Tim Smith, Registered Master Maine Guide
My friend Dick butchered a road kill moose, saving the good meat and giving it to the person who totalled their car as a result of the impact. I took a chunk of the “spoiled” meat. I had been seeing this weasel around for a few days and I wanted to see him up close. So I sat about six feet from the meat with my point and click camera and waited. I didn’t have to wait for long.
My son and I set aside time every week to get outside and explore the natural world. We’ve been looking at plants, tracks, rocks, and other things that he can see, smell and touch. Then we go to the Austin Science And Nature Center, where he can get points for the things he discovers. The points can then be used to trade for other natural items that others have brought in.
If you’re a collector of natural objects, you’ll want to check out the Workshop’s Trade Counter. Bring your favorite rock, seedpod, shell or other cool natural item and earn points for it plus what you know and learn about it. Use the points to trade for new treasures like sparkling minerals, exotic sea shells, animal bones, fossils, polished rocks and much more.
It’s a great program and it gets him excited about nature, which is the whole goal at his age.
Visit the naturalist workshop and trade counter here.
This morning after dropping my son off at preschool I was walking down the stairs to the house and I heard a bunch of crows making a ruckus. After looking towards the lake for a few moments, I spotted a shape in one of the white pines, about 20 feet from our deck. It was a bald eagle. I’ve been seeing a lot of hawks lately, and I’ve seen bald eagles around here before, but in the past it’s always been right after ice-out. Anyway, I grabbed the video camera and got a little footage of him before he took off. I’ll post it here as soon as it’s live.
This morning I saw five bald eagles over Rust Pond. They come through each year as the ice starts to go out. It’s a big deal because for the rest of the year I never see them around here. I think they move further north. There is a certain way they fly that is unique, allowing me to identify them from a great distance. Then as they get closer, I can see their white heads. It was just beautiful.
Building on the nature study post from yesterday, I wanted to add one of my favorite links;
Observations Of A Naturalist by Boyd Shaffer. It features illustrated articles (illustrated by Boyd) about nature by a man who knows it well. I studied the field botany of southcentral Alaska in Boyd’s class at Kenai Peninsula College in 1996. Boyd used to run an organization called the Kenai Peninsula Botanical Society, of which I was a member for years. Future generations of naturalists would be well served by reading everything he’s written.
A friend emailed me about Naturalist Jim Conrad’s site Backyard Nature, part of his push to improve environmental education by offering free nature study courses online. There’s also a public phenology database where you can record nature information you observe. It’s a great resource for learning about the world around you, as well as sharing it with kids.
I’ve seen proprietary nature study programs cost hundreds of dollars, so the fact that Jim has put all this together and offers it for free is inspiring.
Also on the site is a great article on making solar cookers out of discarded satellite dishes and other materials that people throw away. As I’m planning on having several solar cookers at our new base camp in Masardis, I especially enjoyed reading it.
I recently typed-up an old handout about the 27 laws of ecology (collated by Pierre Dansereau) and posted it on the web. It’s a .pdf file located here, and is also linked through our Online Articles page under the Recommended Resources heading. Below is a list of the laws. For their definitions and explanations, read the whole article.
“Twenty-seven basic propositions may be said to cover ecological formulae and comprise the body of the so-called Laws of Ecology. The propositions have taken shape over a number of years, and have been collated by Pierre Dansereau, head of the Department of Ecology at the New York Botanical Garden and Adjunct Professor of Botany at Columbia University. Mr. Dansereau is credited with the authorship of several of the propositions and with the reformulation of others. Mr. Dansereau’s compendium follows:
1. Law of the Inoptimum.
2. Law of Aphasy.
3. Law of Tolerance.
4. Law of Valence.
5. Law of Competition-Cooperation.
6. Law of the Continuum.
7. Law of Cornering.
8. Law of Persistence.
9. Law of Evolutionary Opportunity.
10. Law of Ecesis.
11. Law of Succession.
12. Law of Regional Climax.
13. Law of Factorial Control.
14. Law of Association Segregation.
15. Law of Geoecological Distribution.
16. Law of Climatic Stress.
17. Law of Biological Spectra.
18. Law of Vegetation Regime.
19. Law of Zonal Equivalence.
20. Law of Irreversibility.
21. Law of Specific Integrity.
22. Law of Phylogenetic Trends.
23. Law of Migration.
24. Law of Differential Evolution.
25. Law of Availability.
26. Law of Geological Alternation.
27. Law of Domestication.
Collated as an Appendix to an article, “Ecological Impact and Human Ecology,” by Pierre Dansereau in the book Future Environments of North America by, edited by F. Fraser Darling and John P. Milton; The Natural History Press, division of Doubleday & Company: New York, 1966, 1970.”
Knowledge of identification, harvesting, processing and use of edible, medicinal and otherwise useful plants makes up a vast amount of practical and intellectual knowledge that was highly valued by cultures living off the bounty of the land. In our modern culture, where many people can’t identify the trees in their yard or the ones they pass every day on their way to work, such knowledge has become almost non-existent, or at least increasingly rare.
In our courses we spend time every day studying wild plants. Plant identification walks where students press samples of the common plants and photograph or sketch the less-common ones occur regularly, and each day students complete background studies on a single plant that they’ve identified. This exercise is cleverly named the “Plant of the Day”. Focusing on the background knowledge of a single plant at a time has worked well for our students as it allows them to process, taste, and use the plant, as well as read what many of the different authors have said about it. We don’t pretend that they’re experts on the plant after their day of study, but they have usually greatly increased their knowledge of it and taken an important step towards knowing it intimately.
There are numerous useful wild plants in our region, but to aid in the learning process of our students we’ve written up some of the more common ones that they’re likely to encounter on our courses. You can get that list as a .pdf file here, or by visiting our Online Articles page. There is one plant on the list that doesn’t grow in or near northern New England, but I included it because it is a useful plant and people will often buy the wood in order to build a specific craft. Can you tell which one it is, and what the craft is?
Studying plants is an important part of our naturalist studies curriculum, which, in addition to plants, focuses on weather, the night sky, mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, reptiles, amphibians, insects, fungi, rocks, minerals, soil, water, ice, limnology and ecology. The goal is to know something of the natural world around you and how it works. Bushcraft, then, is our human interaction with the natural world.
My name is Tim Smith and i'm a state-licensed Registered Master Maine Guide. Since founding the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School in 1999 I've been a full time guide and bushcraft instructor.
