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.

Wild

Propelled by grief and the dissolution of her family, Cheryl Strayed impulsively decided to hike a long portion of the Pacific Crest Trail. The untimely death of her mother, the driving force that held her family together, devastated her at age 22. Her loving siblings and step father became distant and the family dissolved, as did her own marriage.

She had been camping and canoeing before, but had no experience backpacking. She had not even walked with a full pack to prepare for this adventure. Readers may be sympathetic or incredulous as the story of this woman unfolds with tales of her shouldering a too heavy pack as she set out alone to cover several hundred miles. Along the way she crossed a snow field with an ice axe. She also encountered a variety of people, most of whom were generous and helpful. One experienced backpacker emptied her pack and split the belongings into two piles - items she should keep and those she could do without. For example, he suggested she keep the ice axe but not the folding saw.

Strayed refers to herself as the girl with the hole in her heart, but along the way she gains both physical and emotional strength. She includes flashbacks about her history of drug use and infidelities, which put her on a trajectory that ended in divorce. Her remarks are candid and confessional without penitence, which will undoubtedly put off some readers. 

Some reviewers also responded negatively because the book is tightly focused on the author and her experience of the trail, some might be tempted to use the word self-absorbed.  One went so far as to say that it could just as easily have been written in a detox ward. I disagree. Admittedly, she neither extols the beauty of nature which daily surrounded her, nor exhorts her readers to preserve the vanishing wilderness. The narrative is about the challenge of the trail as a transformation experience.

Most readers will find the book is a great read, a well written narrative of a quest for wholeness. She is deeply motivated by the challenge of the trail and somewhat by the beauty of the natural world. In the end, she achieves a spiritual core, albeit in non-traditional spirituality, and is changed for the better by the experiences she records. I give this book five stars.

The Gospel of Nature

John Burroughs

Applewood Books

ISBN 155709-131-5

I do not know that the bird has taught me any valuable lesson. Indeed, I do not go to nature to be taught. I go for enjoyment and companionship. I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my eyes and ears and other senses a free, clean field and to tone up my spirits by her “primal sanities.”

            So begins chapter 3 of The Gospel of Nature a long essay originally included in a book of essays by American naturalist John Burroughs. The publishers at Applewood Books thoughtfully republished this essay in a stand alone 44 page booklet which, according to the introduction, describes …man’s relationship to nature and nature’s relationship to religion.

At age 75 Burroughs was still actively farming and writing. He credited his vigor to a close relationship with nature, a theme woven throughout the essay. He begins by extolling the health benefits of nature for the senses and the body.

He claims inspiration for the essay came from a parson who asked him to speak on the topic. He replies, in part, with this statement: The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion – the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe – persists.

This quotation describes the spiritual view of a naturalist, one in total awe of the universe and its majesty. Unlike Shakespeare, Burroughs sees no “Sermons in Stones,” but lessons from history that teach us an appropriate path.

He concludes Part I with a description of a sap bucket left beside a maple tree through winter and spring. Cut off from the rest of nature, the bucket has filled with sap and rainwater and the bodies of drowned animals. He kicked over the fetid mixture with the assurance that the soil would absorb every part and make it pure and sweet.

The story is no less than a metaphor for his view of man. Cut off from nature we decay. Reunited with nature we are made whole.

Part II is as close to a “how to,” a guide for aspiring naturalists as Burroughs gets in this essay. He states that he has not “studied nature so much as visited with her.” He does not aspire to a scientific field study, but enjoyment, though he admits that knowledge will enhance that enjoyment. His delightful story of the ichneumon wasp is but one example of how his knowledge structures his enjoyment.

Burroughs’ gospel is the simple mysticism of the naturalist. It is a belief in the wisdom of nature with little thought to the supernatural. It is a belief that all things happen, not according to some grand plan, but according to what works best.