Earth Explorations

I am learning that one of the things you do as a photographer is chase the light, particularly the golden hours around sunrise and sunset. I know a man who specializes in photographing sunrises. He regularly gets up at or before 4 am to check the weather, make coffee and decide if it's worth a drive to the spots that he knows will yield stunning sunrise photos . I am not there yet, particularly with that getting up before 4 am business. However, I did find myself getting up and out before 7:30 am on a Sunday morning to take pictures of eagles. I feel that this is sort of the same thing. Finding eagles is easy around here as eagles overwinter by the Oahe Dam about six miles out of town, attracted by the open water and cottonwood trees. Eagles are large, photogenic birds that unlike their smaller cousins don't flit. Generally if you are quiet and still they will be as well until something calls them to take flight. In populated areas they move if there is too much human

When I reread my post below my eyes glazed over from the abundance technical details about background defocus mode. Overall, my post was rather dense and  uninteresting. Lesson learned. I'll keep the technical travails about which button to push when to a minimum. Suffice it to say that I don't fully understand my camera yet so occasionally it will do something and I don't know why. For example, I have managed to change the display on the screen so after I take a photo it flashes not only the photo but also all the info like f stops, ISO, etc. And once I set the display screen so that when I touched it, the camera took a photo. I have no idea how I turned that on but it's mysteriously off, for now at least. Somewhere in the advanced user's guide I'm sure it tells me about these things. I don't know when I will get to it because the advanced users guide comes on a CD and I don't have a CD reader. What I do feel I am learning, a little, is depth of fie

While I am a very inexperienced photographer I am not a complete newbie. Years ago I saw a Powerpoint on how to take good outdoor photos that talked about the rule of thirds and depth of field when composing your photos.  I've only had very very basic cameras so depth of field was something that I had no control over but I've always installed gridlines on the viewfinder if that camera had that feature.  I'm somewhat proficient at rule of thirds so with this new camera I turned my attention to depth of field. I am using a series by Graham Houghton  on You Tube to guide my learning. He recommends you start out in intelligent auto or IA mode which sounded good to me. The first subject he tackled after setting up the camera  is understanding how to set up background defocus mode and change the focal point of your picture. Knowing how to do this will help you change your depth of field in the IA mode. In peeking ahead at the topics I think he covers this later on in the seri

As stated below I have added a new camera to my collection, a Panasonic Lumix FZ300. This camera is in the bridge class of cameras. The way I understand it there is a camera hierarchy with phones and point and shoots at the bottom and digital single lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) at the top and bridges in between.  The hierarchy is based on clarity and quality of image and seems to be directly correlated to price and indirectly correlated to ease of use. This camera which I shall call Lu can function as a point and shoot but also has many buttons and dials if you want to take your photography up a notch. Since the whole point of my buying Lu was to do exactly that I have decided to embark on a self designed, self taught course, consisting of what I hope are credible internet resources and my own practice. Over the next few weeks or months many of my posts will be about learning about Lu. There will be posts of photos with information about f stops and shutter speeds and depth of

Last year I set a goal of reading four science books. And I have! Other Minds Song of Trees Caesar's Last Breath Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. They were all good. And they were all by men. My next reading challenge for 2019 is four science books by or about women, preferably both.

I was a speaker at the STEM Savvy cafe about my polar experience and this Lego mini-fig was my honorarium. I love it. This gift is timely because I recently made the decision to upgrade my camera to more than my phone. I have always maintained that you can be an explorer with the tools you have and for many if not most of us that includes a phone. You don't have to have the $3,000 camera with $2,000 lens. But I've come to the point in my journey as an everyday explorer and explorer educator where I want to do more exploring than my phone will allow. My phone doesn't take good pictures of birds for example and I'd like to add more bird photos to my iNaturalist account. I anticipate that I will continue to use my phone for the every day exploration and the upgraded camera for the more intentional exploration. Knowing myself, and I don't think I'm alone here, I have to guard against new puppy syndrome where once the newness wears off I stop playing with it

I had the good fortune to attend the National Council of Social Studies conference in Chicago courtesy of National Geographic. I helped staff the booth in the exhibit hall talking about the Educator Certification program and I gave a lightning talk at an Educator Happy Hour. One of the keynote speakers at NCSS was Khizr Khan. You can tell he is of a different generation because he does not have a social media presence as far as I can tell. Mr Khan (I cannot imagine referring to him as Khizr even here in my blog) is a lawyer, Muslim and Gold Star father who came to national prominence giving a pointed speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the dark dark tone taken on by the then Republican candidate about immigrants.  We educators gave Mr Khan a standing ovation even before he spoke. The applause was long and fervent. After he spoke, the ovation was longer and louder. More than one of us was crying, moved by his words and his call to be candle bearers of f

The day after Thanksgiving traditionally has been celebrated by shopping and consumerism until a few years ago when REI threw down the gauntlet or maybe climbing glove with its # OptOutside  campaign, closing their stores and online shop to allow staff time to get outdoors. A worthy and laudable idea, to be sure. So much so that I became an REI member paying $20 a year so I can buy more stuff cheaper. Full disclosure: I did not opt outside this year. I didn't wade into the consumer fray either (except for the cashmere, black watch plaid scarf from Scotland). Instead I went to the Joslyn art museum where I looked at world class artwork, some of which was about the outdoors like this picture from Monet. The bottom picture is a close up of his brushwork. Apparently, he mixed his paint on the canvas which sounds like a pretty badass thing to do, even to me a non-painter. I still believe in and advocate for opting outside. Christmas for me has a tradition of outsiding as I g

I went to Badlands National Park on its 40th anniversary. The weather was not pleasant; it was blustery, gray, cold. But I enjoyed myself wandering around, looking for new ideas and opportunities to integrate into the course I lead for teachers. I came up with one idea at least. Find a way to get the teachers into the front section of the park where the geologic activity is.

The first Saturday of November is National Bison Day. I thought it would be fitting to observe the holiday by sharing some of my favorite bison photos. This is probably one of my best photos. It was snapped, serendipitously, on my way out of Badlands National Park. I wasn't even the one who pressed the shutter button as I was driving. I saw the bison, handed my phone to the passenger and told her to take three or four photos. A friend of mine who is an excellent photographer, the kind who has high end cameras, noted that the best camera is the one you have with you when the shot presents itself. I would have to agree with him. This is the bison herd moving to water. I was headed out to White Butte and almost intersected their path. Fortunately I saw them coming and scrambled to the top of the Buttes just as they passed below me. I felt a certain poignancy as this is just a small, small fraction of the herds that roamed this land. This picture makes me say Awww

You can live a long time in one place and still make discoveries. Yesterday's discovery was just how many American elms there are around here. American elms used to be common as they were the preferred tree for city planting in the 19th century due to their shape and color. And they are beautiful trees, large, majestic, everything a tree should be. I assumed for quite a while that elms were pretty much a threatened species  well on their way to being extinct thanks to Dutch elm disease which ravaged the population. Dutch elm disease and the monocultivation of elms is Exhibit A in why diversity of planting is a good thing. Diversity provides built in resistance. I was both surprised and pleased to discover about a year ago that on the grounds of the science center where I work there were not one but two large elms. Outside my window. That I looked at every day. I just assumed they were cottonwoods, the other large, beautiful majestic tree in my ecosystem. It wasn't till

During Earth Science Week (which actually starts tomorrow but I like to get ahead of the rush) I try to post a photo a day on social media to raise awareness about how much earth science surrounds us.  The photos below were taken shortly after sunset. This time of year there is something of a Stonehenge effect where the sun lines up with the hallway since this hallways faces due west. I can't get the full effect on the actual day of alignment because a neighbor's house is in the way.   www.suncalc.org is a fun website to play with to find where on the horizon the sun rises and sets so you can find other Stonehenge type spots. Lots of learning opportunities there not to mention just a lot of fun to play with.

It's been a long week. I needed to get away for a bit so even thought the weather was cool and gray I bombed out to the Badlands for a night. The campground was full ish. Unlike summer when people arrive late into the night and leave out early well before sunrise this crowd was pretty settled. I heard someone leave around 4am but generally the campground didn't stir until after sunrise. I walked the next day, wandered really, and found myself headed towards the confluence of Sage Creek and the South Fork creek that runs by the campground. This confluence was one of the monitoring sites for the Badlands Monitoring project. I was trying a different route, one that I had attempted before but missed the confluence and ended up downstream at the Creek.  All who wander are not lost, sometimes we are are just trying again. As always there were new (to me) things to see as I have not spent much time in the grasslands during autumn. Usually by now I move my hiking to the front part

I have been following the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus for a bit now, ever since I arranged to have a ship to shore remote with the crew during the South Dakota Discovery Center's water festival.   It's been both exciting and enlightening to see exploration done real time. The other night, I tuned in to the Nautilus live feed  just because I do that sort of thing. (I also watch a lot of Explore.org ) Currently, the Nautilus is mapping the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument  to learn more about the seamounts (or underwater mountains) and the biological communities that live on them. This is a relatively unimpacted area of the ocean as it not fished by trawlers. I wrote about my first hand experience with trawlers  when I went to Seattle. The upshot: they are massive. I enjoyed listening to the scientists' commentary as the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) sailed through the depths. I was impressed how scientists could identify corals at a glance. These we

Back from my week away in Rocky Mountain National Park. My husband and I took a short vacation to the western side. We stayed in the town of Granby about a 20 minute drive from Kawunechee Visitor Center. We were able to get into the park fairly early every day so we saw quite a bit of animal activity including: A cow moose and her calf. Two harems with bugling elk Random elk herds, grazing Pikas and marmots Coyote scampering through the marmot area Deer On day one we hiked and got caught in the rain. Fortunately, we had rain gear with us. On day two, we hiked the Tundra trail which is where we saw the marmots and pikas. On day three we  hiked out along the Tombstone Ridge/Ute Trail, a trail above treeline, and had to turn back because of an incoming thunderstorm. Only it didn't bring rain, it brought sleet . We made it back to the car about 5 minutes before it started to precipitate. We were hauling as we hiked, stopping for nothing, not even to take a pictu

I am blogging about the butterfly monitoring for the Adventure Scientists project at Open Explorer . But I've been neglecting the every day exploration of Earth Explorations this summer because, well, it's been summer.  Now that it is officially meteorological autumn, I feel I should get back to at least weekly entries. So this makes a nice welcome back post. What should I find in my front yard this morning but a mushroom? I've not studied mushrooms much and my field guide is somewhat vague. It is a cap and stem with gills, I think. I can't be sure, it's hard to get a look under the cap. I took a picture but the camera didn't focus well. The mushroom is growing on the edge of the lawn, near where the leaf and needle fall from deciduous and coniferous trees are. It's an adorable little fellow. I feel like it sprung up overnight but I might be that  unobservant. I'm headed out of town for a week in a few days so I won't be able to watch

In my previous post about the Adventure Scientists citizen science opportunity monitoring butterflies in the wilderness I stated that I did not have any photos of butterflies from previous trips to the Badlands. When I wrote that I was consulting my iNaturalist observations rather than my photos because my photos from last year came up with this photo. I did add it to iNaturalist which identified it as possibly being a Variegated Fritallary on a rabbitbrush plant. Upon further review I would agree. I will be blogging about this opportunity on Open Explorer  with occasional hops over to the Adventure Scientists blog.

I have been watching the work of Adventure Scientists  for a while. This group equips people who are going on back country adventures with the knowledge and resources to do citizen science. They came on my radar through their microplastic work. Not surprisingly, founder Greg Treinish is a Nat Geo explorer. Adventure Scientists current campaign is pollinator s. They are interested mostly in the Rocky Mountain area but I signed up (and was accepted!) to collect butterfly and butterfly habitat observations using iNaturalist in the Badlands Wilderness area. I have to complete an online training which I will do in the next week. In reviewing my observations from the field study area, I don't see any butterflies. The only arthropods I've observed are garden spiders and tumblebugs.  I am excited to try my hand at this and contribute to body of knowledge about butterflies. Swallowtail caterpillar. Not taken in the Badlands but I will be on the lookout.

I'm still blogging on Open Explorer for the moment. I popped back over here to share this picture of Japanese manhole covers. I wrote about the covers I saw in Omaha below.

I am still blogging about exploration but taking a short break from Earth Explorations while I document an expedition with educators called Exploring Badlands National Park through Science and Storytelling.  I'm using the Open Explorer platform which is a National Geographic open platform where anyone can write about their exploration and expeditions. Once the debrief phase of the expedition wraps up in a few weeks, I'll be back here.

These are the latest additions to the bag that functions as my purse but which is actually an 18L daypack.  They are a to-go ware set of bamboo utensils with a steel straw that I tucked in there and a collapsible Sea to Summit container with leak proof lid. These live in their own zippered compartment along with an occasional stainless steel mug. I am stepping up my efforts to remove single use plastic from my life. National Geographic has launched a Planet or Plastic initiative aimed at protecting the ocean by reducing the amount of plastic that gets washed into the sea. Since most of the plastic comes from developing countries with insufficient trash and recycling infrastructure I know that my part to reduce single use plastic will have practically a negligible impact on the amount of plastic in the ocean. And yet. In modeling carrying reusable utensils and collapsible food container as well as beverage container and shopping bags, I am making a difference in my riverside

John Muir, the founder of the Sierra club, explorer of Alaskan wilderness, champion of Yosemite park, was a journaler. The University of the Pacific maintains many of John Muir's papers and has made them accessible by putting the digital images online. They have invited the public to participate as citizen curators and assist with transcribing the journals to make them more accessible. From the university website : Word-for-word transcriptions open up many more possibilities for researchers and the general public to find, read, and understand Muir's thoughts as he experienced them. It also facilitates online searching to locate information by specific topics. Volunteers can transcribe an entire journal or even just a single page. Even transcribing one or two pages increases the discoverability for historians, Muir enthusiasts, students, or anyone searching the internet. I spent the better part of a Friday evening recently trying to decipher two short sentences from

I traveled to Seattle for a few days between my last post and this one. This was my first visit and according to the locals I was there during a stretch of especially nice weather, sunny with temps in the 60's and 70's. Indeed, I expected more rain and Starbucks. My work required staying on a ship which did not sail anywhere. The ship was docked in the port of Seattle next to massive fishing trawlers that were so huge that I did not take a picture because I knew I could not do justice to their size. My colleague on this trip, John Mitchell, wondered at the biomass these trawlers take out of the sea. One of the trawlers in port was the SS Ocean Phoenix . At 680 feet long, it is as long as city block. I don't know how tall it is but 10 stories at the highest point above the pier feels about right to me. It can hold 4,200 tons of what its owner Pacific Premier calls product or the all the different forms of Pollock it fishes and processes. I suppose this helps answer the q

Being an explorer means being responsible. It's not just me saying this, it's National Geographic.  Responsibility is one of the attitudes of an explorer, an essential attribute of the explorer's habit of mind and approach to life. In case you are fuzzy about what being responsible means allow me to clarify. When I spoke to the middle and high school girls Women in Science conference I told them that responsibility meant being respectful of everyone, having integrity, and—this is the big one—to do no harm to and help where you can, both people and  the Earth. Leave No Trace  or LNT is an excellent organization that equips you with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to do no harm to the Earth and be responsible in both the back and front country.  I think their training should be required for everyone who considers themselves an explorer because being LNT competent and compliant helps protect and conserve wild places. And even if you don't think of yourself a

In my post below I talked about the struggle of an ant to remove a small sprout of vegetation near the opening to its nest. I promised I would return the next day to give an update. Well, the next day was rainy and cold and I got busy. You know how it goes. I did go back the day after the next day. The first time I went back it was about 10am. A sprout was there... but it looked like it was in a slightly different place. I could not tell if it was the same sprout or a new one. After all, we've had a lot of moisture lately and all that warming. A new sprout was possible. As an aside, this is why EXACT siting is so important in research. The human memory is not that good at precision recall. I decided to call it uncertain, determined to be more precise in the future. I returned a few hours later, around 1pm, and noted a completely sprout free surface around the ant nest. Regardless of whether or not the sprouts were the same or different, they were gone. Ants - 1 (or may

I read Thoreau's essay  ant war  in high school, or maybe it was first year composition in college— more than a few years ago—but the essay topic was sticky enough that throughout my adulthood I have stopped and watched ants whenever opportunity and time presented themselves.  I had a happy confluence of both on a walk yesterday. I came upon many ants, Harvester ants, huddled around the hole with a few busily scurrying in and out carrying small pebbles. I don't know what the huddlers were doing (beyond huddling, though I doubt that is the proper ant behavior term), nor why. I suspect it had something to do with this being early days of ant activity and just coming out of whatever dormant state they enter during the winter. The huddlers while interesting were not as interesting as this stalwart little ant in the video who was determined to cut down a sprout of vegetation. Harvester ants clear the areas around their holes of any vegetation and I imagine this ant

My first real trip to the Badlands for this year. I hiked around with a friend on this sunny, fine day of spring; a treat as I usually go by myself. The grass was just beginning to green up and we saw this little plant which I know as wild parsley but the guidebook calls desert biscuitroot. Interesting facts from the guidebook: 1) When you crush the leaves it smells like celery. I did not try this so I can neither confirm nor deny. 2)Men of the indigenous Plains people used the fruit in love charms. Again, I cannot confirm nor deny since I am not a man of the indigenous Plains people. You can tell the wild parsley/desert biscuitroot is a plains plant because of the wooliness of the leaves which minimizes the impact of the heat and wind. Many plains plants have this adaptation. The hairs minimize direct contact with the air which slows evaporation and creates shade. Having been on the Plains during the scorch of summer, I know how vital this is. Close up of a leaf and stem

Cumulus cloud! A cumulus cloud is the true sign of spring. Cumulus clouds are formed by convection, heat radiating from the Earth. Cumulus clouds only form in the warm weather since in the cold weather the Earth simply doesn't put out enough heat. I snapped this several days ago. As I write this, a huge spring snow storm is bearing down on us and already impacting much of the state. Clouds are nimbostratus, bringing some icy now. I know the sun will  prevail and eventually the Earth will warm enough so it will feel springlike. But until then, I will semi-stoically endure more cold and snow.

 I went to the land of the Sicangu Oyate, known more commonly to those who are not Lakota as the Rosebud Reservation. I was invited by Sinte Gleska University, a tribal college, to facilitate a special seminar on water and environmental education. We were busy. Project WET, GLOBE protocols, the GLOBE Observer App, and the National Geographic Certified Educator Phase 1 training. I won't lie. I'm tired and I imagine so are the participants. I am always honored to be invited to the reservation. It's not a particularly comfortable trip since you are confronted with the impact of decades of the genocidal policies of the US but it is always an honor.

I haven't been everywhere the past ten days but I feel I come kinda close. Since March 23 I've been to Sioux Falls twice, Washington DC, West Lafayette, Indiana, and Omaha. Ok maybe I don't come close. Most of my trips I was inside various meetings rooms. In Omaha, I did get outside to walk my son's dog. He lives in an older part of town which is actually inside the Bellevue city limits. The days mostly were cold, gray and raw. It was a challenge to keep my explorer's googles on, to feel the call to explore. And yet, I would have missed these manhole covers, had I not. I don't know enough about these covers to know how unique-if at all- they actually are.But I think they are beautiful in their own way and I find it touching the someone took the time and effort to design these. There is beauty everywhere, if you are willing to go outside and look for it.

Fellows and National Geographic staff toast This past weekend I returned to National Geographic to help mentor the next cohort of Grosvenor Teacher Fellows. A bittersweet experience, to be sure, since it marks the end of being part of the current cohort and the beginning of being a part of a previous cohort. But once a Fellow, always a Fellow. National Geographic is practically synonymous with exploration and in many ways is the impetus for this blog. Because of this blog and a couple of other explorer-y projects I am working on, I can honestly say that the close of this year does not feel like the end, but rather the timely transition to the next thing. I'm not being coy or mysterious when I say I don't know fully what the next thing will be but I suspect it will involve the following: Build the field of exploration education. Inspire and equip educators to first see themselves as explorers and then teach exploration. Spend time in the outdoors not just to recr