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.