Nature Girl Science Nerd

Story of Me, Part 2

My earliest memories are from Alfred, a small (pop. ~2000) college town in upstate New York. My earliest loves were drawing and horses. I read the Little House on the Prairie series all the way through—twice—and feel it still influences my lifestyle aesthetic. In school I most loved the sciences, and I especially loved biology and my 9th grade biology teacher, Mr. Lloyd, so in those formative high school years I decided I wanted to be a biologist.

Outside school I became a backwoods explorer. My only walking access to hiking was the big long hill—is it a giant moraine?—that sat behind the little one-mile loop of houses mine was located on. On “The Trails” I would walk slowly and look carefully and try to identify anything that stood out to me, I tried to find wildlife to observe, and I thought a lot about life and the human condition. I have great summy memories of my discoveries up there, like that funny fiesty young groundhog I surprised, that fox I found who liked to sit on hay bales at dusk and hunt voles in the field. The deer that grazed in the far corners of the field wouldn’t tolerate any evidence of me being around, so I mostly had to enjoy the idea of them from a distance vantage point. Did you know there’s an alarming sound deer make when they see you and want to let you know that they see you; hunters call it a snort, but it sounds like a loud, violent hiss to me.

Still one of the more memorable and magical moments in my life was the evening I just sat still in the forest at dusk to see what would come by. I think I was hoping for a closer look at that fox. I was near the top of the wooded slope on the far side of the hill from where I usually walked. I ended up watching (or rather, just hearing) a strange and secret evening ritual that easily may have played out every night I lived over there in Alfred, and may well still be playing out now in 2019. As I sat there with my feet falling asleep and my jeans getting damp from the leaf litter I was sitting in, I heard some creature, faintly at first…no it was several creatures, and they were coming closer. All you could hear was the occasional rustle of feet in the leaves, or a snapping of twigs, but it was—they were—below me, downslope. And to the left and to the right. They were spread out and moving in a rough line, like a silent search party. It had to be at least a dozen of them, whatever they were. I strained my eyes to see, but couldn’t catch a glimpse of anything, there was just this diffuse rustling, growing vaguely louder. Finally, as it was growing nearly too dark to see, and I thought the evening would end with yet another unsolved animal mystery, I was jolted out of my seat at the sudden explosive sound of a turkey…and a moment later a second…then, a whole harem of turkeys—making their final flight to roost for the night. Each individual 5-25 pound bird hoisted its way-too-heavy-for-their-wings body high up into a downslope tree to roost for the night. Less than five minutes of explosive wings and crashing branches, then all was silent again.

It was in these early years I fell in love for the first time. With nature. I loved its beauty, its size and grandeur, its endless details, its modesty and mysteries, its surprises and secrets. Its stoic self-worth. It would take me years to understand how deep and basic this love was, and how it would run as a theme through my life. I wouldn’t put my finger on that until I was thinking about Climate Change and my love for my children, and the strong sense of stewardship that love evoked from me.

I went to college to study biology, specifically a field called “animal behavior,” because, as I said in my college entrance essay, animal behavior allowed me to combine my love of science with my love of nature. The simultaneous love of exciting, abstract and forward-looking science, and beautiful, concrete and perhaps backward-looking nature also becomes a theme in my life, and I see myself trying to find that balance between nature and science, backward-looking and forward-looking, still today, especially as it relates to our changing world and the threat of Climate Change. It is a theme I am sure I will continue to explore, as I think a lot of us have conflicted feelings about preserving what we’ve known and cherished on the one hand, and letting go of these things in order to move into the bright bold new future, on the other.

Next time, going from the development of a teenager’s identity passion and identity to developing into a “professional” in my 20’s.

This brief YouTube video was recorded in the county neighboring the one where I grew up (Allegany County). It is a little hard to find good pictures of wild Turkeys in their native habitat; lots of lawn shots. Notice the audible rustles created by the fancy footwork of these woodland natives. (And as another aside from the homesteader side of my life, notice the stereotyped motions of these reticent "professional" forest floor managers, stirring the leaf litter and cycling nutrients as these scratchers do. That why we're getting chickens soon!)