Notes From the Field
John Seibert Farnsworth’s delightful field notes are not only about nature, but from nature as well. In Nature Beyond Solitude, he lets us peer over his shoulder as he takes his notes. We follow him to a series of field stations where he teams up with scientists, citizen scientists, rangers, stewards, and grad students engaged in long-term ecological study, all the while scribbling down what he sees, hears, and feels in the moment. With humor and insight, Farnsworth explores how communal experiences of nature might ultimately provide greater depths of appreciation for the natural world.
In the course of his travels, Farnsworth visits the Hastings Natural History Reservation, the Santa Cruz Island Reserve, the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, the North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center, and more.
Continue below for an excerpt from the book’s first chapter.
I’m five minutes early, but the deep voice on the other end of the speaker tells me that I’m right on time. It’s the kind of voice that sells pickups on TV. Full-sized pickups. I punch in the code, the electric gate swings open noiselessly, and I drive into the reservation, pulling over just inside to await Vince, the reserve director. A University of California, Berkeley, official-business-only pick-up arrives in no time. The Cal pickup dwarfs Little Dog,¹ and Vince is covered in sawdust. When he shakes my hand he warns me that I’ve arrived on the cusp of a heat wave. But I already know that. A nationwide “heat bubble” has been forecast stretching from here through the desert southwest, and extending through much of the Midwest, lasting most of the week. The forecasters have prophesied all-time records being set in places like Phoenix and Death Valley. But it’s only in the 90s here, right now, in this rolling oak savannah. We won’t hit 100 until tomorrow.
I am ready. I’ve brought along a broad-brimmed “soaker hat” that my mother sent out for my sixty-second birthday, back on the first of this month. Polyester. I looked it up on the Internet and was informed that it’s tan, and that its braided trim adds a rugged accent. In the mirror, it looks like a cowboy hat trying desperately to pass as something else. When I’m finally unpacked and able to stroll the reserve, I’m happy to discover a faucet at the side of the road halfway between my study and the labs, as if someone put it there specifically so that I could keep my hat wet during the commute. I stop, remove the hat to wet it for the first time ever, and learn a quick lesson when an earwig washes out with the first gush. Before I can protest, it scrambles up under the internal sweatband. Pincher bug! From now on, I’ll let the water run for a moment before inserting my hat into this faucet’s stream.
I know the earwig is harmless. All the same, I flush it out rather that capture it by hand.
When I get up to the labs, conversations focus on the impending heat wave. They are worried about the birds, of course. Acorn woodpeckers are cavity nesters, and it’s expected to get hot enough inside some of the trees to kill nestlings. It’s anyone’s guess how many birds will be lost over the course of the next week.
I’m immediately snatched up by Natasha, a fourth-year PhD candidate who wants to climb to a few nest cavities tomorrow. Protocols require a safety assistant whenever technical climbing is involved, and so it is that I’m pressed to service. We’ll weigh chicks and we’ll get to do some banding, she promises. It will be fun. I find her smile convincing.
Natasha’s face clouds slightly with what appears to be her singular concern: whether I’m a morning person. I assure her that I can be up at first light, but she waves off such silliness. “I usually start work at 7:00,” she explains. But tonight the grad students are planning to camp out on the top of a hill. They’ve borrowed a nine-person tent from the reserve director, but some are now thinking that it will be too hot for a tent. Regardless, we won’t be starting until 9:00 tomorrow. She hopes we’ll be in the shade most of the morning, so I’m not to worry about the late start.
I poke around the lab a bit. It’s narrow and cluttered. Along one countertop sits an array of clear, plastic boxes — Tupperware? — peppered with tiny air holes and occupied by black widow spiders, females, one spider per box. At the moment four teams of researchers are present at the reservation, studying acorn woodpeckers, western scrub-jays,² black widow spiders, and western bluebirds. There’s history here, decades’ worth. Part of that history is narrated by a bumper sticker affixed to an office door that proclaims, “Bluebirds rule. Woodpeckers drool.” I tell Natasha that I look forward to working with her tomorrow and then I wander away, my hat almost dry in the afternoon sun. I wonder, rhetorically, what it would be like to be Natasha’s age again, looking forward to a hilltop campout during the almost-full moon on a hot evening one night prior to the summer solstice.
This year, for the first time in my life, the full moon will sync with the summer solstice.
The breeze comes up at 5:30 p.m., and transforms the reservation. Birds suddenly remember their songs, and my ears are drawn back outside. I’ve been assigned a studio in the schoolhouse, which was built in the 1920s to serve as a boarding school, back when this was still the Hastings Ranch. The original curriculum featured lessons in the morning and horseback riding in the afternoon for those who had finished their lessons. Current events were discussed at lunch, and French was spoken at dinner. In modern times the official language here is birdsong, and cell-phone service has never made it out this far. But we have electricity here in the schoolhouse, and I was smart enough to pack a small electric desk fan in one of my duffels. For the rest of the week, that fan will be my prized possession.
I’m here for two weeks, actually, which is a good thing. They charge researchers twenty dollars a night for stays up to a week, but for longer stays the room rate is discounted to fifteen per night. With a research budget like mine, this is a very good thing. It’s probably an even better thing for the crew here studying the cooperative breeding behaviors of acorn woodpeckers. They’ve been conducting this study, here at Hastings, for forty-five years.
