Author: Loree Burns

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The Viburnum Mysteries, Part 2

Okay, two blog posts in one day has got to have one or two readers wondering what gives. This: I’m sick. I’ve tried writing (too exhausting), reading (also too exhausting) and sleeping (strangely impossible). Blogging is … just right. And so I’ve decided to fill you in on the Viburnum Mysteries.

On Sunday my kids and I found several mysterious creatures on our viburnum bushes. We suspect the pearly green, roundish ones are the eggs of a super interesting species of moth, but can’t be sure until they hatch. To ensure we don’t miss the blessed event, we’ve moved two of the eggs indoors. How? Well, I’ll tell you …

I clipped a stem with several leaves—including the leaf supporting the egg—and placed it in a plastic stem holder. You know, the sort you get when you buy a flower arrangement? They are usually green in color and conical in shape., florists fill the plastic base with water and slip a stem through a hole in the rubber cover in order to keep stems alive longer. Here’s a picture:


© Loree Griffin Burns

As you can see, I placed these stem holders into a yogurt container to keep them upright. (Before you decide to skip a step and place the stems directly into a large container of water, realize this: caterpillars cannot swim!) I then put the yogurt container and stems into an old fish tank. The tank is here in my office where I can check on the eggs regularlyconstantly.

I left a few eggs outside on the viburnum bush … I call these my control group. Will moving eggs indoors prevent them from hatching? Or slow down hatching? I’m not sure. But keeping an eye on my outdoor control eggs as well as my indoor eggs will help me answer these questions. In a stroke of brilliance that hit me only after I spent an extremely long time trying to find my outdoor control eggs this morning, I’ve tied ribbons around the relevant viburnum stems to make locating the eggs easier:


© Loree Griffin Burns

Can you see the black ribbon? And the little green egg? They are both in the picture, honest.

After three days of waiting and watching, I can’t tell you much. My indoor eggs and my outdoor eggs are quiet and nothing visible to the naked eye—or even a magnifying-glassed eye—is happening. Sort of makes me wish I had a microscope; then I might be seeing this.

!

Anyway, stay tuned …

 

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Lincoln School

Last year I offered a free school visit raffle for participants in International Coastal Cleanup events in Massachusetts. There were 2900 entrants (hooray for the Bay State and its dedicated ocean lovers!) and the grand prize winner was Emily, a seventh grader from Brookline. Yesterday I visited her school.

As it turns out, I have been to the William Lincoln School once before. But if ever there was a school that I wanted to visit again, this was it. First of all, last year’s trip was a bit unsettling for me. Somehow I managed to leave my computer bag (with my laptop inside!) sitting on the floor of my garage when I left for the visit. Once I recovered from the shock and embarrassment of this oversight, I did my presentations sans slideshow. All went well, and the Lincoln students and staff were amazingly kind about my gaffe. Even still, I was more than thrilled to go back this year and show them my best.

A highlight of this year’s visit was the opportunity to speak with Mrs. Zobel’s eight grade science students, who have spent a good deal of this year exploring ecosystems and sharing them in book format with younger students. What a treat to talk about the process of writing nonfiction for young people with writers in the thick of that very process! I look forward to reading some of these books when they are finished.

Many thanks to Emily, COASTSWEEPer extraordinaire, and Sue Zobel, who coordinated my visit. In honor of Emily and Sue and the entire Lincoln community, I’m going to officially kick off the International Coastsweet Get-The-Word-Out season:

This year’s International Coastal Cleanup will be held worldwide on September 19, 2009; you can find an event near you at the ICC website. Massachusetts residents can visit the COASTSWEEP website, where 2009 ICC events in the Bay State will soon be listed.

 

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The Viburnum Mysteries, Part 1

Most of this past weekend was sunny and warm here in Massachusetts, so I spent a lot of time in the yard. I was supposed to be weeding, but I kept finding interesting things to photograph. During one of my photography breaks I noticed our three Viburnum bushes looked a little, er, chomped:


© Loree Griffin Burns

It didn’t take long to find the chompers:


© Loree Griffin Burns

There were hundreds of them! Even though they were probably not good for my Viburnum bushes, I have to admit feeling a little jazzed at the idea of some butterfly or moth leaving us a giant brood of caterpillars to watch and enjoy. I took lots of photos so that I could properly identify the species later.

Excitement mounted when my sharp-eyed assistant spotted this on an un-chomped Viburnum leaf:


© Loree Griffin Burns

An egg! Look on the top leaf, just right of the center vein at about the center of the leaf. That is an egg! What kind of egg? I’m not sure. But it fed our butterfly dreams. Before the sun set we’d added this clue to our pile of study images:


© Loree Griffin Burns

Certain species of wasp lay their eggs in the safety and relative abundance of a caterpillar body. The eggs hatch and the wasp larvae actually feed on the caterpillar, slowly eating it alive. Gross, I know. But I wouldn’t mind seeing the spectacle once, and it looked as we might have a chance. Plus? This larger caterpillar would surely help us identify the species of insect we were dealing with.

Later, armed with our photographs, several insect field guides, and high-speed internet access, we set out to discover what was living in our Viburnum. It took several hours, mostly because I assumed that all the species we’d found were related. They are not. (Not to self: stop making assumptions!) It seems we are dealing with two species; let’s get the bad news over with first, shall we?


© Loree Griffin Burns

This is the larvae of the recently imported and truly nasty Viburnum Leaf Beetle. Ick. They eat their fill of Viburnum leaves, then crawl down to the base of the plant and pupate in the soil. The adult beetle eventually emerges, flies into the bush and continues to feed on Viburnum leaves. The final insult comes in the fall, when females lay hundreds of Viburnum Leaf Beetle eggs in the woody stems of the shrub … completing the life cycle and setting my poor Viburnums up for an even nastier spring next year.

(The silver lining here is that there is actually a citizen science project tracking the spread of Viburnum Leaf Beetles. And I am now an official contributor! Funny how things work sometimes, eh?)

The truly good news? The eggs we found are not Viburnum Leaf Beetle eggs. And we could find only a few butterfly or moth species that lay eggs on Viburnum leaves in the Northeast. It is possible that we have found eggs that will hatch caterpillars that will eventually pupate into this:


© Loree Griffin Burns

And we Burnses intend to find out for sure:


© Loree Griffin Burns

Stay tuned!

 

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Paxton Center School


Photo by Andrea Thackeray

I was invited to the most amazing luncheon yesterday. It was with the fiesty bunch of fifth and sixth graders in the picture above, readers and writers from Paxton Center School in Massachusetts. I spoke to their classmates in large groups earlier and later in the day, but it was my time with the lunch bunch that I will remember most…

As readers, we talked for a long time about our favorite books and favorite authors: Lois Lowry and Ellen Klages and J.K. Rowling and Pseudonymous Bosch and Linda Urban and so many others. The excitement around that table as we talked about books would have made every single author mentioned proud … and each of us left with a couple new titles on our Must Read lists.

As writers, we talked about strategies for working on our craft. It turns out that finding time to write is just as hard for eleven and twelve year olds as it is for forty year olds! We shared stories of rejection (my heart still goes out to you, Emily!) and triumph (hooray for completed stories!) and agreed that despite all the pitfalls, finding time to write our stories is worth the effort.

Many thanks to my new friends at Paxton Center School, and to their teachers, for inviting me over for the day. Special thanks to Alice, who sent a letter I’ll cherish for always.

Happy reading! Happy writing!

 

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Time and Words

It is rainy and wet here. Very rainy. Very wet. My weekly gig as Garden Apprentice was postponed until the skies brighten, which means I found myself today and yesterday with what I always claim to need: more hours in the day. Sweet!

I spent yesterday’s extra time reading and pondering words. For reasons that are not completely clear to me, I have become intensely focused on words. This sounds funny, I am sure, because I am a writer … of course I focus on words. But this is different. Suddenly my thoughts are snagging on random words, and I find myself writing them down (I am an incurable notebook scribbler) and staring at them, wondering about the words they are connected to and how I might use those connections in creative and intentional ways. This new word fetish led directly to my most recent completed work, a picture book whose structure is entirely dependent on the relationship between the nineteen words that tell the story. (More on that one day soon, I hope. Fingers crossed!)

Yesterday’s striking words, found while reading and scribbled in my notebook, were:

weft

dwine

surplusage

vespine

Say them out loud. Aren’t they lovely?

Weft is a woven fabric, and the sentence I read was this: “Such indeed is the economy of nature that secret relations and astonishing concordances exist throughout the whole vast weft of things.”

::swoon::

Dwine means to languish, waste away, or fade.

Surplusage is archaic, but means, I presume, a surplus. (Yes, I am reading old Fabre books again.)

And, finally, vespine: of, or pertaining to, wasps. This one set off an avalanche of word activity in my notebook. There are a lot of ‘ine’ adjectives that I dig: bovine, porcine, feline, canine, equine. I doodled as many as I could think of, and then spent an hour digging for more: corvine (of, or pertaining to, crows) and anguine (of, or pertaining to, snakes) and, my favorite of favorites, myrmecophagine (of, or pertaining to, anteaters!).

What will come of my word lists? Who knows. Perhaps nothing. But I realized today that the time to play and ponder words is a luxury I should give myself more often. I am, after all, a writer.

So, what words do YOU love?

 

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John D. Runkle School

There is something special about being invited into a school community. Each one is entirely unique, and I am always intrigued by the glimpses I am given into a place that is new to me. Last Friday I got a second invite into the Runkle School community, and saw again many examples of students giving their Runkle best. (Don’t you just love that phrase?)

My visit fell during the school’s annual Music and Arts festival, which meant I was treated to gorgeous art displays and live music during my stay. Although not technically part of the festival, I snapped this picture of the quilt hanging in the school library. Isn’t it lovely?

Science teacher Maxine Hunter challenged her students to keep a plastic journal for the twenty-four hours leading up to my visit, and I was impressed with the student response. Rachel, a sixth grader, recorded 158 ‘plastic encounters’ (another Runkle phrase I adore). The journals got students thinking about plastic in new ways; Rachel wondered why a glow stick that is used for a few short hours is made out of plastic that will last for decades. It’s a good question.

Thanks to librarian Teresa Gallo-Toth, who coordinated my visit to Runkle (and sent me home with some great ideas for read-alouds to share with my kids), to Science Coordinator Janet MacNeil, who shared her wisdom and told me about this cool Understanding Science website, and to all the staff and students I met during my stay; I had a Runkle good time!

 

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Gone Froggin’

The kids and I spent Friday afternoon poking around the milkweed sprouts at Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary. We were hoping to find some monarch butterflies or, better still, some monarch eggs. No luck. But we did meet this fellow, and about a half dozen of his friends:

We were tempted to ring in the long weekend with a hearty American bullfrog chorus, but the mosquitoes and our empty bellies got the better of us and we left well before dark. I love this time of year, though, when it feels okay to head indoors a little early. We’ve got a bit of spring and a whole bunch of summer stretched out before us … plenty of time to spot butterflies and soak in frog sounds.

Happy Memorial Day weekend, friends!

 

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Henri Again

This week I have been working, once again, on the picture book biography of entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. He continues to amuse me. In a chapter from Fabre’s THE LIFE OF THE CATERPILLAR, he writes:

“After unsuspectingly passing a whole morning with my insects, stooping over them, magnifying-glass in hand, to examine the workings of their slits, I found my forehead and eyelids suffering with redness for twenty-four hours and afflicted with an itching even more painful and persistent than that produced by the sting of a nettle.”

He goes on to explain the source of his pain: hairs on the body of the Pine Processionary caterpillars he had been watching all morning. Fabre was the first to note that these caterpillars grind tiny poisonous hairs on their bodies into even tinier poisonous dust particles, which float invisibly in the air, landing and stinging anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby.

Fabre, dedicated seeker that he was, did not let a few stinging hairs stop him observing and recording the life and times of these caterpillars. But he did lament to his readers:

“No, the search for truth on the back of the Processionary is not all sunshine.”

Goodness, I adore this man.

(I searched everywhere–but couldn’t ultimately find–a picture to illustrate this post; I know I took some neat shots of a funky, hairy yellow caterpillar last summer … but my image filing system is a bit, er, underdeveloped. Sigh.)

 

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A Life In Books (Sorta)

When I began this blog three years ago and named it A Life In Books, I was thinking how the track of my life–its daily happenings and goings-on–could be followed fairly easily by looking at the books that came across my desk.* Some of them were books I was reading as research for a new writing project, or books I was reading for pleasure, or books I was reading to my kids. Others were books recommended by friends or colleagues, books written by friends and colleagues, or books I stumbled upon quite by accident and which, glancing quickly, seemed out of place in my stacks. There is an interesting mix of intention and whimsy in the piles of books that surround me on any given day, and I still think sharing them could be an interesting way of sharing myself … if only I could find the time to do the job justice.

Seriously. Too many books. Too little time.

Looking over my blog posts for the last few months, for example, I am totally bummed at the many pages missing (so to speak) from My Life in Books. Did I not blog about Frommer’s WASHINGTON, D.C. … or even the DC trip itself? Did I never write an ode to ROGET’S THESAURUS … even after communing with it daily for two weeks as I sculpted the nineteen tight, tight, tight paragraphs of the BUTTERFLYING manuscript? Have I still not blogged about HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT OUR CHANGING CLIMATE? And GRANNY TORRELLI MAKES SOUP? Oi.

Deep breath.

Anyway. Just thought I’d let you know that my blog is officially three years old this month, and that one day soon** I hope to go all Complete and Unabridged.

* The title also referred, of course, to the fact that I hoped to spend the rest of my life in books: writing and sharing them with the world. But this more obvious meaning has always felt secondary to me.

** I am using the term soon loosely, of course.

 

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A Book Fair for Boys

The dedicated book reviewers at GuysLitWire have launched an initiative to get books into the hands of boys incarcerated at the Los Angelos County juvenile hall system. You can learn more about the GuysLitWire Book Fair for Boys here. I decided to help out by adding some nonfiction to the new library: