Musings On Natural History, Science, And The North Woods
Taxonomic descriptions have gotten a bad rap: “dry”, “desiccated”, “mere description”, “stamp collecting”. But a taste for the precise and spare poetry of these nuggets of natural history is worth acquiring. In the past several decades, the Flora of North America Project has been compiling what is hoped to be the standard taxonomic accounts of, … Continue reading White Spruce: A taxonomic description set to verse
Old Mother Goose, When she wanted to wander, Would ride through the air [With] a very fine gander. The honking of Canada Geese and the wailing of Loons are the sounds of the spring returning to the North. A wedge of geese – some days two or four birds, some days many more – often … Continue reading Mother Goose and the Evolution of Canada Geese
We have plenty of ice here in Minnesota. It is the most common form of much of the water here for most of the year. Ice is bad when it’s on roads but good when it’s on lakes. We drive on it, skate on it, and drill holes through it to fish beneath it. People … Continue reading Ice
Sometime in the past six or eight decades, a carbon dioxide molecule entered one of the stomates on a leaf of a paper birch across the meadow outside our dining room window. Once inside, a photon from the sun split the carbon from the two oxygens and sent the carbon onward into the green machinery … Continue reading The second life of a dead tree
At a first glance, the natural world appears messy and arbitrary. A pile of data about trees, moose, or any other organism often looks as random as a phone book. And yet, we almost always find some very simple and beautiful mathematical relationships which underlie such messiness. Finding such simple and beautiful mathematics beneath our … Continue reading The beauty of ballerinas and equations, spirals and snails
There were plenty of chores to be done this fall – finish picking the last of the apples, harvesting the carrots, beets, and other root crops, transplanting wildflowers into the meadow and beneath the big spruces, extracting the honey from the beehive, and getting the firewood in. But the skies were bright blue, the temperatures … Continue reading A Beaver Pond in the Autumn Glory of the North Woods
One summer some years ago, while doing fieldwork in northern Minnesota, I was reading a book by the astronomer Joseph Silk called Cosmic Enigmas, a collection of essays about the formation of galaxies and other questions about the Universe. In northern Minnesota, especially along the shores of lakes in the Boundary Waters Wilderness, there are … Continue reading Cosmic Reflections on a Precambrian Rock
They are small plants that look like pine seedlings. No, perhaps they look like little cedars. But then again, maybe they are a weird kind of moss, or perhaps a fern. These are just some of the reactions people have to these plants which are commonly found in the pine and spruce-fir forests of the … Continue reading Ancient Plants of the North Woods