Chattermarks

As much as we love North Cascadian landscapes, we here at the Institute are still called to visit and experience other amazing places on our planet. We publish accounts of the places Institute staff and graduate students visit in our Road Trip series.

As graduate students immersed in developing a sense of place within the rich, rugged landscapes of the North Cascades, we spend a lot of time attending to, and exploring, the natural world outside our doorsteps. At the Environmental Learning Center, our academic studies of the history, culture, ecology, art, and conservation of this place are integrated with actual feet-on-the-ground learning. This type of naturalizing is a practice that takes patience, and a willingness to move through our surroundings with careful observation as we slowly make sense of its many patterns and intricacies. The deeper we go in this process, the more the meaning and being of the North Cascades opens up to us. We begin to understand the stories written on and of this landscape, and our place in it.

For many of us, this practice of Natural History in all its interdisciplinary forms roots us intimately and specifically to the high mountains and steep river canyons of this region. The nature of this type of learning means that, for many graduate students, we will leave this program knowing the North Cascades better than we know our own, native homelands. How then, do we translate the tools we are learning here to other river drainages, mountains, high deserts, or valley bottoms?

In an effort to explore this question during our month-long respites from the North Cascades, Kiira and I reflected on how the practice of natural history can be used to cultivate awareness and develop a deeper sense of connection to any landscape that we move through. While Kiira’s travels took her home to the rolling hills of southern Vermont, mine took me south into the austral summer of the Patagonian Andes.

» Continue reading Latitudinal and Longitudinal Explorations of Natural History

Last weekend Cohort 11 graduate students had the chance to step away from our roles as Mountain School Instructors and again return to being students of Natural History during our three day Fall Grad Retreat. After weeks of training and teaching 5th and 6th grade youth about the diverse ecosystems of the North Cascades, the respite from such high activity was much appreciated by all. Our explorations took us by hand and knee through douglas fir forests near home, and by car and foot through the ponderosa pine and fire-scarred forests in the Methow Valley.

Day one of the retreat was spent near the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center campus with M.Ed. graduate alumna and mycologist Lee Whitford discussing the amazing yet unfamiliar world of fungi and their fruiting mushroom bodies. After learning some basic facts and characteristics about our earthy friends, we set out to do some local harvesting of our own (on Forest Service land, of course!). It took some time to adjust our eyes and hone our observational skills to the often unnoticed specimens hidden between leaf, detritus, and tree trunk, but half an hour and handfuls of mushrooms later our forage had yielded an impressive and diverse variety of them.

» Continue reading From Teacher to Student and Back Again

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I was leading a hike on the Diablo Lake Trail during our August Family Getaway, when one of the participants noticed something odd on the ground at the side of the path. We all stopped and got down on our hands and knees to see what he had found.

At first, it looked like a really big feather. It was about five inches long, an inch-and-a-half wide, and furry, in short, a tail that was detached from some sort of small-ish mammal. I picked it up, deciding to bring it back to the Learning Center with me to see if I could figure out what it came from and why it was laying next to the trail.

A quarter-mile farther up the trail we found a banana slug, and when we got down to look at it, we realized that it was on top of another tail. Where are these detached tails coming from?

After puzzling about it for a while with some of my coworkers, I decided to ask our Science Coordinator, Jeff Anderson, to see if he had any ideas. And he did! The conclusion? A flying squirrel. The anatomy index at flyingsquirrels.com has this to say:

Flying squirrels have “break-away” tails. Should a predator attack and grab a flyer’s tail, escape is possible, if only at the cost of part of its tail, not its life. The sight of a wild flying squirrel with half a tail is not an uncommon sight. The affected squirrel makes adjustments to this loss and can live a normal life afterwards.

Mystery solved.

To learn more about flying squirrels, visit www.flyingsquirrels.com

In cultures around the world, oral tradition plays an important role in teaching people about the world around them. Through storytelling, elders can warn listeners of potential dangers, teach the medicinal uses of native plants and the importance of ecological balance, explain cultural norms and portend consequences of breaking mores.

This tradition exists at North Cascades Institute as well, in the form of natural history presentations from one graduate student cohort to another. Cohort 10 has been living and learning in the North Cascades for over a year now, and its members have become knowledgeable naturalists and skilled educators. Cohort 11 students began classes in Bellingham in June, and will begin their yearlong residency with North Cascades Institute in late August. The overlap between cohorts in the summer is one of the biggest strengths of the graduate program, as it allows time for each of the “elders” in Cohort 10 to share knowledge with the incoming students. While each student had a particular natural history topic they chose to teach, through the design of their presentations, they also shared teaching techniques, inspirational stories and sage advice. Perhaps more importantly, they helped connect the incoming students to this place through their passion to live, learn and teach in the North Cascades.

» Continue reading A meeting of minds, a sharing of ideas

Back row, left to right: Jacob Belsher, Elise Ehrheart, Sarah Bernstein, Mollie Behn, Susan Brown, Katie Tozier, Kiira Heymann, Erin Soper, Ashley Kvitek, Alex Patia. Front row, left to right: Emmanuel Camarillo, Colby Mitchell, Jess Newley, Christen Kiser

On June 21^st, fourteen new students in North Cascades Institute’s graduate residency program started their first quarter of classes at Western Washington University. In late August, they will move to the Environmental Learning Center to start a one-year professional residency, working towards a Master of Education in Environmental Education and a Certificate in Leadership and Nonprofit Administration.

The three courses that students take the first summer are all taught by professor John Miles, creating a cohesive summer block that is a combination of classroom time and field excursions to local public lands. During their first week of classes, students explored the Lower Skagit River and the Puget Sound. During the second week, students journeyed to the Environmental Learning Center to study the Upper Skagit River.

» Continue reading Exploring the Upper Skagit

I’ve often found that while hiking, walking or biking through the forest, the noise I make can be so loud that it’s a wonder that I ever see a bird, snake or squirrel before it charges off in what can only be a fit of disgust. Let’s face it, our chances of watching a pair of weasels dance between the salal are considerably lessened as we stomp down the trail with a sixty-pound pack, screaming feet, and an internal dialogue as focused as the spray from a twelve-gauge shotgun. The quiet moments we have in nature are when the forest truly becomes alive. The subtle sounds we lose when we are not focused jump to the forefront when we quiet ourselves internally and externally: something scurrying under last season’s bracken fern, the buzzing of the hummingbird as it races from the blooming currant and huckleberry, and the birds, so many birds.

So here’s the thing, I have a hard time sitting still and not doing anything, but I really love the world that is revealed to me when I am quiet and focused. I can sit down on the forest floor, in the shadows cast by Douglas firs, in a sea of salal and Oregon grape, and draw.  The loudest noise I want to make is the sound of pencil on paper. Believe it or not, this sound can be almost deafening in the absence of almost all other sounds. As it is quite unnatural, I have found on more than one occasion that birds and mammals can’t resist the chance to figure out what is making the noise. This is my favorite part of being outside and drawing.

» Continue reading Naturalizing Through Pencil and Paper

Each season the graduate students at North Cascades Institute go on a retreat. The purpose is relaxation, fun, and to learn a little more about natural history. For the spring season, myself and the other planners decided that getting out and exploring places closer to home would be perfect. A canoe ride across the lake, riparian exploration along the Skagit, and working the land at Blue Heron Farms became the main activities for a three-day stretch in May.

Imagine gray clouds. Cool and wet, the wind licks the skin. The 11 graduate students of Cohort 10 and their fearless leader, Tanya, piled backpacks, fire wood, food, and themselves into six tandem canoes, despite the 180 degree change in weather from the previous day. Spring had teased us with sunny skies while we worked with Mountain School students in and amongst the newly budding plants the day before. Making the best of it, our group set out towards the destination, Thunder Point campground, situated on the other side of Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park. Canoes slide in, paddles hit water, and the day began.

» Continue reading Closer Connections

As students in the Masters of Environmental Education program, naturalizing is at the forefront of our studies. Our curriculum encourages, and requires, us to get outside and document our experiences in nature. We keep journals marked with sketches, notes and questions that record our findings and observations as we explore the North Cascades landscape.

As the spring months of April and May have greeted us, so have the birds. Our winged residents have returned to the North Cascades and many of us have been eagerly watching. A major perk of living in North Cascades National Park for a year is the opportunity to live deep in the mountain landscape under Colonial and Pyramid peaks, and keep close watch of the changing seasons throughout our year-long residency in this place.

With my home at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center in close proximity to the forest, I have found myself in the midst of an ironic naturalist’s moment with birds. For several months, I have closely observed web cams zoomed in on an eagle’s nest located in Iowa, and another located on Hornby Island near Vancouver Island. While immersed in close observations of the intimate lives of eagle parents feeding and caring for their chicks, I noticed a red-breasted sapsucker prospecting a lodgepole pine right out my back door.

» Continue reading Birding Tools of the 21st Century

I recently had the opportunity to join Megan McGinty, North Cascades Institutes’ Climate Challenge Program Coordinator, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a meeting with representatives from several other environmental learning centers that will all be offering trainings this summer on how to teach climate change in the classroom. The meeting was hosted by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, which is located near Cades Cove in the national park. The meeting included representatives from NatureBridge’s Headlands Institute (Golden Gate Natural Recreation Area) and Santa Monica Mountains Institute (Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area), as well as from Will Steger Foundation/Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, all of which will be leading teacher trainings over the summer.

The trainings are being sponsored and supported by the National Park Foundation’s Parks Climate Challenge program. In addition to the meeting being a great opportunity for me to learn more about the trainings that will assist roughly 120 teachers in effectively teaching their students about climate change in the context of our national parks, I was also able to learn more about the different national park-based environmental education organizations and how they share their natural resources with students.   While at Tremont, we had the opportunity to observe students participating in their school program, as well as participate in a citizen-science phenology plot activity, studying where different plants are in their seasonal life-cycle.

» Continue reading Spring in the Smokies

Several weeks back, North Cascades Environmental Learning Center was abuzz with talk of an animal kill on campus near the Peninsula Trail behind the dining hall.

A chunk of fur found on the peninsula by Remote Medical International instructor and former North Cascades Institute staff member, Adam Russell, was the first clue to the kill. Adam had found the hair while observing a rescue scenario conducted by Wilderness EMT students who were staying at the Learning Center at the time. What was unique about the hair Adam found was how it was clipped from the missing carcass in clean cuts, as if it had been cut by scissors. Naturalist sleuths made hypotheses that it was a feline kill, as cats use their incisors to clip their prey’s fur in chunks.

Adam and several others did a brief sweep of the peninsula to look for further signs of the kill, but none were found. Several days later, Institute staff member, Katie Roloson, and some friends were out for a canoe on Diablo Lake when they noticed a deer skeleton splayed on the rocky shore of the peninsula. The clues were starting to fit together, but the mystery remained. Many thought the carcass was less than a week old based on its condition, but no one knows for sure.

With the excitement of the new discovery, I decided to examine the evidence for myself.

» Continue reading Unsolved Mystery: Dinner on Diablo’s Shore