A couple of weeks ago the crocuses were blooming in front of Morning Thunder, then yesterday's snow storm buried them Most of that snow melted off by the afternoon, and this morning I photographed a few that looked only a little worse for the wear. They're "in recovery." The other photo is called "forest paraphernalia" and is an assortment of forest floor items my wife and I gathered while journaling in the forest and placed on a slab of interesting sedimentary rock.
As I get back to musing about attitude and its connection to natural history and what makes a naturalist, I was given a boost by a quote from Bill Watterson's great character Calvin: "You know what we need, Hobbes? We need an attitude. Yeah, you can't be cool if you don't have an attitude." When I was in the midst of studying natural history and ecology many years ago, I was so enthralled, or should I say awed, by the fact of being in college that I thought my professors were gods. I didn't question much of anything they did. Now I look back with some embarrassment at the amount of killing that was inherent in studying natural history. Millions of fish were dropped directly into jars of formalin (formaldehyde gas dissolved in water). Somehow most of us blocked from our consciousness the frantic struggles of those fish as they took their last gulps of oxygenated but toxic water. It had to be painful. The same with frog, insects, and salamanders. Once in a while a larger specimen would thrash so violently it would jump out of the jar and/or splash us with some formalin. I remember having twinges of guilt, even disgust, at those moments, but they would pass as I resumed my duties as apprentice naturalist. We also shot many lizards with "rat" shot from our 22 caliber pistols. Doing this in West Texas deserts seemed appropriate, and we sometimes dressed the part. It was a wasteful practice in that if you were too close, the shot would blast the lizard to smitherines so it was a worthless specimen. If you were not close enough, you would only stun the lizard and it would escape, often badly injured. In the case of bats in caves, we'd often stun them with rat shot. When they then fell from their hanging places on the ceiling stunned, we'd pick them up with leather gloves and put them in burlap bags and later kill them with ether or chloroform. AS for larger mammals, we spent many a night cruising back roads with shotguns and "scientific collectors permits" looking for whatever moved. I remember riding the roof of our van with a shotgun across my lap, and after doing this for several nights in a row, getting so drowsy I almost fell off the roof. I saw lots of amazing wildlife in those days and learned a great deal about all manner of environments from Vlofida to New Mexico and in Old Mexico. I do regret the role of killing. As I pursue similar kinds of knowledge today I go armed with field notebooks and cameras. When I can afford them, I might get a video camera and a directional microphone. It seems to me that Henry Thoreau learned more than most humans about nature by simply looking - looking very carefully and persistently over many years. As an observer, he is one of my heroes, along with Charles Darwin. So, as my ideas about studying natural history evolve, I try to stay open minded, but not so open minded that my brains fall out. :) (graphic cliche)
For my afternoon addendum, I will write about two occasions in which I was confronted by Bible-wielding pastors dressed in black. I have no doubt that these instances helped my attitude evolve.
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