to know the land

Every year I bring the recorder out listen to some of the other-than-human animals in our shared spaces. I then come home, dreamily relisten to the recordings and then set them up as a show. Why would I broadcast an hour of other animals making noise? Well, that’s a long story which if you have listened to the show before you probably know already.

The other-than-human world is alive and breathing. They sing and mate and eat and die, just like us. We honour all the varied stages of our human lives through words and song, of which we record, archive, teach and celebrate, so why not them? Sure we use our languages to speak to their lives, but wouldn’t it be nice to allow them to sing their own songs and for us to pay attention as we would our own? I certainly think so.

There is a beautiful mystery within these recordings. I don’t stick around when I record them, but I bring them home and listen and it’s all a surprise. What made that Robin (Turdus migratorius) alarm? Who was wading in the river near by to make the sounds of rippling currents? Why do some of the Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) suddenly stop singing? Who may have been hunting in the dark just out of sight? It’s a beautiful chance to hold the land a little longer, to investigate a little deeper and to hopefully know a little more intimately, year after year.

If you would like to hear the recordings from last year, you can listen here.

Birdwatching is obviously a thing as birds are everywhere, loud, demonstrate interesting behaviours, and they are often brightly coloured. Squirrels too are everywhere, loud, and demonstrate interesting behaviours. They aren’t brightly coloured, but their brindled, black, red, brown, grey, or even white in the case of some albino individuals at Trinity Bellwoods downtown Toronto, are still a joy to observe. So why not take up Squirrelwatching?

Elizabeth Porter is the project coordinator for the Squirrel Life project which is developing an app to collect community sourced observations of Squirrels (all species within the Sciuridae family) and their varied, interesting and often comical behaviour and then enables future researchers to access the shared collected data for their research. It’s a project with many aims including getting folks outside to observe wild life close to home while encouraging a closer look at varied Squirrel behviours which are happening all around, all the time. Along the way, Elizabeth is looking at how to communicate scientific research and findings with broad diverse communities. A great goal.

For me, tools which help people connect with the land in a good way should be explored and celebrated. Inaturalist, Merlin, and now Squirrel Life could be part of broader cultural tools like field guides, workshops, podcasts and experiential work in schools to get folks building their own relationships with the land. I am grateful that these tools exist.

To learn more :

Squirrel Life on twitter

By calling, Greg is a Jesuit priest. Lorraine, a textile artist. Both have a keen eye for observation, and translation. Learning to see the wonder and awe embedded in the guardians of the air we collectively breathe, the trees, they render the arboreal grace and might into earthly transmissions which allow us to know the land a little better.

On Earth Day weekend, April 22-24 2022,  Greg Kennedy, Lorraine Roy and I will be facilitating a retreat at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre with the theme of Trees. We will be taking the time to give thanks, make beauty, to reflect and listen as we explore some of the many ways we connect with trees.

In preparation for this upcoming retreat, Greg and I have been going on many walks around the 600 acre farm where the Jesuit Centre is situated. We’ve been planning, and sharing in our profound respect and love for the land. I had suggested this interview to talk about the weekend and Greg reached out to Lorraine as well to see if we could all get in on it and share some of why we are involved in this project, and to reflect on what brought us to this work, who has inspired us, and what we hope to bring to this emergent weekend.

It was great to talk with the both of them. I learned a lot through our conversation, and I know I will learn so much more on our coming retreat weekend.

I you would like to sign up for the weekend, check out the link below.

Trees Retreat Weekend information and registration

Nature Guelph was established in 1966 and since then has been promoting connection with the lands in and around the city I now call home. I have been attending their events for years, always drawn in by their knowledgeable speakers and presenters and great community. It has been a hub for naturalists in Guelph and I have been so lucky to get to know the broader community of humans and non-humans through their efforts.

I got the chance to talk with John Prescott long time member of the organization to talk about the past, present and future of the organization detailing their work in partnership with rare Charitable Research Reserve, the Arboretum at the University of Guelph campus, and about the City of Guelph’s campaign to become a Bird Friendly City. It was great conversation.

If you want to learn more about the work Nature Guelph is doing you can check out their website and their facebook pages here. Be sure to visit some of their partnering organizations and projects with some links below.

Nature Guelph

Knowing the plants who are in relationship with the animals we track can help us find the animals we want to learn about. They can point in the direction of where the animals are going or where they will be going. They can show us if we are in the right environment or if we need to keep looking.

To learn more :

Grey Squirrel Food Preferences: The Effects of Tannin and Fat Concentration

I have been tracking Deer Mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) a lot lately, and trying to learn a little bit more about them through their tracks and all the questions that come up. What are they eating right now? How can I tell them apart from Voles and Shrews? How many live together in the Winter? Who ate this one’s brains? You know, the usual.

Tracking is an interspecies pedagogy. We learn from the animals in the field, or from other humans who have learned about them and written out what they have learned. I am full of gratitude for all the life that the snow reveals and for the gift of tracks from the animals who leave them.

I have seen and been part of a lot of Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) removal efforts, and while initially hopeful, often there is a inevitable return of the non-native to once again take over the forest understory in short time. What if there were strategies, without herbicides or biocontrols to reduce or prevent the likeliness of Buckthorn’s recolonization?

Mike J. Schuster from the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota recently co-authored a paper looking into native phenological competitors to Buckthorn which can be planted after Buckthorn removal to help keep R. cathartica out. Luckily for me, one of the suggestions was a (fairly simple) practice I have been learning about and working on for the past 5 years! Plant more Elderberry! Sambucus canadensis and perhaps even more so S. racemosa can help block out the light essential to early Buckthorn growth. By planting these two shrubs , who have similar phenological timelines to the Buckthorn, we can help restore native biodiversity in forests experiencing Buckthorn invasions.

I will try to remember to create a follow up episode in the Spring to detail how to propagate Elderberry to help anyone who wants to try this experiment at home.

To learn more :

Cover it up! Citizen science project

It has been the Winter of the Fisher indeed with long tracking missions following three different Fishers at three locations in Southern Ontario between November 27, 2021 - January 16, 2022. I had only written of one of the experiences and hadn’t really told the story of the second and third, I thought I could detail some of what happened, and some of what I had been learning about for this episode.

Fisher (Pekania pennanti) is a hefty member of the Weasel family (Mustelidae) only found in North America. Once trapped widely for their pelts, Fishers were once extirpated from many regions, but through extensive protections, reintroductions and better land management practice, Fishers are reclaiming some of their prior range.

Powerful and beautiful, fierce and fuzzy, the Fisher is an animal I long to know more about. Here I share a couple of stories and share some entries from field guides in an effort to learn from this wonderful animal.

A friend told me that someone in their small village had spotted a Northern River Otter (Lontra canadensis) in the same river the passes through the city where I live. This is the closest sighting of a River Otter to my neck of the woods I have ever heard of. I was so excited that I ran to my  desk where I had all of my mammal books out anyways, and flipped to the River Otter entries and started learning.

This show is tribute to all animals who are experiencing range expansions, moving back into their historic territories and holding it down for the future. As I mentioned to the person who observed the Otter in an email, “[a]midst all the rough news of the year, this is some good news to hear.”

My friend Julian Fisher recommended a book to me he thought I would enjoy. It was Baptiste Morizot’s On the Animal Trail from Polity books. I got it and began reading when he told me he had just finished the book and was working on a review for the journal Environmental Philosophy. In light of this, I asked him if he would like to do a “book report, not a review” with me, where we could just have a good conversation about what we were thinking and learning about through reading the work. Julian is a philosopher, and I am a tracker. Why not share in the feast of ideas that is On the Animal Trail together?

Baptiste writes beautiful accounts of tracking wolves, bears, panthers and worms, and describes some lessons he and we have been offered by these cohabitants. But he also asks us to look a little deeper into these lessons and into our relationships with these different, and in some ways not-so-different, communities. Can the tracker be a diplomat between communities helping to lessen the violence humans inflict on the more-than-human world? Can tracking change how we see the world by changing the way we interact with the world? Can following animal trails help us find a deeper sense of belonging to place because we are more in tune to the relationships happening around us? Julian and I get into it.

I have read a number of books by various authors where efforts are made to conflate tracking wildlife with deeper understandings of our human selves. There is even a phrase for this kind of work: “inner tracking”. A couple of those books were just bad, while some offered ideas I could get into. Baptiste Morizot’s book On the Animal Trail is different. Here is someone reflecting on real experiences in the field, tracking these non-human neighbours and learning to encounter the world with new senses. It is a great read.

This is potentially only part 1 of Julian and I’s discussions of this book. We hope to find the time to talk again and get a little deeper.

More info :

On the Animal Trail website

Julian Fisher’s instagram (@juleswfisher)

The tracking blog I mentioned where someone tracks their cat