A Different Kind of Reading

I love the use of the word "reading" for making sense of Nature's signs. Decoding the meaning of squiggles (words) on a surface and decoding the meaning of what we see outdoors seem fundamentally the same to me. Sometimes I imagine myself in a place without being able to read: the barrage goes silent. Yet we stand in the middle of a vast flow of information every day -- broadcast by Mother Nature -- and don't even know what we're missing.  

These two books are jam-packed with information that will be so very much fun to test and use. Both of them have a Continental flair, requiring a bit of extra effort to translate their details from English and German landscapes, respectively. Overall, though, they lay out an inviting roadmap to increasing our knowledge and awareness of the world around us. 

Tristan Gooley's How to Read Nature: Awaken Your Sense to the Outdoors You've Never Noticed (Taste Direction, Smell Time, Hear the Weather, and More) has a real gift for pointing out subtleties in the landscape with a naturalist's eye and making sense of them. We might not notice that the trees along the edge of a field are a different type than the trees near the center, but once we notice, the next step is to intuit that there's a hidden pond there, or a spring, or at least a depression where water collects, because that kind of tree likes wet feet. You can be sure there's water there. Once you know that, you can imagine the insects (if the tree is a host plant) and perhaps the birds that will visit to eat them and the mammals that will come to eat the fruit or seeds. And on and on. Gooley helpfully provides various exercises -- easy ones, like taking the same 3-minute walk twice, focusing on different things -- to help you practice what he's talking about in real time.

More dense, less focused, Peter Wohlleben's The Weather Detective: Rediscovering Nature's Secret Signs is a treasure trove of naturalist knowledge that is almost overwhelming. Far from just the weather, he also expounds on such varied topics as the seasons, the soil, invasive plants, native species, and (human) night vision. Many of these topics are covered in the context of gardening, which is a different subject than Nature, and no, I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. Knowing the natural tendencies and larger context of your plants helps you be a better interventionist, planting and designing and tending, and that's all I'm going to say about that. It also helps you appreciate the things you might miss; the soil is alive everywhere and fungi are amazing wherever they're found! The breadth of Wohlleben's knowledge is astounding, and helps me appreciate why people fall in love with science. How delightful it would be to know all these things!

Most importantly to me, if you know things, you can determine the age of a young pine tree by counting its branches. You can determine which direction is south by drawing an imaginary line down the horns of the crescent moon -- or by looking at which way a nearby satellite dish is pointing. You can look at a daisy and tell how old it is, and also whether rain is on the way.

What we are looking at every day is a huge, complex, functioning system that has boundless information to relay to us. We just need to know how to read.  

Excerpt from Gooley:

Almost everything that our senses pick out is eager to tell us a story that will help us more vividly read nature. The constellation Hercules is itching to boast all about the time he slayed a lion, an eagle, and a swan. Those victims will be found in the nearby constellations of Leo, Aquila, and Cygnus. The plant Danish scurvy-grass, which tolerates salt, earned its name after it was eaten by sailors returning home from long periods at sea to satisfy their mortal craving for vitamin C. It has more recently come to colonize the verges of major roads, where we have accidentally created coastal conditions by spreading salt in winter.

Excerpt from Wohlleben:

There's a bright blue sky in April and the fruit trees are blossoming, and yet there are no bees to be seen. The only ones out making the most of the enormous array of flowers on offer are the bumblebees, which set off to collect nectar as soon as the temperature rises above 48 F. The young apple trees promised a rich harvest last spring, but I was seriously worried about the lack of pollinators. . . . Later (now as a more informed beekeeper) I learned that bees only leave the hive at temperatures above 54 F. So, I should have simply waited for warmer weather . . . . [Also, when] it gets warmer outside than the optimal body temperature of 95 F, the bees stay at home. When flying, they generate additional warmth, so that they can quickly overheat. Thus, here we have an indicator of very high temperatures. 

Note: These books count toward the Color Coded Reading Challenge and the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.