Author: Loree Burns

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Hive Detectives Update

© Ellen Harasimowicz

“Tracking CCD continues to be complex. Despite several claims, we still don’t know the cause …”
Jeff Pettis, USDA press release May 31, 2012

The paperback edition The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe will be released next spring, and I’ve been preparing a research update to include in the backmatter. Which means I’ve been reading up on two years of new CCD research, talking with the hive detectives (Jeff Pettis, pictured above, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Diana Cox-Foster, and Maryann Frazier), and boiling all the information I collected down into a few succinct and reader-friendly paragraphs.

Sounds like it should have taken a single working day, right? Or maybe two? Ha. It took me over a month. I may be thorough, but I am not fast.

Then again, what is the rush? The results reported in this 2012 paper from hive detectives Jeff Pettis and Dennis vanEngelsdorp were derived from experiments in progress when Ellen Harasimowicz took the photo above … in April 2008. Some things take time. Sometimes thorough is more important than fast.

(That’s my story and I am sticking to it!)

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Wednesday Wild: Tiger Moth

© Loree Griffin Burns


I’m cheating a bit, because I didn’t actually spend a moment in the wild today. Or yesterday. And things aren’t looking too good for tomorrow either. Some weeks are like that. The good news is that all this inside-at-my-desk time translates into a steadily lengthening rough draft of my new book. (Hooray!) And since I’m sort of a wildlife-in-my-backyard junkie, I always have a backup photograph to share…

I found this moth dazed under the porch lights one night last week and was struck by its size and bright markings. It was fairly easy to identify it (through my favorite online insect field guide, bugguide.net) as a tiger moth. I followed up with my trusty handheld field guide (Caterpillars of Eastern North America, by David L. Wagner) and was surprised with this tidbit: “Adults, when gently squeezed, may bubble generous amounts of their yellow “blood” out of the front corners of the thorax …”

Eww. I did not try it.

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Got Barn Swallows?

© Loree Griffin Burns

In the forefront of this picture is my newly dug garden. (More on that another time.)

In the background is our big, old barn. Which lately I’ve been looking at as more of a laboratory.  The sort of place where I could do this.

(How wicked cool is that?)

Stay tuned …

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More Wednesday Wild: Bob’s Spicebush Swallowtail

© Bob R, Grade 5

 

This photo arrived by email over the weekend, along with a note from the fifth grader who snapped it. “Today I was working in the yard, and I saw a butterfly,” he said, “so I went to go check it out .. I am pretty sure it is a Spicebush Swallowtail …”

He thought I’d like to see it, and he was right. (Thank you, Bob!) In one of those fun happenings that fuels my school visiting, a teacher at Bob’s school independently sent me photos of a froglet she found in her backyard.

Look closely at the world around you, friends. There is so much to see.

(Read that last sentence every morning and you won’t even need me to come to your school. Although if you’d like me to come to your school, you should check out the School Visits page of my website. I added my first 2012-2013 school year events to the calendar this morning!)

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Insect Sounds

Remember this record? Well, I finally had a chance to hear it, thanks to my friend Doris, who actually owns a record player.

(Thank you, Doris!)

This track list will give you an idea how cool the recording was, but only an idea. It doesn’t tell you, for example, that the commentary accompanying the insect sounds occasionally included nifty experiments. Like the one where the sound recorder, Albro Gaul, set up an audio experiment to prove to listeners that wasps don’t fly in the dark.

Here’s how it worked …

Mr. Gaul put a wasp’s nest in a cage rigged with a microphone. At bedtime, he turned out the lights in the room and went to sleep. The wasps appeared to go to sleep, too, because the buzzing their wings make in flight settled down.

In the middle of the night, Mr. Gaul got up and turned the lights on. The hive remained quiet. So he slapped the cage until the wasps woke up. How could you tell when they were awake? Buzzing. Lots of loud and angry buzzing.

Then Mr. Gaul turned the lights out, and the buzzing stopped. Because, apparently, wasps don’t fly in the dark.

When he turned the lights on again, the loud, angry buzzing resumed.

Again, lights off: silence.

Again, lights on: buzzing.

This was by far my favorite track on the album. Although the “six-footed cadence” of a viceroy butterfly walking was pretty cool, too.

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Wednesday Wild: Catbird

© Loree Griffin Burns
© Loree Griffin Burns


One of my sons has been learning to bird by ear, and he’s inspired me to try it myself. It’s hard! In fact, I’ve found that the few bird sounds I did recognize by ear have been pushed right out of my brain by the flurry of new calls and songs that I’ve been trying to cram in there. Thankfully, our resident catbird (above) has made it his personal mission, it seems, that I not forget his mew call.

Wanna hear it?

If you press that link, scroll down, hit the play arrow on the audio file labeled “mew call”, and repeat for an hour or two, you’ve got the soundtrack to my Wednesday.

Catchy, no?

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Life on Earth

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/34922807 w=400&h=300]

I’ve spent the past week or so exploring e-books, in preparation for the creation of the enhanced electronic version of TRACKING TRASH. Among the gems I’ve discovered so far is E.O. Wilson’s LIFE ON EARTH. What is available now is only an introduction to the enhanced textbook that will eventually be available, but the introduction is free–and stunning–so I recommend checking it out if you have the devices to do so.

To me, LIFE ON EARTH is an incredibly well-done glimpse into exactly what an enhanced e-book can do. As a codex-clutching skeptic, I thought I’d never be converted. Oh, my. If I’m not converted, I’m at least intrigued. This is not the textbook of old. It includes the same information, but presented in engaging ways that enhance understanding and didn’t for a moment distract me as a reader. There is footage of E.O. Wilson in the field, animations of cellular components, stunning full color image galleries, and more, all accessible (or not) as often as you like. Of all the e-books I’ve explored so far, the textbook genre is the one in which the electronic format makes the most sense.

Also? I think E.O. Wilson is a national treasure. In a short video interview introducing the chapter on small creatures, which you can see above, he explains why he has spent a lifetime studying ants. They are abundant and easy to find, he explains, simple to study and intensely interesting. And then, with a boyish chuckle that melts the part of me that so admires passion, he adds “I honestly cannot understand why most people don’t study ants!”

Me either, Mr. Wilson. Me, either.

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Twice-stabbed on an Apple Tree

© Loree Griffin Burns

Yesterday, in central Massachusetts, the sun came out. In celebration, my daughter and I spent a couple of hours outside after school. She did her homework on the picnic table, I scoped out one of our two apple trees. I’ve been reading a truly inspiring book on tree-watching–SEEING TREES, by Nancy Ross Hugo and Robert Llewellyn–and have decided to take up the sport. Somewhere between noting the gorgeous pattern of the bark (it was spongy and wet, mottled dark and light all over and then sprinkled with moss and lichens) and checking out the leaves, I found some critters. Not surprisingly, I was distracted. Ants. Slugs. And a ladybug! Not just any ladybug, mind you, but one I’ve not yet seen in the wild.

Can you see it up there in the photo?

That, my friends, is a Twice-stabbed Ladybug (Chilocorus stigma). Or maybe its a Once-squashed Ladybug (Chilocorus hexacyclus)*? I will never know for sure, because when I tried to catch it for a closer look at its chromosomes**, it dropped down into the grass. Lost forever. But I did manage this picture, which I’ll submit to Lost Ladybug Project soon.

So, eleven different species on my ladybug life list now. Hooray for the sun, and for tree-watching, and for ladybugs!

* I am not making these names up, I swear. They are from this excellent ladybug field guide.

**Okay, now I’m making things up. The only way to distinguish the two species is to examine the chromosomes, but I had no intention of doing so. I’m not that geeky. Plus, I don’t have the proper microscopes yet.

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Center City Public Charter School

Photos courtesy of An Open Book Literacy Foundation

Last month, while in Washington, D.C. for the USA Science & Engineering Festival, I was invited to visit the Center City Public Charter School in Center Heights. Sponsored by An Open Book, my morning visit with Ms. Vanessa Elliott’s sixth grade science class was, in a word, spectacular. Ms. Elliott’s students were excited and inquisitive and completely jazzed by the concept of citizen science. And I was completely wowed by their enthusiasm.

The morning would have been a success no matter what, because Dara La Porte from An Open Book had prepared the school, and Ms. Elliott had prepared her students, and because these kids were so very open to rewriting the definition of a scientist. (You know, so that it included them.) But my supremely generous publishers, Henry Holt Books for Young Readers and Houghton Mifflin Children’s Books, pushed the event over the top by donating enough copies of Citizen Scientists and Tracking Trash that each student went home with a copy of their very own.

Do you know how cool that was? It was very cool. I thought so, and so did the students.

Sometimes in the rush to write and edit and perfect and promote and meet deadlines, I lose sight of what I am really trying to do with my work: share stories and ideas that thrill me with people who will be equally thrilled. I’d like to thank each and every student I met at CCPCS last month for reminding me of that. Happy exploring to all of you!