This Place We Call Home
An On-line Field Notebook
The idea of this blog is to post some of my field notes. … I do this mostly for myself, but I still hope that readers will find them interesting. So many people are disconnected from the land these days that it hurts my heart. And those who want to be connected really don’t know how to go about re-connecting. So perhaps the notes that I post here will help. You can learn about natural history, get a sense of the types of things a professional ecologists thinks about and notices in the field, and eventually come to care about the world we share a little more.
Why Do This?
Good question. Why, indeed? … This all started when I wanted to record what I had done and seen after a day in the field and realized that I forgot to pack my field notebook. I never really thought I’d be the type of person who kept a blog. Never wanted to. My passion is understanding natural history and the scientific study of natural history, which we label the discipline of Ecology. I usually share this passion with others through my teaching and as an avocational nature photographer. Then, on July 5th, the perfect storm of needing a field notebook, my desire to share, encouragement in the form of my dad’s blog (see EcoTads), and back-burner thoughts about teaching my students the art of keeping a field note brought the spark of life to this blog.
I have tried blogging in the past. It didn’t go so well. Low readership. Sporadic posts. Lack of dedication to the concept or project. But this time, my blog fulfills several needs/wants, so I predict that it will have a longer run than my previous efforts. In fact, I’m kinda “blog crazy” right now and keeping up not just this page, but two others as well.
- Here you find my field notes and photos that document the natural history of northern Georgia (and other places that I travel).
- On Terpenoid Colored World you will find weekly posts that discuss a paper from the peer-reviewed literature. It is, like this page, a thing I made mostly for myself but don’t mind sharing. (Look for the first post on July 16th.)
- Ecolosophy is my “general interest” blog, which I hope will attract the largest readership. It deals with any ecology, conservation biology, or general science topic that strikes my fancy. It’s role is to raise awareness, but it is not intended to be encyclopedic in scope or content.
