes:

"Mankind had long taken its place at the center of the cosmos for granted. The world was a play performed for our benefit. No longer. In the new picture, man is not even the pinnacle of creation but an afterthought. The universe would carry on almost exactly the same without us. The planets trace out patterns in the sky, and those patterns would be identical whether or not humans had ever taken notice of them. Mankind's role in the cosmic drama is that of a fly buzzing around a stately grandfather clock."

Stay Away from Screens

The show stopper: Altocumulus perlucidus

 This is what you might have missed over Olympia last night around sunset had you been looking at any number of screens available to you. I am not talking about screen doors, but the other kind, the kind you plug in and forget to look up from because you sense some strange urgency there. 

text-align: left;">   Without a trace of urgency, but on a steady wind from the south, these altocumulus perlucidus moved in silently late yesterday afternoon. I was in my hammock when the first several appeared in the blue sky and over the dark roof line. I wasn't sure what they were--they were too large for cirrocumulus and too small for cumulus humilis or fractus. I can't recall having seen them before. And so I went out for a walk under the celestial dome.

A sky full of popcorn or spilled cotton balls?

These are altocumulus perlucidus--a mid-level cloud formed of patches of cloudlets that are, according to my favorite Cloud Collector's Handbook, appear between "the width of one and three fingers, held at arm's length when they are more than 30 degrees above the horizon." The most distinguishing feature I noticed was the beautiful shading of the cloudlets--they were a luminescent white and gray and shaded on the side away from the sun. Cirrocumulus clouds are just the width of one finger (or less) and are not shaded.

   As you can see from the photograph above, that shading is different in nearly every cloudlet as each cloudlet is being shaded by the cloudlet, or cloudlets, to its west.

Looking to the east (above), you can see the individual cloudlets starting to thicken toward the horizon. I wasn't sure if this was because of my perspective, or there was something else going on. So I turned back toward the west and watched for another hour while the setting sun turn the white clouds into shades of lavender, gray, pink, and orange that would challenge the best of painters to reproduce. 

 Every time I started to head for home--thinking the show was over and the cloud were going to turn a flat, drab gray--they lingering light of the setting sun kept on with its finales with me offering a standing-walking ovation.

   This morning the solid gray skies were evidence that those cloudlets had ganged up overnight into a low sun-obnubilating mass. I check Art Rangno's Guide to the Sky poster and here is what he says about altocumulus perlucidus: "...usually indicates that large areas (thousands of square miles) are undergoing gradual ascent brought about by an advancing trough and area of low pressure." Which could mean rain--but it doesn't--at least not today. Checking in with the National Weather Service charts and forecasts (which don't address clouds specifically), it looks to me like these clouds were "embedded moisture" in the "southerly flow," clouds that made the skies "bumpy." 

    The gray of this morning is stratus clouds--fog--pushing in from the coast. It is supposed to retreat from whence it came later today, giving us our sunny skies. And maybe a chance for another spectacular sunset.

Preparing for Flight

   Twenty four hours before traveling, I am not packed, not ready, and not at home when it's time to check in for my flight online. Why? Because I am at Nisqually National Wildlife refuge with a friend. She has offered to take me to the willow thicket to see the Swainson's thrushes. I have been hearing them sing their heart-piercing song for weeks but have yet to see one of these cryptic birds.

    Monday morning at the refuge is apparently the time when a volunteer walks the boardwalk trails with a leaf blower. As you might imagine, this makes hearing the thrushes difficult. So, we bide our time near at the edge of the thicket where, two weeks prior, my friend spotted a rufous hummingbird at its nest. Hummingbird nests are tiny and well camouflaged and are nearly impossible to find unless you can track an adult to the branch where it has built one.

    While we try to relocate the nest (this takes a while), I catch sight of some medium-sized, freckle-breasted brown birds flying into the elderberry bushes. Swainson's thrushes--hark!--two of them. I am thrilled. "Don't they have the most beautiful innocent-looking eyes you've ever seen?" my friend asks.

   We watch the thrushes for a while, and, once the leaf-blower ceases, we hear their calls all around us. I am happy. I am ready to go home and pack. We have given up on the hummingbird nest, but see the adult bird fly to a branch. This changes everything.

    My friend sets up her spotting scope and we spend the next hour ignoring the thrushes and watching two baby hummingbirds in an impossibly small nest. The nest is made of lichen and is wrapped in spider webs; this durable, flexible material allows the nest to expand as the chicks grow (they start out as eggs the size of a small grape). At first, we see only the dark backs of the birds and the needle-like beak extending over the nest cup. But we are patient and are rewarded. The chicks pop there heads up, stand up, and practice flapping their wings. Their wings flutter so rapidly that they disappear in a blur of diaphanous gray. They are ready to fledge. They turn around in their nest, and settle themselves in. Through the spotting scope, I watched a baby hummingbird blink. I watched it go from alert to drowsy, its eyes opening and closing slower and slower until it slept. I watched the feathers on its back rise and fall with its breath.

   I am sorry I do not have photographs of this. Nor do I have photographs of the joyous moments that followed. Insert your imagination here.

   A group of school children and their teachers are heading toward us. They are on a field trip to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Because my sprite-like friend is as generous as a person can be without completely disappearing, she lowers her scope so that these children can look through it to see the hummingbirds. Lowering the scope, however, means the side rails of the boardwalk block the view of the nest. There is only one option. I get down on bended (two syllables) knee.

   One after the next, the very serious children--I am guessing five or six years old--step up onto my thigh to get eye level with the eye piece. I hold their hands to help them balance.

   From my vantage point, below them, I see something more fantastic than a blinking baby hummingbird. I am looking up at their faces. I am watching as they lean in toward the eye piece. I am watching their long eyelashes nearly touching the lens. I watch smiles break across their chins and mouths and cheeks. They see the nest. I see smiling mouth after smiling mouth of missing baby teeth, half-grown adult teeth, a few gold-filled cavities, gummy smiles, big smiles. These children are beaming.

   One after the next, the smiling children pull away from the spotting scope as soon as they spot the birds. They do not linger to watch the hummingbirds, they do not hog the scope. They want to let us know that they have seen what we have seen.   

    An hour or more later, after three groups of young students on field trips have seen the hummingbirds, we know it is time to move on. 

   I have been thinking about those hummingbirds and those smiles ever since. I have been thinking about what to make of this experience, what larger point to draw, what life lesson I can share, what epiphany will come if I push it in that direction. But this is not something I am going to muck up with metaphors. That hour--so pure and powerful--seems to resist amplification or expansion. There is no room for anything else. Except my restraint.

Natural History in the Methow

East of here: The scrub-steppe landscape of the Washington's Methow Valley.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I joined a large and convivial group of naturalists for a weekend retreat    in the drier, sunnier scrub-steppe landscape on the East side of the Cascade Range. The retreat was offered by the fabulous Methow Conservancy based in Winthrop, Washington, and featured three nights and two-and-a-half days of field trips and talks on the valley's flora and fauna. This was the first retreat of this kind I had ever participated in. I was a little nervous about the intensity of being among Intentional Naturalists, Expert Birders, Stamen-Scrutinizing Botanizers, and friends who travel with entire libraries of really fabulous field guides (below). But I had a lot to learn. Too much as it turns out.

Have tub, will travel.

   Our field trips began at 8 a.m., but birding began at 6 a.m. when I opened my eyes to see two of the friends I was camping out with sitting up in the sleeping bags, their binoculars focussed on something in the sagebrush, whispering giddily over Sibley's Guide to Birds. A meadowlark. A blue grouse. A kestrel.

   A few hours later, twenty or so of us were gathered around our two leaders to get a lay of the land and split into two groups--half to spend the morning among the birds, half among the plants. We'd join up for lunch and then switch groups. Everyone packed field guides, lunch, water, binoculars, loops, essentials.

The 11th Essential: a butterfly net

  I was off to a good start among the birders. Did I mention that I am not a birder? I really love just a few birds--the marbled murrelet being my number one--but do not keep a checklist or have a particular desire to see or hear a certain bird except the Swainson's Thrush, whose call I learned when moving to the Pacific Northwest. I did not hear the thrush on this trip, though I did hear a plethora of warblers, bluebirds, robins, kingbirds, grosbeaks, blackbirds, nutcrackers, nuthatches, woodpeckers, killdeers, and coots. I studied their field marks, listened for their calls, tried to memorize the mnemonic for their song, translated their Latin names. Wichety wichety wichety. Receiver receiver receipt. Kon-ka-reeee.

A fabulous birding spot...despite the clouds.

  I had started writing down the names of the birds I saw and heard, but there were just too many of them. I stopped taking notes and decided to let the songs and calls wash over me and let my brain chose what to remember. It remembered Wilson's Warbler--bright yellow, black yarmulke. Chchchchchchchchchchch.

A 10X magnifying loop should be in everyone's backpack.

After lunch, fauna. Much. It was all new to me. I hadn't expected the plant life to be so different on this side of the mountains, but this was the near-desert scrub-steppe, not the lowland temperate rain forest where I lived. I tried to make sense of it all, think of the plants in families, groups of dicots and monocots, but still had some wichety wichety wichety noise buzzing in my brain. I looked to the sky. Ahh. Cumulus fractus with tree representing ganglia in Accidental Naturalist's brain.

Haywire in the clouds.

  I was having a problem. I was overwhelmed, my brain was saturated. I needed to retreat, to hear just one bird, to study just one plant. But I had two more days to go. So fell several paces behind the group and pulled out my camera. Using the macro setting, I shrunk my universe down as small as I could. This felt so much better. I could breathe. I could see.

The crevasses of a morel mushroom.

Easily overlooked buds on a Ponderosa Pine.

Ummm...

Lichen in a color I would have said "could not be found in nature."

A shooting star.

Rosy Pussy Toes.

Ummm....

Ummm...

Lupine.

Saxifrage?

A moment of stillness: The only fauna that posed for me all weekend.

  Despite my self-preservation efforts, I was really in bad shape by the end of the second day. The species and names and Latin and songs and calls and flowering parts and fruiting bodies just kept accumulating. I wasn't sure what to do with all of the information. There was no time to sort, categorize, let everything soak in. This is not the fault of the retreat, but of my easily overwhelmed brain, my Accidental Naturalist approach: Let's take a hike and maybe hear a bird or two. Let's try to remember the Latin name of a sword fern. Or not.

  I wanted to think about everything, why these plants and animals were where they were, where they had flown in or blown in from, how they lived in the world, what made life challenging for them. Yet I am not sure what I would have done with all of that knowledge either. And I seem to be the kind of person who needs to use knowledge. What action could I take? I couldn't figure out how to show my astonishment and my gratitude for all of these birds and plants who were so much more than their names--common, Latin, bi-nomial--and so much more than we'd ever have time to understand.  

  I opted out of the last morning field trip, though I took a field trip of my own, just walking slowly by myself along a dirt road beside a creek. In the sun, in the breeze, amid the chattering birds.

  The day after I returned home, I took a walk in the rain and heard the one song I had craved all spring--the song of the Swainson's Thrush. This is the song a friend describes as "the sound of what my heart longs for but can’t name." Here it here.