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Clicking vs. Knowing
If a tree is googled in a forest is it still a tree?
Counting trees. A whole summer of counting trees. Betula papyriferae, Quercus albus, Fagus grandifolia, Acer sacchirinum. I noted down their names and approximate widths in a soggy logbook, my pencil sometimes tearing through the wet paper as the rain dripped off the brim of my baseball hat. I leaned against their bark and peered up into their canopies, estimating their spread. I accompanied the supervising ecologist out to the center of ponds where I dredged up their pollen and put the silty soup in labeled plastic bags. And when the days were done I trudged out through the muddy Adirondack paths, miles and miles sometimes, back to the truck, counting my footsteps all the way until I could get back to dryness and food and think about something other than trees. This was how I spent the summer of my 21st year on this planet.
Anyone who has ever done biological fieldwork surely knows this feeling. The entomologist dodging stings to count up wasp larvae; the ornithologist breaking into foul-smelling kingfisher burrows to see about this year’s nesting success; the mammalogist scanning the horizon for caribou: three females, one male, two calves, moderate ground cover. The drone of observable phenomena logged, tabulated, and annotated for later analysis. In many ways, getting to know nature can be a…
