Welcome to Bedrock to Birds!
Notes from adventures in learning to read the New England landscape.
Attention is the beginning of devotion
At the end of her essay, Upstream, Mary Oliver closes with the simple words, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” My friend, Nick Dorian, first shared these words with me several years ago, in the context of our pollinator conservation work with the Tufts Pollinator Initiative (TPI). Learning to pay attention to pollinators sparked my devotion to environmental conservation more broadly.
When I left Boston, MA in 2022 to start my graduate work in Burlington, VT, I was seeking kindred spirits. I missed my pollinator people at Tufts. Quickly, I was connected with Alicia Daniel, founder of the Vermont Master Naturalist program. We’ve been working together on native plant and pollinator conservation projects with the folks of Grow Wild since.
I was immediately enchanted with how Alicia teaches about the natural world. She describes the Earth being like a layer cake that we need to learn to read from bedrock to birds. She starts with bedrock geology and ancient history of a place, moving up layer by layer, to glacial geology, then soils, natural communities, birds and more.
Turns out, for the past ~5 years, I’ve been studying the frosting on the cake: flowers and bees. While it’s an important – and delicious – layer of the cake, it would not be there without what’s below it.
This fall, I have joined Alicia and a wonderful cohort of nature enthusiasts on a year-long journey to become a Vermont Master Naturalist myself. I grew up in New England, but through this program, I’ve been learning to interpret our landscape in amazing new ways as I am beginning to recognize the critical connections between each layer of the cake.
A bit about me
I grew up with my toes in the sand of Fishers Island Sound in Connecticut, spent my college years learning about pollinators in the urban wilds of Greater Boston, and I now call the Champlain Valley of Vermont home. I’m a Montessori kid turned PhD candidate. I’ve always been a big fan of hands-on, self-directed, nature-based learning.
My dissertation research focuses on wild pollinator conservation in agroecosystems, through field data collection, ecological modeling, and place-based education. I also lead field walks and workshops about wild pollinators and native plants (collaborating with folks like Grow Wild, Shelburne Farms, Burlington Parks and Rec., etc.), and I serve on the City of Burlington’s Conservation Board.
I am so excited to share what I’ve been paying attention to, as I learn to read the New England landscape from bedrock to birds.
A few teasers on what’s to come: I grew up at the terminus of an ancient glacier? My favorite wildflowers exist here in Vermont because of an ancient tropical reef?? Whales used to swim through the Champlain Valley??? If these types of stories are your jam… subscribe to get these notes straight to your inbox!
