I lived at home during my college years because my parents didn’t have money for dorm fees or out-of-state tuition, and it was a good thing because I was pretty aimless. One morning during a semester in which I hadn’t enrolled – whether by my own choice or the school’s, I forget – I stumbled across a show on PBS called “The Naturalists.” I think there were four episodes, one about Henry David Thoreau, one about John Muir, one about somebody else, but the one I saw that morning dealt with John Burroughs, and by the time the credits rolled I had decided that’s what I wanted to be, a naturalist and nature writer. We don’t have anyone in the present day comparable to Burroughs. He was famous for writing about nature, but not famous like Roger Tory Peterson (who died twenty years ago today, by the way). Burroughs was enormously famous. It says something about fame, or time, that he’s now utterly forgotten. Just for writing books and articles about birds and nature he was fervently admired and sought out by the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Muir. When Toledo, Ohio, honored him with a statue in 1918, “twenty thousand schoolchildren paraded before him, dropping wildflowers at his feet.” When he died in 1921, the New York Times devoted an entire page to him, the New York State Senate adjourned in his honor, and the New York Evening Post likened his death to “the crash of some patriarchal pine towering above a younger forest.” And yet the memory of him has vanished, even though, perhaps more than anyone else before Peterson, he made bird watching a popular activity. He sounds just like a modern birder in Wake-Robin (1871): “But what has interested me most in Ornithology is the pursuit, the chase, the discovery.” His biographer Edward Kanze wrote, “If I were asked to bestow a single honorific upon Burroughs, I would call him the Father of Recreational Nature Study. In his essays and poems, he encouraged his readers to venture afield for themselves, and to seek the same kind of intimate encounters with plants, animals, and landscapes that had made his own life so full and satisfying.” I was amazed to discover that someone filmed Burroughs two years before his death, walking about and entertaining some visiting children on the family farm in Roxbury, New York, where he grew up: http://www.catskillarchive.com/jb/youtube-john_burroughs.htm
We’re just a few days away from August, when the trickle of migrants will build into a steady stream, and the window of opportunity will open for such rare and beautiful species as Golden-winged, Canada, and Cerulean Warblers. August is also our best bet for migrant shorebirds. By now we’ve probably said goodbye to Purple Martins, Northern Rough-winged Swallows, and Orchard Orioles, and in August the kites will thin out and then disappear as summer draws to an end. We’ve already lost 26 minutes of daylight since the solstice; by the end of August we’ll have lost nearly another hour.
Because of the warbler migration, August marks the beginning of a three-month period during which most of us spend a lot of time in hardwood forests like those at San Felasco Hammock, O’Leno State Park, and Paynes Prairie (mainly Bolen Bluff). We go in looking for birds; we come out with ticks. There are a few ways of handling ticks. You can dress normally and pull the ticks off when you get home, which is not ideal. You can pull your socks over your pants cuffs and powder your lower legs with sulfur or insect repellent. You can treat your clothing with permethrin, which is quite effective – I’ve used it, and I can vouch for it – but it requires spraying your clothes ahead of time (here’s a brief and helpful video: https://vimeo.com/39012753 ). Permethrin also discourages mosquitoes, by the way. Matt Hafner had an interesting way of dealing with the tick problem, which was to wear shorts and sandals so that he could see the ticks crawling up his legs and remove them.
Listen, can I take you aside for a moment? I’ve seen the way you dress. Everybody’s noticed it. Luckily, Gainesville’s own Avian Research and Conservation Institute is holding a fundraiser by selling sweatshirts, long-sleeved shirts, kids’ tees, women’s tees, and regular tees, all emblazoned with a Kite Sighter logo. I beg of you, buy one so we can stop talking behind your back. Please make your purchases by August 4th: https://www.bonfirefunds.com/swallow-tailed-kite-population-monitoring?utm_source=mailgun&utm_medium=pledge_notification&utm_campaign=fund_profile