4 Noting with a Climate Eye

The geese return to Wisconsin in March, wrote Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac. And as long as Leopold’s book resides in a trusted location, on a shelf or tabletop, the geese—Leopold’s geese—will continue to return in March. This notation is on page 18 of the edition in my hands. They return whenever I open to that page, the same way that Henry goes into the woods to confront “the necessaries” and John Muir sits and becomes acquainted with a flower for a minute, or a day. These are experiences recorded by these writers and sustained in print year after year.

Leopold’s geese have returned at some risk, he tells us, in contrast to the lesser gambles taken by the cardinal and the chipmunk. And in numbers. How many? The record, after a few weeks, from an April observation, was 642 geese, counted on the eleventh of the month in 1946. Six hundred and forty-two geese counted on a single day! If that doesn’t excite you, you may have read this far for nothing. I humbly apologize. But it’s likely that, having come all this way with me, you’re savvy to the thrill of counting geese in springtime, or something along those lines. Or perhaps you want to be.

Learning your plants, birds, trees, frog sounds, insects, and more is a time consuming, sometimes frustrating, business, sweetened by the opportunities to spend time with like-minded people (if you especially like people) or keeping your own company (if solitude is your preference). All the same, it takes time, as do observations and the business of recording what you’ve observed. So why do it?

As for any activity that requires time and energy in an otherwise busy life, there are rewards for getting the work done. Psychologists class rewards under two headings: those that count as extrinsic motivations and those that are intrinsic. Extrinsic rewards come from outside oneself. Things like money and honors count as extrinsic rewards. If you engage in citizen science, keeping careful records and reporting them faithfully, you may receive recognition. Other than that, there’s not a lot of reward. I have searched the cosmos for an extrinsic motivation for making phenological observations and recording them, and I came up with this: if you live on an estate, and you keep good phenological records (ideally over generations), your records may possibly add to the estate’s provenance and increase its value.

Let’s move on to intrinsic rewards.

Phenology is exciting! It is, at least, from a certain point of view. Watching for the first leaves to break out in the spring is a little like watching an eclipse of the sun, except that there is far less risk of rendering yourself blind. Watching for the geese to return, whenever that happens, is several things at once. It’s an anticipation of the end of something like winter and the arrival of something like spring (no matter where the earth’s axis is pointing with respect to the sun). It’s a fulfillment of nature’s promise to restore and revive. It’s a host of honks where honking was absent, and flocks where there was previously only air.

As is reading Leopold, watching for the geese to return is a ritual, and a fine one. Seeing your geese return, or whatever you’ve chosen to anticipate, is a moment to acknowledge.

Acknowledge it. Write it down.

“Do you keep a journal?” Ralph Waldo Emerson asked of Henry David Thoreau. Henry made it his life’s work to answer in the affirmative should the question ever come up again.

Many years later, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who wrote Bobos in Paradise, a description and critique of a segment of elite American culture, decided one day to devote his column to people who keep journals, wondering aloud for his audience whether keeping a journal wasn’t a sign of narcissism. While he didn’t push for the narcissistic interpretation, Brooks did make the argument, with the help of some psychologists, that immediate introspection—who am I? how could I be better?—misleads, and that an unconscious process of knowing oneself is a better one.

This is a very limited notion of what a journal is for, and of why you should keep one, why you might keep one. It’s a very limited sense, too, of what introspection is. Introspection may or may not reveal one’s true character, but at the very least it allows you to devote some time thinking about it. Without something outside your mind, a mirror of sorts, on which to focus your introspection, the distractions of daily life easily take over, and you risk becoming the product of your distractions. David Foster Wallace pointed at this in his justly admired address to the Kenyon College commencement audience in 2005. We all have a choice, Wallace suggested, to see the world entirely from the perspective of me, and how every action has an impact on me, or to see it as a broad distribution of me-like beings. To practice, in one word, empathy (as opposed to just possessing empathy) and to practice it as a matter of choice. This is difficult to do in the moment. Reflection, the process of returning to a moment, as when one takes pen in hand and writes in a journal, makes this easier. And is just as much a matter of introspection as anything else is.

Now, Aldo Leopold saw this more broadly, by appealing to a choice: cast your empathy over the whole of the natural world rather than reserving it for humans—or for your neighbors or family alone. To say nothing of reserving it for just yourself, although “just you” doesn’t quite count as empathy. Leopold understood that something like a journal was useful as a mirror of the world around us. Here’s why: you can try to experience and then forget everything that happens to you in a day—everything you see, everything you do, everything that anyone says to you. There’s a kind of nobility in doing this. You can live truly in the moment. The problem is that, barring neurological damage to your brain, you won’t forget all of it. As we all know, some of it sticks while much of it doesn’t, and the archivist in charge of sorting what sticks and what vanishes without a trace doesn’t seem to be fully in our employ. With a journal, you get to compete with the judgment of that ornery and uncaring archivist and insist that some things stick. Things like the scarlet tanager you saw on a walk this afternoon or the raccoon you spotted peering out of the storm drain. Those things get to stick around if you journal them and read back (reading back is important).

Without a journal, our remembered lives are like a community theater performance of Our Town. There’s a stage, a few chairs, and fewer actors than there are characters, some actors playing multiple roles. There aren’t any trees or birds, frogs or mosquitoes. Well, maybe we can do without the mosquitoes. But no butterflies, and there aren’t really any seasons, either. In New Hampshire! Nothing like the crickets on a warm summer night or the bite of snow blown by a swift wind on a winter day. Just chairs and some people talking.

With a journal, our lives grow so very much richer. There are the ponderosa pines, standing tall, each one appearing to shrug. “Ehh,” they say with body language. The two pines you pass everyday that seem to be holding hands. That nuthatch! Is there more than one? It always seems to be the same one. Every time you see it you wonder if nuthatches aren’t from Australia, so determined are they to experience the world upside down, from our perspective. You haven’t bothered to look it up. The theory doesn’t hold water. It’s just something silly you thought one day.

Under the pines, a trail, traveled by the oddest assortment of people. There’s the fellow who hands out Grateful Dead CDs, and who perpetually remembers you as someone you’ve never met. The couple who seem so terribly mismatched—she loves the hike and he would rather be at home watching ESPN. The lone woman with the really big dog. Out of the pines, on a patch of grass, a dozen crows stand in a sort of digital pose, equally spaced in a diamond grid. That sound? Chickadee. And that one? Woodpecker. You look around to see the caller—a flicker. You round a corner and see four birds pretending to be the navy’s Blue Angels, without the gosh-awful noise. (But you actually liked the noise in the moment, didn’t you? Go back in your journal and see.) Across this open patch is a cloud. A hatch of insects! What are they? And clouds overhead, cirrus clouds, high and thin. Weather coming! (Was it just at this moment you thought about the gardening tools you left outside and want to bring in lest it rain? You didn’t add this to the journal, so maybe, maybe not.) Back into the pines. As you pass by an old ponderosa, you stop, turn around, walk up to it, get your nose up to the bark, and sniff. Is that vanilla smell present? It’s hard to tell today. But the bark is so, what’s the word? Rugged? If it were salmon, you’d say it had flaked.

You’ll see more, and see more clearly if you record what you see. You’ll participate in your life with more agency. So why not keep a journal, if you haven’t developed the habit already? And if you do keep a journal, why not expand its scope to record seasonal and phenological events?

Keeping a journal with notes on what goes on in your dooryard is not simply a way of participating in your life, and the lifeworlds around you, on a daily basis. Nature adapting to conditions of acute flux is something new, albeit unwished for. In the past, our parents and their parents looked at nature as an unchanging thing, a solid stage on which they lived out their lives. It has ceased to be that (if it ever truly was). Now, keeping a journal filled with phenological events is a way of tracking a new and changing nature, a natural world never before seen or experienced. And while it will arrive in your dooryard at what will often (but not always) feel to you like a snail’s pace, the new nature will be coming at light speed relative to evolutionary time.

Would it be best simply to fight climate change and to refuse to acknowledge climatic changes? The answer, in part, and only in part, is no. Climate change is a bad turn of events in human history, but climatic changes to nature are just nature, neither good nor bad but outside human morality altogether. Rage and take action against the former, pay attention to and marvel at the latter. And make no mistake: climatic change will arrive in your dooryard, for every dooryard is a crossroads of the world. On a breezy day, the air you breathe in came from some distant place. The rain that falls evaporated from some body of water in another state, another country. Birds that alight in your trees may have begun their migratory journey across a sea. And not only is your dooryard a crossroads; these natural roadways themselves are also changing. Nature, in its manifold adaptations to changing climate, is presenting you with a new dooryard, day in and day out, and will continue to do so throughout your life, at a rate that modern humans have never before experienced.

As climatic changes unfold, each and every one of them, it is important that they be noticed, discussed, recorded, compared. Important to whom? Important to everyone, whether they voted Republican or Democratic, pray in evangelical churches, in mosques, or in no church at all. Important to men and to women. Climatic change is important where work goes on and people play, where people raise children and in kitchens and hearths.

Not everyone will pay attention. Not everyone will write things down and keep careful records. Perhaps you will. So let’s begin.

Most everyone with an interest in or affection for nature has stopped in their tracks and beheld this world outside ourselves. Perhaps you’ve sprawled on the grass one summer’s day, lazily watching clouds drift across the sky, slowly forming and reforming as they do. Or you’ve lingered a while, watching ants go about their busywork. Or fish, set on tasks that we don’t fully grasp! One day, a friend and I sat on a boulder in the middle of a Western stream, watching tiny fish wriggle through water, oblivious (the fish, that is) to the rarity of that substance in the arid West.

But have you ever looked at a pencil? This is a question that I often ask students in several classes I teach, classes where part of the final grade requires descriptions of things.

Of course my students have looked at pencils. But observing pencils and describing them using suitable language is an entirely different matter. Pick up a number 2 pencil and describe it. A pencil is long and narrow. Good start. What is the word for the body of the pencil? It’s a “shaft,” although a “rod” would do. What’s the geometric shape of the shaft? (Here you get to put some of that mathematical knowledge you learned in school to good use.)

It’s a prism. Specifically, it’s a hexagonal prism.

What color is the shaft? And what is it made of? What kind of wood? What is the word for that metal thing that holds the eraser in place? (It’s a ferrule.)

My students sometimes considered this level of descriptive detail a case of overkill. If you agree, be thankful that you never had Louis Agassiz for a teacher. Agassiz, the Swiss expert on fish who “discovered” the ice ages but opposed Darwinian thought, was a kind of master teacher, if you believe Nathaniel Shaler’s story about him. Shaler became a geologist at Harvard University (not the undergraduate college there, but its one-time Lawrence Scientific School); he studied with Agassiz.

Shaler’s story goes like this: on the first day of his class, Agassiz placed a pan with a preserved fish in front of each student, with instructions that they discover what they might learn by looking at the fish, without discussing it with other students or doing any reading. After an hour, Shaler thought he had a sufficient understanding of the fish and looked for Agassiz so as to report his newfound wisdom. But Agassiz wouldn’t discuss the fish. So Shaler, mildly frustrated, went back to work and continued to look at aspects of the fish each day for a week. At last, ready to report at length on his discoveries—the series of scales, the number of teeth, and so on—Shaler got Agassiz’s attention and told his teacher what he had learned.

“That’s not right,” said Agassiz.

After many more hours of study, Shaler was able to provide Agassiz with an answer that satisfied him enough to allow Shaler to move on to a new task—sorting through bones of different fishes and doing his best to reconstruct several specimens of fish.

Thus did Agassiz, a fine observer in his own right, teach his students to observe and to describe.

What is an observation? How does one go about making one? Must a good observer learn by staring for hours at a dead fish in a pan (as opposed to sitting with a friend on a boulder, watching them swim)? How reliant on observations are the sciences, particularly those that intersect with anthropogenic climate change?

For their sheer world-changing power, there are probably no more significant observations than those made by Galileo Galilei in the years 1609–10 and reported in his book, Sidereus nuncius or The Starry Messenger. Turning a telescope on the heavens for what were almost certainly the first telescopic observations of the sun, the moon, Jupiter, and Venus, Galileo found that what he saw through the device seemed to be in agreement with the model of the solar system (he didn’t call it that, but we do) devised by Nicolai Copernicus and published in De revolutionibus more than half a century previous. Today, historians and astronomers agree that Galileo’s observations did not prove the Copernican system, but they surely pointed in that direction.

The Copernican system itself was the result of mathematical ideas applied to countless individual observations of the stars, the sun, the planets, and the moon, observations made by many observers over centuries. Not all of them were made in the interest of what we now call astronomy; many were made by would-be astrologers, looking to tell fortunes to the highest bidder. But the observations were there when Copernicus looked to make sense of them.

To be useful, to provide data for the Copernican system and our current understanding of the solar system—where a spacecraft, an object about the size of a Chevrolet Suburban, can be sent hurtling from one end to the other in order to photograph Pluto and not miss the mark—it wasn’t necessary for every observation and measurement to be dead accurate. But most of them needed to be. Science is built on a foundation of care (in Latin, curare, the root of the words “accurate” and “curator”) that every observer can, and many observers do, bring to bear on the natural world.

Galileo made observations, whereas Copernicus relied on books filled with the observations made by others before him. Charles Darwin made many observations while circumnavigating South America, as well as on the grounds of his home in Down, but he also relied on observations that others made—often at his request. It is possible to do great science without making many observations firsthand. But it is not possible to do science without recourse to someone’s observations. Even theoretical physics is conducted with the real, observable world in mind. And so it is with phenological observations.

A phenological observation, when it is useful to science, consists of four parts. First is a correct identification of a species of plant or animal. The second is a note on the calendar day of the year, a consequence of being in the right place at the right time—the moment a plant blooms, a bud bursts and begins to form a leaf, a bird that has been missing for a season or two appears in your dooryard or a nearby pond or marsh. The third (not always, but often) is description, such as the color of a leaf. The fourth is what scientists call metadata: a report with the correct notation of time of day and place, without which the report is useless to science.

Before getting specific about individual observations, let’s look first at how data is used by science, working backward from a conclusion. I promise: what follows is about the leaves of birch, ash, and cherry trees and currant shrubs. It will take a page or two to get there.

In the year 2000, two German scientists, Frank-M. Chmielewski and Thomas Rötzer, analyzed phenological data collected from across Europe and wrote a paper in which they concluded that warming of one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in mean annual temperature will lengthen the growing season in Europe by five days. If that warming happens during the early spring, between February and April in Europe, the growing season lengthens by eight days. The “mean annual temperature” generally means pretty much the same thing as average temperature, but here it is significant. Annual mean temperature can increase by one degree in a number of ways—perhaps mostly in a particular season and less so in other seasons. This may happen because of seasonal circulations—patterns of weather events that recur each year. In the United States, for instance, the monsoon in southern Arizona, which brings rainfall to the Sonoran Desert in July and August each year, is an example of seasonal circulation. For Europe, the North Atlantic Oscillation is a key circulation that determines both Europe’s weather and its climate.

Chmielewski and Rötzer also concluded that, in many regions in Europe, the growing season has increased by eight days over the past three decades. This means, of course, that early springtime temperatures have increased over the same period of time by more than one degree Celsius (or close to two degrees Fahrenheit).

Having so concluded, the scientists put their pencils down. They don’t say whether a longer growing season is a good thing or a bad thing. They don’t say whether eight days is better than five days, or worse than five days. Drs. Chmielekski and Rötzer might tell you what they think, if you ask them, but as phenologists drawing conclusions from data, they believe the upshot to be outside their official purview. So we are mostly free to draw our own conclusions from their conclusions.

Something else goes unsaid in their conclusion, although they could well have said it. The finding—growing season lengthens by eight days when early spring temperatures increase one degree Celsius—is the result of a sort of natural experiment. The “sort of” is important, because laboratory experiments can be repeated and must be repeatable for experimental findings to have validity. In the case of conclusions from phenological data, we can’t easily order up a second planet identical to Earth, age it 4.6 billion years, and then warm it up a tad by increasing its greenhouse gases. Even so, the changes to which the planet are being subjected are like an experiment, and the conclusions that scientists draw from such data tell us about not only warming but much else besides. They tell us how ecological systems work and whether the systems are static (their physical characteristics and mix of species remaining intact) over specified periods of time or dynamic.

Ecologists have devised experiments of various kinds, but never at the scale of global warming. Robert MacArthur, along with Edward O. Wilson, experimented with patterns of ecological succession on an island; the results gave him his theory of island biogeography. Mike Gilpin, at the University of California, San Diego, experimented with fruit flies in laboratory habitats. Anthropogenic climate change, for better or for worse (and I’ll show my hand here—it’s for worse), is the biggest experiment anyone has devised, if anyone could be said to have devised it. And it’s accidental—unplanned and unintended.

Let us work backward from the conclusions. Before concluding that they had demonstrated a relationship between temperature and growing season over the past thirty years, Chmielewski and Rötzer declined to make predictions based on their analysis. They pointed out, guardedly and with an unspoken tip of the hat to Heraclitus, that not enough is known about forest growth to simply project their findings into the future.

But they did take care to pay attention to what part of their finding might be due to a straightforward increase in air temperature in any particular place, and what part to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation, Europe’s weather maker in spring and fall, which seems to be bringing springtime to Europe about 3.5 days early each decade.

The bulk of the scientists’ article considered these variables: temperatures, natural regions, and data from International Phenological Gardens. Okay, one variable at a time. The temperatures came from an archive of climate data kept by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Europe’s natural regions are like the growing zones in the United States but organized on the basis of similar soils, climate, and vegetation, rather than on climate alone.

The International Phenological Gardens are in a smattering of locations throughout Europe, a network like the USA-NPN mentioned in chapter 3, but with a much longer history. Begun in the 1950s, they consist (at this writing) of eighty-nine gardens in nineteen countries. A small variety of genetically similar plants grow in the gardens—twenty-one species at present, including Betula pubescens (silver birch), Prunus avium (wild cherry), Sorbus aucuparia (mountain ash), and Ribes alpinum (a currant). Observers report on eight different phenological stages, including the beginning of leaf unfolding, beginning of flowering, general flowering, first ripe fruits, autumn coloring, and leaf fall. Between beginning of leaf unfolding and beginning of flowering are two stages that are not self-explanatory.

For their study, the scientists Chmielewski and Rötzer selected data collected by the IPGs specifically related to the moments that leaves of the three species of tree and a shrub—the aforementioned European birch, wild cherry, mountain ash, and currant—opened. In order to have those data, someone needed to be present at each garden to observe and record the date each opened.

And so that is the prize. A leaf opens and you make a note of it. Your note and many thousands of others are aggregated as data (the plural of datum, that is, your note) and, when analyzed with other data, lead to the conclusion that spring comes eight days earlier when there is a rise of one degree Celsius in average temperatures early in spring.

Now, to be useful to you, all that is required is to be present and to pay attention. You do not need to engage in citizen science in order to take pleasure in, and edification from, phenological observation. It’s enough to know that you are seeing the world around you, that you are aware of your world and, in time, of the way it is changing. But as luck would have it, an observation that’s useful for science requires you to be present, to visit your site every day or two, and to pay attention.

There are some differences between the kinds of observations one makes for science, and other kinds of observations, and that’s what this chapter is about. For science, one must ideally make objective observations, without bias, and record them with care.

When observing outside of science, there’s more than a little room for fantasy, for emotion, and for creative, even magical, thinking. In a sense, Henry David Thoreau engaged in this kind of observing related to his acknowledged status as an American transcendentalist, although he did less of this as he matured as an observer. And John Muir observed both within science and without, never (or seldom) confusing the one kind of observation with the other.

When thinking about how science works, I often think of the relative values of the Richter scale and of the Mercalli scale. Each in its own way provides a sense of “how big” an earthquake was, whether it’s a shaker that I feel under my feet or one that I hear or read about in the media. The Richter scale is a mathematical technique for quantifying the energy released in an earthquake. Richter measures ignore the consequence that the earthquake may or may not have had on people. The Mercalli scale (more correctly, the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale) grades the effect that an earthquake has on people and their environs. One might think that news media would report Mercalli and ignore Richter. But one would be wrong. The chances are that you have heard of Richter and not of Mercalli.3 Even if you have heard of Mercalli, it is rare that a Mercalli number is part of any news story.4 What you tend to get instead is a Richter magnitude and a verbal report such as “no injuries or damage to structures was reported.” That’s about a V, on a scale of I–XII on the Mercalli scale, or weaker.

It’s the difference between the two scales that’s important. Richter is a logarithmic calculus based on wave amplitudes, as measured in a seismograph. The logarithm itself is reason enough to leave it out of media reports. A magnitude 8.0 earthquake isn’t one unit larger than a magnitude 7.0 quake (to take just one intuitive reading of the difference). It’s a hundred times more energy. A magnitude 7.0 releases a thousand times more energy than a 5.0. More important, however, is that there is no direct correlation between magnitude and the thing we care about: what damage did it do? A magnitude 6.1 can do a lot of damage if there is a population area nearby—considerably more than a magnitude 7.1 would do if it occurred in a remote, mountainous area. And there are plenty of other variables in terms of impact. Wet sand is much more effective in transmitting shaking to structure than solid bedrock is. A mountain range between the focus of an earthquake and a population area will absorb a lot of energy. The Richter scale doesn’t care about these differences, and that’s exactly why it is useful for studying earthquakes.

Modified Mercalli Intensities (MMIs), in contrast, are the reports of eye (and body) witnesses—citizen scientists, you might say, but the U.S. Geologic Survey asks only “did you feel it?” The MMIs reported on the U.S. Geologic Survey site are effectively crowdsourced. They do little to help seismologists in their effort to someday predict earthquakes, but they provide the information that an interested party wants. Did you feel it? Yes, some chimneys were broken and toppled. That’s an MMI VII.

We would be much better served if the media reported earthquakes in Mercalli, and if we knew what the scale measures, leaving Richter magnitudes to scientists who are doing science.

Do phenologists have the equivalent of seismographs? In fact, they do, in two senses. Remote sensing, using photographs from satellites, provides some phenological data, such as the progress of green-up. But the observations of phenological events made by citizen scientists serve a similar function and provide (a) data that remote sensing cannot or (b) data that keep remote sensing honest (the latter are called “ground truth”).

As was the case for seismology, there is a difference between what scientists hope to take away from phenological observations and what we would like to know about our dooryards. Scientists are hoping to build ever more rigorous and accurate models of how ecological units respond to changing climate, as well as hoping to better understand the ecological units themselves. The rest of us want those things as well. But, just as we care more about whether there was damage from an earthquake and therefore are better served by reports of Modified Mercalli Intensities, so, too, are we somewhat more alert to our own observations that, for instance, there seem to be fewer deer (or more deer) passing through our dooryards, not just this year but for the past three years.

Whether your aim is to participate in the growth of scientific knowledge or to know your dooryard, what should you observe, and how should you record it? If your aim is to participate in citizen science alone, the various networks will provide you with protocols for observing and for reporting data. Most make this as simple as possible to do but still look for close attention to detail. Project BudBurst, for instance, asks you to identify an individual tree, in the case of deciduous trees, by common name and by Latin name, and to provide a location in longitude and latitude as well as city and state. From here, you can provide what the project’s researchers refer to as a “single” report of a phenological event. The form asks: “What is your plant doing now?” And you answer by checking a box, perhaps: “Many leaves have unfolded from the buds.” And then you turn that in. Nature’s Notebook is similarly organized to simply reporting. Single reports might be a way to start out in citizen science or to scratch the itch to do a little phenology if you’re traveling for business or pleasure.

“Regular” reporting is rather more elaborate. The regular reporting form asks for information about the tree, such as whether it is a hundred feet or fewer from a building or from concrete or asphalt, whether the tree is regularly watered (irrigated), what kind of habitat it is growing in (a park, natural setting, school, your backyard), and what the shading is like. Then the form asks that you record, for this tree, the month and day of each of the following phenological moments: bud burst, first leaf, all leaves unfolded, first flower, full flower (the moment when at least half of the flowers are either open or releasing pollen on three or more branches), the first ripe fruit, full fruiting (half or more of the branches have fully ripe fruit), 50 percent color (half of the leaves have changed), and 50 percent leaf fall.

Project BudBurst has similar reporting forms for wildflowers and herbs, conifers, evergreens, and grasses. All told, the network currently has a list of two hundred fifty plants from which to choose.

A thorough report on the regular form requires a degree of commitment. Project BudBurst does not demand that you fill in all of the blanks in order to file a regular report, but let us assume that you want to do so, or at least as complete as you can. And since you’re going to the trouble, why not observe multiple trees—individuals of the same species, spread out along your phenological trail, as well as multiple species.

With this sort of commitment in mind, it’s best to turn to a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, naming individual trees on your trail, one row per tree, in the order you encounter them, and columns for each of the phenological events. Your spreadsheet might look like the one shown here. From this, you can fill out regular reports as you please, for as many plants as you care to.

Networks for reporting birds, frogs, and other animals have similar but, in some cases, stricter protocols. FrogWatch USA, for instance, ask that volunteers register an observing site (this is similar to the BudBurst questions about location) and include information about the weather conditions while observing, then begin making observations only after remaining quiet for at least two minutes. When you are ready to begin, the protocols are precise. You cup your hands around your ears and listen for exactly three minutes, remaining still the entire time. (It’s obviously a good idea to make yourself as comfortable as you can be before beginning.) At the end of three minutes, you record the time you began listening, the time you stopped listening, the species you believe you can correctly identify, and the call intensity for each of the species. FrogWatch USA also asks that if there is a disturbance (from a loud airplane or a cellphone ringing) that you start the observing procedure over again. The network takes observations using forms that you fill out online.

The requirements for reporting to the FrogWatch USA network are not onerous, but there may be days when you hear frogs, or expect to, but don’t wish to follow all the guidelines. In such cases, note the calls in your journal. Similarly, BudBurst doesn’t ask for reports on mushrooms (which are not plants) or mosses, so if these organisms interest you, report them to yourself in a spreadsheet or your journal, doing so with as much metadata as you can. Someday, someone might be interested.

When you begin making phenological observations and recording them, your attention and understanding will evolve. It makes no difference whether you report your observations as a citizen scientist or keep them to yourself, in your journal or even in a spreadsheet. You will improve. If you keep records primarily for yourself, a system might be of some use. Many ecologists, conservation biologists, and others agree that Joseph Grinnell, director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California (Berkeley), devised the gold standard for keeping nature notes.

Grinnell’s system has three parts: a journal (no different in kind from the journals discussed in this chapter), a catalog, and species accounts. The catalog refers to the metadata associated with specimens that Grinnell and his field associates collected. If you engage in collecting of any kind, of insects for instance, or leaves, then you will want to keep a catalog, although it won’t be extensive. More likely, you will keep lists, as birders do: a life list, an annual list, and lists of birds counted on, say, a Christmas Bird Count. Like these, your lists will include information about the locations of your observations.

Finally, Grinnell insisted on species accounts: detailed descriptions of observations of individual organisms in their natural settings. There are some species accounts in the chapters that follow, but they are guides only. You will become familiar with species, learn from more detailed written accounts, and add your own observations to them, observations that may range from the rigorous to the fanciful.

At first, the process may feel a bit like doing a school project. But with passing time—months, years, decades—monitoring your dooryard can change into a cornerstone of who you are, of where you’ve been and where you’re going. And that’s just looking inward. At the very same time, your observations and notations will stand as testament to how the lifeworld around you is transforming. Not all of the latter changes will be caused by climate. But many of them will be.