Road Scholar

When I retired from the journalism business I wondered what I was going to do to fill the time once spent working. Do what you enjoy, I was told by friends and magazine articles.

Well, that means birding. But what kind of paying job could I get in the birding business? Not many that I would want to do, as it turns out.

Hitting the road. (RE Berg-Andersson)

I have great admiration for people who study birds for a living. I don't mean everyday birders like me, I mean those with hard-core knowledge. They know a primary from a secondary (a bird's outer and closer to the body flight feathers), a mantle from a tertial (feathers on a bird's back) and a gape from a gonydeal spot (the fleshy edges at the base of a gull's mouth and the spot, often red, on some large gulls).  

All these definitions come from Richard Crossley's field guide to Eastern birds. Crossley is hard-core. So is David Allen Sibley. So was Roger Tory Peterson. They don't just look at birds and identify them, they know their every part. All have written extensive guides.

Other hard-core birders go beyond identification and want to handle the birds in the cause of science. So I looked into becoming a bird bander. It turns out there are rules - a lot of rules.

I found a free, online course in bird banding offered by the U.S. government. Once I registered I looked at the study materials in each module. For instance, there is the 69-page North American Banders Study Guide published by the North American Birding Council. It begins with a Code of Ethics and then goes on to detail such things as the permits needed for banding (migratory birds are protected by federal statute), how to handle a bird, how to open a bird's bill, capturing and extracting birds from mist nets and how to prevent bird injuries and fatalities, among many, many other things.

Duck banding at Eastern Neck Wildlife Refuge.
(Public domain image from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

I would also have to go through the Handbook of Field Methods for Monitoring Land Birds by C. John Ralph and others from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This book is 47 pages.

When I started the course I discovered I would not be watching a video of a person talking to me and handling actual birds, but listening to a script as I followed along with notes put up on the screen. I quickly got bored.

OK, says I, I don't want to go through the process of becoming a registered, licensed bird bander. What about volunteering to help out the bird bander?

A contact sent me the link to the Ornithology Exchange listing all kinds of jobs. Most of them require experience as well as advanced science degrees no way covered by my Bachelor of Science degree. The closest hotspots to me for those who monitor, trap and tag migratory birds are on Lake Ontario or Lake Erie. 

Here is one such place, in Erie, Pennsylvania. The job would be an assistant to the bander and would pay about $5000 for seven days a week over eight weeks of work starting in September. I would need my own car to get me from the office to the field site. Nothing is mentioned about where I'd be staying for those eight weeks.

Then I read on and found this:

The most successful of candidates will also: Have previous environmental interpretation experience and/or teaching skills. Be comfortable using various social media platforms to relay information regarding EBO’s banding program in a manner consistent with NABC guidelines. Hold NABC certification at the banding assistant level or higher. 

Applicants should possess a positive attitude, be comfortable interacting with the general public on a frequent basis, be prepared to work long hours in sometimes adverse conditions (heat and humidity, biting insects), be meticulous in record keeping, and be in good physical condition. Successful candidates will have experience extracting, handling, and banding songbirds. This includes: 1) At least one season at a high-volume station (2,500+ birds/month). Volunteer experience also acceptable and 2) Successful solo extraction of 400 birds minimum. (emphasis added)

So much for that bright idea.

I also considered the Cornell Ornithology Lab's online ornithology course on comprehensive bird biology (for which I'd need another expensive textbook). But I had no interest in that, or even in the Lab's more general online bird-related courses.

Pete Dunne in 2012 (Margo D. Beller)

I was an average student, and I went into a field where having a BS (and an ability to cut through the BS) was enough. Everything I learned after that has come from actual experience, the University of the Street. And I remembered that the great Pete Dunne, a man I've met, the author of many books and once the sanctuary director of New Jersey's Cape May Bird Observatory, did not have an advanced degree in ornithology. He was just some guy with a great interest in birds who, according to his "Tales of a Low-Rent Birder", lucked into the job. 

The same is true for the writer Kenn Kaufman, who started birding as a young boy and then, as a teen, hitchhiked all over America to see every bird he could find. He wrote about that in "Kingbird Highway," which became a bestseller and led to a career as a bird guide, then as a writer and illustrator and editor of field guides.

Leg band (Public domain image from the
Michigan Department of Natural Resources)

Do I expect to become a famous birder like these guys and many others, or even a YouTube influencer for fun and profit? No. But I can't see myself trading in the time I've missed by working indoors staring into a computer for time spent indoors following an online course. Life is too short. I'd much rather be outside in the field, scoping out a hotspot or even just walking along a road in my town, learning from life. 

The Study of Nature

Do schools teach earth science anymore? Is there discussion in the classroom about nature and all the things one sees when outdoors?

"Anna Botsford Comstock 1854-1930" by USDAgov is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Nowadays, it seems we hear more about what CAN'T be taught in schools or what should not be allowed to be taught in schools than about what IS taught in schools. (I am not a teacher and do not have children, so I don't know.)

During the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002, the U.S. enacted the "No Child Left Behind" law. At that time Bush was quoted as saying:

"We're gonna spend more money, more resources, but they'll be directed at methods that work. Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work." (emphasis mine)

According to Brittanica, that meant "states were required to administer yearly tests of the reading and mathematics skills of public school students and to demonstrate adequate progress toward raising the scores of all students to a level defined as 'proficient' or higher by 2014. Teachers were also required to meet higher standards for certification. Schools that failed to meet their goals would be subject to gradually increasing sanctions, eventually including replacement of staff or closure."

Rather than helping students, the rules forced teachers to concentrate more on offering enough learning to live up to the testing standards than to actually educate the primary and secondary school kids. (Earth science was not considered worthy of mention.) The rules were eventually eased during the Obama administration.

Back around the turn of the last century, the concerns were different. There was no TV or internet to distract children and keep them indoors. The people at Cornell University's agricultural college thought teachers should have a guide to explain how children should see the outdoors - basically everything animal, vegetable or mineral except humans. 

Another difference: Back then it was much more common to see farms, and agriculture was a major part of the U.S. economy. According to Statistica, in 2022 there were just over 2 million farms in the U.S., compared with 2.2 million in 2007, and the average size has been steadily decreasing. 

But farmland was decreasing long before 2007 as post-World War II population increases prompted an explosion in housing on what used to be crop-growing fields, such as the famous Levittown development in Garden City, Long Island, NY.

Back before suburbs took over farmland, Cornell wanted a "Handbook of Nature Study" to be available for teachers. To write it, the university turned to the only woman on staff, Anna Botsford Comstock. She had been a student at Cornell - one of the first - and met her husband, John Henry Comstock, there. She eventually made engravings for illustrative plates for her husband's books on insects and butterflies, as well as for her own books on nature studies, including bees.

It was when she was appointed to the New York State Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture in 1895 that she planned and conducted an experimental course of nature study for public schools, which resulted in her "Handbook."

The book has never gone out of print. The used copy my husband recently bought was the 22nd edition of the 1974 printing, with a new introduction written in 1986. It is even available for download.

You could say Anna Botsford Comstock was the original ecologist, though the word was not in existence in 1911. 

The first part of her guide explains teaching nature study, why such learning is important and what to do (and not do) to get a child interested. The next sections cover animals (including mammals, fishes and birds), plants (including wildflowers and weeds) and earth and sky (including soil, rocks, water and, most interesting to me, climate and weather).

(Margo D. Beller)

Nature study gives a child "practical and helpful knowledge. It makes him familiar with nature's ways and forces, so that he is not so helpless in the presence of natural misfortune and disasters," she writes. "Nature-study cultivates the child's imagination, since there are so many wonderful and true stories that he may read with his own eyes, which affects his imagination as much as does fairy lore..."

And here's something to consider in these days of social media, artificial intelligence and not being able to tell what is true from what isn't: "Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it. Nature-study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are."

Think about that the next time you read an article about how children are spending more time inside on TikTok than they are on their studies.

Within each section are lessons for teachers, and sometimes interesting quotations. For instance, in the section on the woodchuck, the teacher is encouraged to take students outside to find a woodchuck burrow and, if the animal appears, study it. The teacher can discuss such things as when young woodchucks are born, how many can live in the same burrow and the animal's physical characteristics.

At the end of that section was a long excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Journal, including: "I think I might learn some wisdom of him," he says of a woodchuck he encountered during a walk and stayed to study. "His ancestors have lived here longer than mine. He is more thoroughly acclimated and naturalized than I."

Thoreau spent his life being outside as much as he could, observing nature and writing down his findings. He did not need a handbook to tell him what he could see around him, but not everyone is a Thoreau.

In the urbanized, suburbanized, commercialized, technology-driven world we now live in, where climate change is altering the way we interact with the world, it is heartening when we read of young people who are angry about what is happening in the world they've inherited, and are trying to do something about it.

But they may be the exception. You have to have an interest in the outside world to care anything about it. Which brings me back to my original question: Is earth science (or ecology or whatever you want to call it) taught in school anymore?

Anna Comstock gets the last word: "When it is properly taught, the child is unconscious of mental effort or that he is suffering the act of teaching. As soon as nature-study becomes a task, it should be dropped; but how could it ever be a task to see that the sky is blue, or the dandelion golden or to listen to the oriole in the elm!"

Baltimore oriole (Margo D. Beller)