Author: Loree Burns

I’m leaving the pages of my citizen science book briefly–just briefly!–to share some froggy delights. Here’s a photograph from earlier in the season, and a haiku from earlier in the millenium. Enjoy!

© Loree Griffin Burns

Old dark sleepy pool
Quick unexpected frog
Goes plop! Watersplash.

Basho

I’ll be finishing my work on the frog chapter, I think, over the weekend. Then it’s on to ladybugs. If I put on my glasses and squint just right, I can almost see THE END!

First, the snafu. For some reason LiveJournal has stopped sending me emails to let me know when someone has posted a comment on my journal. This is very annoying. I don’t want y’all to think I am ignoring you … but I also don’t want to check my LiveJournal even more often than I do already. (I’m trying to write a book, man!) Any other LiveJournal users having this problem? Any of you know how to fix it?

Now, the pop quiz. I’m combing through butterfly images for the citizen science book this week and I came across these three members of the royal family: a Viceroy, a Queen, and a Monarch. Do you know who is who?

© Loree Griffin Burns

© Loree Griffin Burns

© Loree Griffin Burns

I’ll post the identifications in a comment later today.

Happy Wednesday!

© Loree Griffin Burns

That right there is the pupal stage of a Monarch butterfly. The jade green chrysalis with golden accents is hard to spot in the wild, so blended is it with the surrounding plants and bushes. I told my daughter this during a walk last week. We were in a milkweed meadow in the late afternoon and conditions weren’t good for our butterfly tagging mission. I suggested she look for ladybugs or caterpillars instead, but she wanted to look for a chrysalis.

“They’re pretty hard to find,” I warned her. “I know adults who have searched for years and never found one.”

She was walking behind me at the time, and she gave her patented Whatever laugh.

“It’s really not that hard, Mom,” she said.

I turned to disagree, to tell her about the man I know who has been watching and raising Monarch butterflies for more than twenty years and never, not once, seen a chrysalis in the wild. And there was my daughter, nose to pupa with a chrysalis, right there in our immediate wild. She was studying the golden threads, the droplets of dew, the silken pad holding the whole thing up.

And there you go. This is the thing about kids and nature that has so captured my imagination lately. This is the very beating heart of my citizen science book, in fact: young people see the world differently than us older people do.

Why?

Well, for starters, there’s physical stature. My daughter is four feet tall and was looking up at the chrysalis; I am five feet seven inches, and it was so far under my nose I didn’t even notice it. The physical geography of place is different for her; she was quite literally closer to the meadow around us.

There’s also the sensitivity issue. At almost forty years old and I don’t perceive sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes as well as I once did. My daughter’s senses, on the other hand, are still developing. Each day she sees and hears and smells and feels and tastes a little better than the day before. She is coming into her prime just as I pass mine.

And then there is the matter of focus. As I breezed past that chrysalis, my eyes were on the place around me but my head was only partially there. I was thinking about chrysalids, but also about my daughter, how nice it was to spend time with her; and what I would make for dinner and how badly I needed to remember to stop and buy a gallon of milk on the way home; how soon we should leave the meadow in order to pick up my boys from soccer practice; how well (or not) I had rendered this magical place—the milkweed meadow—in my writing earlier that day; and so on and so on forever and a day. I live in several moments at once. My daughter lives in the one and only moment at hand. And so she finds the magic.

This little meadow incident, coupled with the timely and wise words of my friend Linda, has helped me re-focus myself and my book in progress this week. The spine is clear. I need only grip it tightly and keep writing.

Still here. Still writing the citizen science book. Still not so good at blogging about the writing process while I am wrestling mano-a-mano (mano-a-keyboard-o?) with it. I did take some time off over the weekend, though, and there were adventures …

On Saturday, my husband and I turned this:

(Otherwise known as our newly dug 900 square foot garden plot
planted with a cover crop of buckwheat.)

Into this:

(Otherwise known as our newly dug, enriched 900 square foot
garden plot now ready for a late-season planting of oats.)

We had planned to rent a tiller, but our experience with that particular garden machine has not been good. And so we turned the garden by hand. It was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon … heart-pumping work, kids nearby (but not near enough that we could stick a spade in their hands), lazy chit-chat, lots of water breaks in the shade.

Things took a turn toward scary, though, about halfway through the plot. I slid my spade into the soil for the millionth time and a GIANT FURRY BEAST shot out of the tangle of buckwheat stems at my feet. It charged me! I was not terribly level-headed about this … at least not until I figured out that the GIANT FURRY BEAST was an Eastern Cottontail Rabbit. A baby Eastern Cottontail Rabbit:

(Otherwise known as the cutest furry beastlet on the planet.)

Sadly, the mother rabbit has not returned to the garden. We’ve moved the babies into an open cardboard box, retrofitted with their previous fur-lined burrow/nest, and left them in the garden, hoping for the best. We’ve had the “they are wild animals and not pets” talk, and the “survival of the fittest/Darwinian evolution” talk, and—when we found one of the rabbit babies dead on Sunday morning—the “circle of life” talk. Still, the kids and I are rooting hard for the three remaining beastlets:

(Can you blame us?)

Katydid
© Loree Griffin Burns

One more Friday thing…

If you live near New York City and you like the idea of listening to animal calls in the dark, then you should know about this weekend’s Cricket Crawl. Hearty citizen scientists are taking to the leafy jungles of the Big Apple in search of crickets and katydids … and they will be finding them by listening to and recognizing their various sounds.

(I am not making this up!)

It is a very good thing that I do not live near New York City, because I could totally get into this sort of thing. And then my book would never get written.

American Toad
© Loree Griffin Burns

So, this week I’ve been writing about frogs. And toads. And their crazy mating calls. I have a CD called FROG CALLS OF RHODE ISLAND, and have been playing it on an endless loop, trying to describe the calls in words. It would be maddening if it weren’t so fun. My favorite call by far belongs to the American Toad; it’s the easiest to imitate, and doing so totally impresses the neighborhood kids.

(Wanna try it? Come on, you know you do. Okay, press your lips together. Now blow air through them so that you make your lips flapperate (a new word) … sort of like making a raspberry, but without using your tongue. Great. Now flapperate while screaming. I kid you not. Just try it. If it were mating season there would be an American Toad stampede outside your window right now.)

Anyway, I’ve been working hard. Chapters have been written. Frog call quizzes have been aced. I deserve a break. And, so, I am heading off to Storytime at Wellesley Booksmith, where Kristy Dempsey and Christopher Denise will be celebrating their new picture book, ME WITH YOU, later today. I promise to take pictures. And I promise not to do an American Toad imitation while I am there.

Hey! Don’t forget to enter my little raffle: chances are VERY good that you will win a copy of the fabulous BIRDS OF CENTRAL PARK, by Carl Vornberger Seriously. Good. Odds.