After Ten Days Back to school

A good shot of the Juglans nigra (Black Walnut) collected this morning (Saturday- 08/29/09) in my side yard. Two caterpillars, 1000 leaves, 32.9 N, 89.9 W, bagged and ready to be reared out in the classroom zoo.





Lashunda's cotelydons came up - can you identify?






Then there was the sexing our bearded dragon - Benita or Benny?







Quaneckqua brings Mo Jo the hamster to add to our classroom zoo.







Ms. C. sent this over by Coach Wilder. Can you identify?
Thanks to MIke Thomas, a new friend from the Earthwatch Expedititon
who works at the Connecticut Agricultural Field Station, the bug has been
identified as a longhorned beetle, Eburia quadrigeminata.

Day Seven Back

Yesterday was terrible - I thought those what was I thinking when I considered teaching thoughts. I said more than one this is going to be a long year and knew I was in for the very long haul. Except for my first block physics superstars who helped move the tables out of my room (no small task) and then calmly learned about SI and metric standards, the rest of my classes were yappy and needed policing but I would have go to the police academy if I wanted to wear a badge and carry a gun besides I almost had a paperwork meltdown a few times.

Ah but then I had sushi for supper and the guy next to me at the sushi bar was from San Francisco and he was actually very interested in my teaching job and my interests in physics and global warming and being green and being on the Earthwatch expedition and being informed and making a difference. I gave him my blog address that he put into his hackberry, and I left more enthusiastic and I got a new pond for my retreat center (the one I got all ready had a leak - another reason for the terrible day) on the way home and woke up with a better perspective.

In my morning time I thought about a circle of flowers around our school fountain. My students got the fountain going on two different occasions last year and collected a black widow spider for a pet at one point - I will tell that story another time. However we never really got the flowers around it growing so it is mostly weeds. Last Friday we got to school to devastating news; one of my students who graduated last year was killed in an auto accident during her first week on scholarship at USM. I thought a circle of flowers memorial would be a great way for our students and faculty to remember her and keep life growing in a circle of love. Everyone seemed to like the idea.

Also I was awaited at my door by a welcome surprise - Ms. Dickerson who was kind enough to keep Benita, our classroom bearded dragon, all summer had brought her back home. My jaw almost dropped when I looked at Benita - she had tripled in size. The students were coming in left and right to see her again. Students were all in a flurry bringing in pond supplies and seeing Benita - what a welcome change from a dreary drag on yesterday.

My classes were all introduced to Benita, bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps and learned all about why we use Latin names all around the world.

First Week Back

After moving all day Saturday and getting unpacked Sunday, I began school on Monday after missing two days of staff development and the first three days with students. I really did not know what to expect since I really expected to be somewhere else this year.

To my surprise the students actually seemed interested and my colleagues were really glad to see me and the principal came by to see the pond one my students (thanks, Augustus, u da man) dug for me in my special retreat center by the greenhouse.

My students were very curious about my trip and about the picture of the Cucullia lilacina Dr. Dave Wagner sent to me. I used it in talking about the scientific method and making observations. I asked how many legs they thought it had and got a lot of very interesting answers, 1000, 100, 52, 28, and so on.

Post Expedition One

Saturday I had most of our big furniture moved. Finis and Charlie loaded everything, Charlie drove my trunk, Finis drove Mama's car, and I drove the moving van from Cleveland. When we got here in Goodman they unloaded everything and put everything back together. My good friend, Rob, helped unload things also. It could not have gone better.

Sunday I got a new refrigerator loaded on my trunk at Lowe's. After school today, Mama's students helped get it in the house.

Tomorrow we get the cable transferred.

The first day of school went fairly smooth. I do not think anyone remembered the email I sent about me going on an Earthwatch expedition except Ms. C who said she had been following my blog and had seen two transparent caterpillars in Mexico on a trip years ago. I would like to see one of those and hear more about it - I wonder what predator would precipitate a change like that over time?

Day Ten

We bid farewell yet again in the morning. It was a great sight seeing Sawako wave with her bright orange suitcase and smile and her new friend Junko accompanying her to the airport. After dreading the first flight where I had the first of three seats on the inside, I took out my origami book that Junko had so generously given me and a little beautiful six year old sat beside me – a princess. I folded a frog for her and she said green was her favorite color – then I folded a crane and then one out of a gum wrapper like my mama used to fold each Sunday and then one in between. She was watching a dinosaur animation movie and showing me parts of it and ever so often telling me I was doing fine on the folding. At the end she had a whole family of cranes and when I left she said she had never met anyone like me who could fold frogs and cranes and gave me a handshake and then a hug – what a gift - and I told her to grow up to be a beautiful lady with great wisdom and caring.

On the next flight I got to sit next to a young African Amercan beauty from Redondo Beach, California and I was jealous of where she lived. We chatted and I told her about Earthwatch and my expedition. She told me about visiting her family in Dallas and Houston. I told her to pray for me because I did not think I would get lucky three flights in a row – first a beautiful young girl and then a beautiful young lady – who knows what I would get next – I got the solo seat on a small plane opposite the two and napped and read some.

After navigating the very outdated and hard to get around George Bush Houston airport (I would get the name changed if I were he), I made it safely home to Jackson and a stop at Logan’s for a deprogramming steak and then home to Cleveland and up the next day for moving.

As I told my friends, Earthwatch Arizona 09 was probably my best trip ever and I almost did not go – if it had not been for the first ten minutes of Teacher Academy I would have suffered through the first week of school instead of meeting new very gifted friends and professors and getting new eyes for this wonderful world in a very beautiful place. I am a very grateful person.

Day Nine

Jen Wren takes last shot - the only time there were clouds on the mountain for the entire trip.
Sawako sports new hat purchased at The Thing.

And now the road home.

First the road to Tucson from SWRC in the Chirachuan Mountains after a packing up morning from the lab (where everyone pitched in to get caterpillars defrassed, the last caterpillars dissected for beads, the last pictures sorted, all caterpillars bags organized and hung and all equipment packed and loaded) and Cave Creek room and suitcases packed and loaded and a three hour or so road trip back to the Tucson La Quita Inn with a stop at The Thing.

(I am feeling okay about the rest of the way since I let go yet again and realized HP (Her Person - Higher Power) can do for me what I cannot do for myself. This will work out in amazing ways if I will get more out of the way and let HP work in and through me instead of around me. I need to listen more and talk less and find ways to exercise my brain - all in the group would agree to this!)

Sawako gave me a card that said gentleman as what described me which was very generous and Jinko gave me an origami book and paper since I had asked about how to fold a frog and she did not get a chance so she said it will be hard to teach so take the book and paper! These ladies are so generous and gracious. And Sawako had Junko shoot our handshake.

I think I wish I had got some mpegs of folks talking as did Sassy (Judy) but I did not – nevertheless, their voices and personalities and passions will continue to enliven and enrich me.

I had a good talk with Doc Dude as we rode in and he shared about a cool college where students raised all their food and maintained windmills and made the place very green and connected to the world (Deep Springs College - of course, in CA). (Got him back to his being raised on a farm in Spain) Also he told two great spider stories and one guide story - all three are not PG so I will not blog them.

Day Eight

Yesterday I did a lot more macro photos of caterpillars and then uploaded them to folders. Sawako and Junko helped me pick the good ones with thumbs up or down. It helped make the tedious task much more fun.

I have tremendous appreciation for research in the field. These men and women are amazing - bright, witty, driven. It has been a great eye-opener to see the hours and hours of work, mountains of specimen collection and marking, thousands of data sheet entries, and constant revision and consultation with others. These guys/gals are good.

Just the caterpillar collection process is amazing – all the branches whacked and foliage searched and then caterpillars bagged and marked with sharpies, then processed in the lab with identification of both the caterpillar and foliage taking lots of consultation and research, then in the lab the zoo has to be kept each day with the bags cleaned of frass and new food collected. This was daily and intense.

Then observations are made for pupa and parasatiods and then they are placed in new bags and marked. From there they are reared out to adults. All of these are hung on a rack.

We had a great gathering last night and night walk in Rodeo.

And after breaking down the lab and breaking we head back to Tucson.

Day Seven

We got to plot yesterday at about 8400 feet elevation (Rustler's Point) – the trail and air were refreshing.

My team was Judy (Sassy) and Jared (J-man).

We found a Douglas fir for the center of our plot and placed four five meter ropes knotted at the end at the base of the tree. (This gave us a 10 meter diameter circle for a plot around the tree. We then extended them out perpendicular to each other and formed four quadrants. Everything in that circle was plot 506 and the GPS coordinates were written on the collection bags. We wanted ponderosa pine and lupine in our plot as well. All three of these species were whacked for caterpillars and each caterpillar along with leaves from the plant were placed in sample bags. After that we did a leaf count of each plant – the doug fir had 2.4 million and the smallest pond pine had 250 and the smallest lupine about 25. All in all a great morning and the views around the narrow gravel switch back road were exhilarating as was the mountain air earlier. And the strangest thing in trying to find the little caterpillars were how they imitated the pine and fir so much that at times it seemed the needs imitiated them – what a incredible interplay of flora and fauna which may dance with.

The afternoon was off and I got to walk to the store at Portal about 1.2 with Sawako and Jared and Nat and learned more about Japanese along the way and we helped a 91 year old man get out of his car.

And the evening was great as well . . .

Day Six

There a lot of slogging through data yesterday and a new appreciation for keeping an accurate data base. Then there was a lecture by a very learned, Mike Singer. I will digest it all at some point. In a strange way it was good to be exposed to the intensity of an academic fourteen hour day.

Day Five

This morning my head was really foggy and I am really longing to getting the neurons to shake hands together again and suddenly there is kukamonday on the rock porch and I am wondering what gets birds and now it is good. HP, help me find a way to get this done and be on my A game again.

W outdid himself last night. He began with the introduction from his caterpillar book with a quote from the best ant guy in the world, “Everyone needs an obsession. Mine is ants.” For Dave Waggoner it is caterpillars and his ten plus year study has opened a whole new world. As he says for our students, things at arm’s length are not so interesting but up close with a hand lens or microscope a dazzling, inviting, curious, puzzling world is revealed. It draws you into its ecology and you have another life quest that may be the main current or another tributary of life’s river.

His whole deal was survival techniques of caterpillars. After dazzling us with why to study with the first and most basic being their beauty. And with many other direct– their huge biomass, their food for song birds, their macro decomposition, their silk, jasmine, and their indirect causes those plants who can’t run and out to make toxins that keep the caterpillars away like caffeine and nicotine and on.

And then the two groupings of palatable and unpalatable. Palatables feed at night so as not to be seen and blend with the surroundings. Unpalatables are stark with the warning colors of red and yellow and black and white to set them off – the Clint Eastwood caterpillars W says.

On and on I could go with their incredible adaptations to fool their main predator –birds. From looking like bird droppings to snakes to petioles on leaves to bark with lichens to the two places at one time cat who has an escape hatch in a leaf and crawls through but leaves spidery sensors behind to be two places at the same time. The spidery webs detect danger and let the cat know whether to return or flee.

What a privilege to sit at the feet of yet another guru along life’s journey. I had a similar experience on a long afternoon walk to look for trogons – we never got to that point - but the journey along the way was filled with splendor through the eyes of four scientists scoping in on butterflies of great variety and every herbaceous plant and tree were Latinized and related to their feeders and of all things I was introduced to brave new world of many species of flies and wasp and bees. I saw a deft explorer net a bee and carefully put it in a specimen “jar” and show it to me so I too could see what he had seen from afar. I was regaled with stories about plant/caterpillar relationships and even a spider crab on a flower that would have escaped my untrained eye.

Best of all descriptions after all the latin glaucous this and something another that Peri Mason, yes that is really her name said – wow that is a big ass fly. I knew exactly what she meant – there are so many ways to ponder and describe the world. That was in direct contrast to one saying – I just can’t remember the common name of this. Yeah right. Thank you with the opportunity to walk with four wonderful scientists each at different places in their journey. From Tim’s masters – the birthday boy – to Perry’s doctoral work to Mike teaching prowess and post doc and doc mentees and to Mike Thomas who works in great wonders of this world including examining something like 180,000 mosquitos for west nile who also gave me awesome tips on photography with natural light.

But the greatest gift they gave was once again to affirm my gifts as a teacher and guide to my students who can jump on my shoulders and spring on to greater understanding and connections by folks like these whose paths they will cross and make new ones of their own. I am fired up to take on botany and zoology with no books and great ideas and the main one being my mission to share the wonders of this world.

And to be apart of a new community where Nat Jat offered me water along the way and when I finished my six mile walk with clunker motorcycle boots even offered to let me in on a three way underwear laundry deal. And I got to share the favor when I happened on an ant guy because of his Isotope T shirt (a minor league baseball team that I had seen with my daughter at Autozone stadium against the Redbirds in Memphis). He was a physics undergrad and I got to share my favorite physics students successes and revel in the learning communities I had been a part of and best of all he was from Japan and I got to introduce him to my new Japanese friends in our Earthwatch pack.

All in all a very good day and this is only like the one drop of water from the pond or the looking through the drinking straw opening in the sky to represent the tiny part of the field of view of space from Hubble’s deep field that is home to 10s of thousands of galaxies that I had shared with two more Earthwatch friends.

As one said we are all here because we care about similar concerns and interests or as I said we are all here because we simple care. That is the good starting point and continuance of an ever widening circle of exploration and wonder.

Day Four

From an early morning view of a deer taking a walk and red headed woodpeckers doing a foursome beat on a tree to learning the stars of the big dipper in Japanese it was another beautiful day in the neighborhood. My morning job was taking pictures of caterpillar for documention after designing a needle out of a paper clip to pull thread through the sample bag hanger. My afternoon job was working with Amy, Jinko, Sawako and Jat Nat on visual collection and whacking beater sheet collections along the trail - we did manage to take a lot of fun shots along the way.

The highlight of the day was being the designated buyer for the evening party. W drove us to Rodeo, NM in record time and a local establishment owner and I bargained for everything from lime to tonic water and a few other refreshments in between - Nat Jat kept up with the bank with stellar accuracy.

Or maybe it was the time I directed the four walkers home in the dark after they had walked four miles from dinner while the rest of us rode or the incredible richness of reinventing myself yet again with new friends in a place that welcomes and invites it.

Day Three

I had a great ride in yesterday to the Southwest Research Center with W (Dave Waggoner - the caterpillar book guy), Wren (the Bostonian, research background, middle school teacher friend), and Ryan (W's son who is a freshman at wake forest). Once here we whacked cedars and acacia and cypress for caterpillars and had some success and lots of fun with the new J team - (Jered "Jman" from DC, Nat now Jat from the Y in Jersey, and Jen Wren). Supper was awesome and refreshments before and after. We saw the dipper and little and casseiopea and a shooting star - great for a guy from Mars.

Day Two

At the mostly outdoor Sonora Desert museum I got to observe the native plants in their own harsh, hot habitat at 114 degrees and later at Grant’s Pass in the Tuscon Mountains collect caterpillars by literally beating the acacia bushes over beater boards. Once I got four caterpillars with one whack – I was wanting success in whacking and got it. It was a good kind of whacking. It is amazing that flora and fauna can exist in the desert in such beauty and variety. (And that even here were the broken brown glass residue of revelers fleeing the city and strict parents and on.) For all the infinite variety of plants and animals (including humans) check out my pics on http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbks54/sets/72157621832436175/.

In Tuscon

The hotel shuttle guy was talking about afternoon monsoons and flash floods and everything in the desert being angry and wanting to bite and to stick you. I am longing for Edwin Abbey's Desert Solitaire version. We will see.

It is 101 degrees but seems almost cool since there is no humidity.

The seatmate on the first flight spoke little English is in heading to Puerto Rico from the New York Bronx and heading to a halfway house. The second seatmate works for an oil company in Saudi Arabia and is on a five week vacation with one week at his house in Tuscon. Two different worlds much like Same Kind of Different As Me which I am reading on the trip thanks to a great recommendation from a longtime friend and author and gentle, wise one, Dorothy Shawhan.

I spent the night with friends, Rob and Chris, last night after moving a load of furniture -loaded by Finis and friend and unloaded by new friends, Jim and Nancy. (Friends are folks that are there when the truck needs unloaded and other stuff). In a few minutes I will board American Airlines to Dallas and then Tuscon.

Earthwatch Expedition

I have been selected to participate in an EarthWatch expedition at the Southwest Research Station in Arizona (http://research.amnh.org/swrs/index.htm). The title of the expedition is Climate Change and Caterpillars in Arizona (www.earthwatch.org/expeditions/dyer_arizona.html). This is a part of four projects around the world (www.caterpillars.org).

I will be making posts along the way. My trip begins Wednesday, August 5, as I leave on American Airlines from the Jackson Airport at 10:30 am. I will return to Jackson on Friday, August 14.

My first day in classes will be Monday, August 17. Until then I will be there virtually and have virtual assignments with a real sub, Ms. Zollicoffer.

I look forward to hearing from students, teachers, parents and friends.