Diary of a Citizen Scientist: chasing tiger beetles and other new ways of seeing the world

Sharman Apt. Russell

Oregon State University Press

2014

Sharman Russell teaches creative writing at the college level and has authored several books of natural history, with topics ranging from butterflies to flowers to archeology.  In her most recent book, Diary of a Citizen Scientist, she documents her efforts to support scientific research. Russell presents the material in a format accessible to general readers, who may not be as familiar with the idea of citizen science.

Throughout the book, Russell weaves three narrative threads together into a unified picture of citizen science. She begins with her own research on tiger beetles in which she was the first person to observe all three larval stages of the Western Red-bellied Tiger Beetle. To this strand, she adds lyrical descriptions of her home and research area in New Mexico, near the Rio Grande valley. In the third narrative thread she presents descriptions of numerous citizen opportunities. These include projects from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology with which bird watchers are already familiar.

                                                                                                                              

Other projects she describes include Nature’s Notebook, which asks citizen scientists to observe the times when various species of trees reach the bud stage and leaf out or certain wildflowers come into bloom. Some are computer based such as the video game Foldit, which helps biochemists working on protein synthesis and Galaxy Zoo, in which participants review telescope photos to classify distant galaxies. Russell even gives some examples of projects which can be applied in the schools, and describes how her daughter used a schoolyard bird survey and a project to examine fossil evidence in soil that had surrounded a dinosaur.

She also sparks the imagination with inspiring quotations from scientists such as entomologist Dick Vane-Wright of the London Museum of Natural History: “You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.” This is a jumping off point for the book, but it also sums up her enthusiasm which brought about the hard work she did to complete her project, work any citizen scientist comes to understand, in the hours of tabulating data and confirming results.