Seeing Costa Rica

Although Costa Rica is far from my backyard, I wanted to write a little bit about my recent trip to several areas of that glorious tropical country. I took this journey with my graduate school and through Earth Expeditions. When I first applied for the program, I wrote that I wanted to contrast the country I visited to the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. That idea colored the lens through which I viewed my surroundings in San Jose, Talmanca, Yorkin Village, Estaciaon Las Tortugas and Monte Verde. But first I needed to be able to see through that lens.

Having moved to the dense foliage of Washington State from the sparse vegetation of the Mojave Desert, I expected to feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of unfamiliar plants and trees. That was certainly the case. I had recently heard the term plant blindness, and that is what I experienced. I was blind in Costa Rica. I couldn’t “see the trees for the forest,” so to speak. Forsyth and Miyata  (1984) wrote about the overwhelming tangle of life in the tropical forest and that trying to make sense of it was like trying to understand a foreign language. This is what I found. It wasn’t just the vegetation, either. I wrote in my journal that I had no frame of reference to identify birds, “ In the US, I know that a bird is a swallow or a warbler from size or behavior. Even if I don’t know what species, I can find it in the guide. Here I don’t (have an idea of what family of birds to look for or where to find it in the guide)”. There are 903 species listed in The Birds of Costa Rica field guide that I brought along on my trip (Garrigues & Dean, 2014), but I relied on our host, Marco, to identify most of the birds that we saw. My species list includes 20 new birds, all of which I had never heard of. How could I have possibly known that the hanging nests covering a tree were built by a Montezuma Oropendula or that these birds belong to the blackbird and oriole family? In the ten days that I spent in Costa Rica, I wasn’t able to truly see the birds and the trees and the plants, but I could still compare the general differences between Costa Rica and Washington State.

One of the thoughts that has stayed with me in the last four months since I returned,  and which I have spoken of many times, is the way that the Bribri people practice agriculture. I drive through a well known agricultural area on my way to work every day. There are no vast banana plantations, or the miles of mono-culture practiced in other parts of the US; the Skagit Valley is composed of many small farms, often organic and sustainable. However, they are still so very different from the small family gardens we saw around Yorkin Village. I was fascinated to walk through the Stibrawpa plot with “The Jaguar” (Eliodoro) and see how guava and yucca, jackfruit and stinging nettle were all planted in proximity to each other. Not in straight lines as a garden would be in my neighborhood, but all woven together, providing just what the community needs for sustenance and healing. I loved the idea that jackfruit were planted near the Bribri banana plantations so that the workers would have something to eat while they worked. What  caught my eye, though,  was the stinging nettle plant that was pointed out. The plant seemed to be different from what I call stinging nettle in my woods, but used to make tea just like I would use nettle leaves.  Eliodoro called this plant Ortiga, but I can’t  find the actual Latin name for it. Our stinging nettle is Urtica dioica. Urtica sounds like Ortiga, but I’m not sure of the relationship. In any event, the Bribri use nettle leaves to stimulate lactation in women, combat the effects of toxins from pesticides and to treat migraines and sore knees. It is even used as a punishment for naughty children! My favorite native plant book of the Pacific Northwest, Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Pojar & Mackinnon, 1994) only suggests that the young leaves of Urtica dioica be eaten as a green. No mention of using it on children, but I seem to get punished every time I bushwack off trail in the summer.

I should probably write about the overwhelming beauty of the cloud forest in Monte Verde or the enormous turtles crawling out of Caribbean sea on a moonlit night, but what truly helped me to “see” this magnificent country was to find the similarities between Costa Rica and my home. Even though I cannot identify a tropical plant or a bird, I can still make a connection to my own life.

Forsyth, A. & Miyata, K. (1984). Tropical nature: Life and death in the rainforests of Central and South America. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Garrigues, R. & Dean, R. (2014). The birds of Costa Rica, 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Polar, J. & MacKinnon, A. (Eds)(1994). Plants of the Pacific Northwest coast. Vancouver, Bristish Columbia: Lone Pine Publishing.

Great blue heron

Flying overhead, they look like something prehistoric. “Maybe a pterodactyl”, a child once said as we watched the bird rise up from the water, seemingly too big and gangly to be so graceful. Watching them land in tall trees, forty feet in the air, and place large sticks in a wide, messy nest seems equally impossible. How can they balance on those tree limbs with such big toes and on such long legs? I love great blue herons (Ardea herodias). I’ve seen them in every wetland I’ve visited, from the Everglades to the Dunes State Park. From the Las Vegas Wash to Fidalgo Bay, Washington. Most often, they’ve been solitary stalkers, lurching forward, then standing completely still waiting for fish or a crayfish or a frog to swim unknowingly near. Then they instantly thrust their long, yellow bill into the water and retract it just as quickly with their prey squeezed between their mandibles. I watched one, a large Asian carp lodged in its throat, fly down the river and wondered if it would survive its over-sized meal.
In late winter or early spring, great blue herons give up their lonely ways and come together in large colonies.We called them rookeries in the Midwest, but here near the Salish Sea, they are called heronries. The March Point heronry in Anacortes, WA has over five hundred nests – some say the biggest heronry in the western US. Herons choose a new mate every year, engaging in elaborate courtship behavior of stick offering, bill clapping and plumage displays. After a successful courtship, the females will lay between 2-6 eggs, sometimes twice in a season if the first young did not fare well, preyed upon by bald eagles or raccoons or even their own siblings. Falls from the tops of the trees are not uncommon before they are ready to fly. I was told that last year, at the March Point heronry, numerous fledglings fell from their nests during a ferocious wind storm. Volunteers, worried about the birds’ safety, rushed to the site, but were only able to save three. Of those, only one survived after its rescue.
But, I think what I like most about the great blue heron, is its call. Perfect for a prehistoric flying bird, it is a deep, guttural “crunk, crunk, crunk”. Imagine what hundreds of these birds sound like when they are gathered together.

Sound of the great blue heron –  https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/65572061/embed/640

 

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (n.d.). All About Birds: Great Blue Heron. Retrieved from https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Great_Blue_Heron/

 

Eissinger, Anne. (2007). Great Blue Herons in Puget Sound. Puget Sound Nearshore Partnership Report No. 2007-06. Published by Seattle District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle, Washington.Retrieved from http://www.pugetsoundnearshore.org/technical_papers/herons.pdf

 

 

 

Citizen Science

The days have gotten away from me! It seems like everywhere I have worked, there are a couple of months where all the environmental education and outreach to the public is concentrated. In Washington, that time seems to be April and May and I have been so busy! But, part of that time I’ve been lucky enough to help out on some citizen science projects and I’ve gotten some training for other efforts that are in the works. When I lived in Nevada, I participated in an annual bald eagle count on Lake Mead, but I wasn’t aware of any other citizen science opportunities. In Washington, they are so abundant, it is almost overwhelming. Last month was the time for amphibian egg mass counting and the beginning of great blue heron nesting and foraging monitoring. I learned about intertidal and crab monitoring on the Salish Sea and an upcoming effort to watch for signs of climate change in the lowland forests. I received emails from Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology about the Big Day bird count. What’s going on?
Citizen Science can be defined as the participation of ordinary people in scientific work. Anyone, from children to adults, can be taught the skills necessary to observe, monitor or collect data for a particular project. Good projects have protocols developed by scientists and use subject matter experts who review the data for accuracy. Why do scientists use laypeople? Because there is so much work to be done! Volunteers can expand the capacity of a project well beyond the ability of one scientist to collect data. In return, the citizen scientist learns so much and can take pride in contributing to a scientific study. One quick foray into a great blue heron nesting colony (rookery), hooked me on these magnificent birds and sparked my curiosity about their behavior. I am eager to help scientists understand why the herons are forming mega-colonies of hundreds of nests near the Salish Sea and why the colony on Samish Island was suddenly abandoned last year. Most participants feel this same passion. Here are just a few examples of projects that anyone can check out:

http://scistarter.com This is a clearing house for projects, but does not capture all that are available
https://www.inaturalist.org Find a citizen science project or just upload personal nature observations to a database

Butterflies
http://www.monarchwatch.org Monarch tagging and monitoring east of the Rockies
https://monarchalert.calpoly.edu/ Monarchs west of the Rockies
http://www.swmonarchs.org/index.php Monarchs in Arizona and southwestern US
https://monarchlab.org/mlmp Monarch larvae in US and Canada
http://www.naba.org North American Butterfly Association projects
https://www.nps.gov/noca/getinvolved/supportyourpark/butterfly-project.htm North Cascades National Park, WA

Birds
http://www.audubon.org/Bird/cbc Christmas bird count
http://www.birdsource.org/gbbcapps Great Backyard Bird Count
http://www.birds.cornell.edu.pfw Project Feeder Watch
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/birdsleuth Great resource to learn more about bird projects and school children

Frogs
http://www.aza.org/frogwatch
https://whatfrogs.wordpress.com Whatcom County, WA amphibian projects

Other insects
http://www.lostladybug.org Ladybugs-I’ve done this with little kids. It’s a lot of fun!
https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/ Photograph bumblebees and submit to project
http://xerces.org/dragonfly-migration/migration-monitoring/ Fall and spring movements of dragonflies

Other
http://www.re-sources.org/north-sound-stewards/citizen-science North Salish Sea projects through RE sources

 

 

Wake-robin

Isn’t that a wonderful name? A plant that flowers, just as the robins start calling in the woods. Some people call it Bethroot or Birthroot, because it can be used to stop bleeding after childbirth (Ream, 2011). The Lummi and Skagit tribes of Western Washington also used the juice of the smashed plants or an infusion of the roots as a wash for sore eyes (Native American Ethnobotany). Most of us, however, know this plant by its genus name – Trillium – for three. Three leaves, three white flower petals, three sepals. Every year I look for this flower on my spring walks through wet woods. It’s hard to find in disturbed places, those places that have been logged and regrown or developed into wooded homesites. So I go to places like the Stimpson Family Nature Reserve in Bellingham. This year, I was fooled by the appearance of one Trillium I stumbled across. I am used to seeing the flowers nestled in the distinctive three leaves (which are actually not leaves but are the bracts of the flower) close to the ground, but this flower was standing tall above the forest floor on a six inch stem. My walking companion assured me it was still a Trillium! As spring progresses, white flowers age into a pretty purple color, which has also fooled me in the past.
What I find most fascinating about this plant is its method of seed dispersal. Each Trillium seed has a little appendage called an elaiosome that is tasty to ants and some other insects. Ants take the seeds back to their nest and eat the elaiosome or feed it to the larvae, then they discard the remaining part of the seed on their debris pile. They have been known to carry the seeds up to 15 meters from the plant! (Pojar & Mackinnon, 2004; Ream, 2011). Forests with seed-bearing ants can be lush with Trillium, but I have never before thought about how they came to be there. Mostly, I just enjoy them, harbingers of spring.

From Mary Oliver:

Every spring among
the ambiguities of childhood
the hillsides grew white with the wild trilliums.
I believed in the world. Oh, I wanted
to be easy
in the peopled kingdoms,
to take my place there, but there was none
that I could find shaped like me.
So I entered
through the tender buds,
I crossed the cold creek, my backbone
and my thin white shoulders unfolding and stretching.
From the time of snow-melt, when the creek roared
and the mud slid
and the seeds cracked,
I listened to the earth-talk, the root-wrangle,
the arguments of energy, the dreams lying
just under the surface, then rising,
becoming
at the last moment
flaring and luminous — the patient parable
of every spring and hillside year after difficult year (Oliver, 1986).

 

Resources:

Erna Gunther. Ethnobotany of Western Washington. 1973.
Native American Ethnobotany: A Database of Foods, Drugs, Dyes and Fibers of Native American Peoples, Derived from Plants. http://naeb.brit.org
Mary Oliver. Dream Work. 1986.
Jim Pojar & Andy Mackinnon. Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. 2004.

Tarn Ream. Life History and Demography of Trillium ovatum Pursh. (Liliaceae)in Western Montana. Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 625. Retrieved from
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/625. 2011.

Searching for Place

I’ve lived in several very different environments in my life. I grew up in the dunes, forests and fields of northwest Indiana, walking some of the same paths as Edwin Way Teale and Henry Cowles. When I got married, I moved to southern California and lived in the chaparral and oak savanna with an occasional visit to the Pacific. Then came 12 years in the Mojave Desert, where it’s said there are nearly 300 days of blue skies. Finally, a move to western Washington, and a house under massive western redcedar and Douglas-fir. And because I love to learn about all the living things around me, I sought out teachers and new friends who could share what they knew about my new homes. Although it was 35 years ago, I’ll always remember a class I took with Milt McCauley. He taught me the wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains and introduced me to my local hiking trails. I volunteered with what was then called Nursery Nature Walks and learned how to engage small children in nature. In Nevada, I found the Nevada Naturalist program and the Public Lands Institute and met lifelong friends who explored the desert with me. But in Washington, I haven’t yet found the right mix of education and good company. There are plenty of classes and workshops on the Salish Sea and I found one intensive course put on by the Washington Native Plant Society, but I want to learn about everything! From eelgrass beds to banana slugs to the lichen that live on the Western redcedar in my backyard. Hence, this blog. While I am Finding My Place, I want to share what I am learning. Maybe others will want to join me and we will create a community of nature literate folk in the Pacific Northwest.

 

A few books and resources:

Cowles, Henry Chandler.The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan. Part I.-Geographical Relations of the Dune Floras. Botanical Gazette, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Feb., 1899), pp. 95-117

Docents of Nursey Nature Walks. Trails, Tails and Tidepools in Pails. 1992. (Nursery Nature Walks became the Children’s Nature Institute, a wonderful organization that is no longer operating).

McCauley, Milt. Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains.1982

Teale, Edwin Way. Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist. 1943.

Nevada Naturalist https://www.unce.unr.edu/programs/sites/nevadanaturalist/

Salish Sea Stewards http://www.skagitmrc.org/projects/education-outreach/salish-sea-stewards/

Washington Native Plant Society https://wnps2.org/new-site

Nature Literacy

Nature literacy. I’ve read about environmental literacy and ecoliteracy, but I hadn’t heard the term nature literacy until I saw it used by the Orion Society in a book by David Sobel. I’d like to adopt that term for this blog. “ The ability to learn from and respond to direct experience of nature”. Our society doesn’t have that ability anymore. With so many of us wrapped up in our day to day lives and living so far removed from the woods and water, mountains and deserts, we no longer “see” nature, even when it is still right in front of our eyes. And it’s so important! Not only because without an understanding of ecology and the environment , we are at risk of fundamentally and irreversibly changing our world, but because we have lost something essential to our spirits. We humans are a part of nature, not apart from nature. Not such an original thought, but so true! Our community is then an inclusive one, not just those people who live in our towns and neighborhoods, but all those organisms that live under and over and beside us. We need to get to know them as we would a new neighbor who moves in next door.

 

By the way,that book by David Sobel is a good one, especially if you work with children. It is part of the Nature Literacy Series and includes the following titles. Great books.

David Sobel. Beyond Ecophobia. 1996.
Clare Leslie, John Talmadge & Thomas Wessels. Into the Field. 1996.
Orion Society. Stories in the Land. An Anthology. 1998.
David Sobel. Place-based Education. 2003, 2005.