Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

Sycamore in the Stony Brook I feel like every once in a while you can appreciate nature in small doses. Nature has become big and that's not just because it's marketing team got better (we can thank National Geographic for that certainly). People wanting to "experience" the great outdoors, buying organic food, life listing rare and unusual species, hunting locavores (as in locavores hunting for wild food, not Ted Nugent's third favorite thing to shoot from a helicopter), and many other grandiose and specific things. Taking a sip While it certainly feels amazing knowing just how maple sap rises due to temperature fluctuations or why amphibians can breathe through their skin, taking time to appreciate a moment of pure presence can impress upon someone all the more. Take for example Monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus ). You see them gliding along passageways of tarmac and concrete, flapping furiously along roadsides looking to refuel not at Micky D...

Sciurus Niger, Black Squirrel When you move to a new place, it often comes with new sights and scenes. One of the more unexpected examples has been the color of the local squirrels. Squirrels in the northeast are already named for their predominant colors (with the exception of flying squirrels), but as the picture to the left shows, they also come in black. While they seem like a different species, these "black" squirrels are actually a melanistic morph of the regular Eastern Grey Squirrel ( Sciurus carolinensis ). In the past, this didn't prevent prominent scientists and naturalists from labeling them as such however.  Even though color morphs were certainly known about in the 1800s, there was still the constant taxonomic war known as "lumping and splitting". Even today, there are still battles and hypotheses being waged about certain species either being regarded as unique from one another or as simply being a subspecies. In biology, species and su...