A Brief History of the Die-in

As a student of historical nonviolent movements, the protests in Saint Louis have an academic as well as a personal connection for me. In particular, I am interested in the language of protest. It can differ greatly by location and time period. In many places, a particular color has a deeply woven cultural meaning of resistance—yellow in the Phillipines, green in Iran, orange in Ukraine. In other movements, a particular kind of demonstration has become the signature of the movement—the boycotts and marches in the Civil Rights movement, the salt tax protests in the Indian independence movement, and the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo’s Arab Spring. However, these different forms of language have a similar goal: by wearing a certain color or taking a particular action in a highly public manner, nonviolent protesters aim to demonstrate their rejection of an unjust system, and the system’s inability to stop them from doing so without resorting to violence.

So far, the signature action of the Ferguson protest movement, other than the ‘hands up’ gesture, has been the die-in. As organizations have begun to struggle for control of the leadership of the current movement, I think it is important to bear witness to the Saint Louis roots of this particular demonstration. It is also a fascinating case-study in the spread of nonviolent tactics and the results of activism.

A little over a week before the grand jury decision announcement, Saint Louis-based activist groups were continuing their months-long campaign of protest. Though cable news attention had waned once the minority of criminally violent demonstrators had moved on, nonviolent protests continued unabated from August to November, with a peak of activity on the weekend of Oct. 11-12, dubbed “Ferguson October.”

According to the St. Louis American, on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 16, two groups of protesters, including members of Tribe X and Missourians Organizing for Reform (MORE) marched in University City, meeting in front of the Tivoli Theater on the Delmar Loop. After several minutes of chanting, some of them mimed holding a gun and shooting the others, who fell to the ground. Others traced chalk outlines around the ‘bodies.’ Laying in the street for 4.5 minutes, they mimicked the 4.5 hours that Michael Brown’s body lay on Canfield Ave. after he was shot. By blocking traffic and speaking over a megaphone to pedestrians, the protesters interrupted daily life and the normal flow of commerce in a business district. Delmar Blvd. is also culturally significant, as it represents the current line of segregation between white and black neighborhoods in St. Louis, according to the BBC (also see this write-up by the St. Louis Beacon). The Loop, therefore, is a liminal space in which this segregation can be challenged.

Video by the St. Louis American.

That evening, just hours after the protesters had dispersed, the New York Times put a photo of the die-in on the website’s front page.

Suddenly, the die-in was on track to spread virally. The Monday edition of the Times also featured this photo. However, it is important to consider that the activists strategically manipulated to get national coverage of this action. While the cable cameras had retreated, newspaper reporters from the Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times remained. By beginning with a march, they made sure the reporters knew where they were headed. They chose a highly photogenic action that looks good on a front page and is easily replicated by other groups. Though these choices, the organizers created conditions that nearly ensured national attention.

Since then, the die-in has spread nationwide. Most recently, medical students around the country held campus die-ins while wearing their white coats.  They often target highly-trafficked spots such as malls, large roads and interstates, and public squares.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Nick Pistor, recently claimed on Twitter that the die-in “has officially become a pop culture thing.” I think there is an important distinction between “widespread” and “pop culture.” Pop culture is never dangerous. Demonstrators, especially people of color, take very real risks participating in die-ins, ranging from verbal abuse, to arrest for unlawful assembly, to violent police response. The Saint Louis activists created a word in the language of the current movement that, wherever spoken, continues to challenge racism and promote solidarity among groups throughout the country.

Nine Haiku

For your diversion, or perhaps your distraction from evening work: Phizzog Review, led by our own Hart L'Ecuyer, was good enough to publish some haiku I wrote during a haiku frenzy in our writing workshop this spring. And they're alongside (well, below) a series of cicada haikus by Matthew Rohrer, a widely published writer. Check 'em out. 

Note - both sets of haiku are non-traditional: they don't all have 5-7-5 syllable structure. Mine do only when convenient. In this I am following Robert Hass's lead. He translated hundreds of classic haiku and sought dynamic recreations in English rather than literal replications.

Birds in Restored Campus Habitat

This fall, I have been conducting surveys at sites around Kirskville to study how birds use streamside vegetation (known as riparian zones) during fall migration. I designed the project because other students have led an effort to restore the native riparian vegetation to Truman's campus along a stream called Bear Creek. As preparation for eventual presentations of the project, I went out to get some pictures of late fall migrants foraging among the plants that have sprung up in the no-mow zone on either side of the creek on campus. 

A Red-winged Blackbird perching in a tree above the creek.

Zoomed out: so there was also an American Robin. That's less important, since the Red-winged Blackbird is primarily a wetland bird, while the Robin is more of a generalist. 

 These pictures are unfortunately a bit blurry, but they show a Red-winged Blackbird in the act of foraging on the seeds of Ambrosia trifida, otherwise known as Giant Ragweed (which I happen to be allergic to.)

A Dark-eyed Junco on a ragweed stem.  

  

A House Sparrow. Like the Robin, this is less convincing evidence of the quality of the restored habitat, since House Sparrows are urban birds, but it nonetheless shows a bird making use of the vegetation.

Two male blackbirds and a House Finch in the background.

Red Leaves, Yellow Cello Case

I don't think I could have posed a more autumnal scene on the Quad last evening. A cellist and a violist were playing pop songs and improvising around sunset.  

Truman Students Arrested at Nonviolent Protest

Photo by the LA Times. The two Truman students
are the first and third seated protesters from the right.

For this week's Truman Index, I wrote a feature on two students (one, Greg Fister, an old Prep News comrade) who were arrested during a nonviolent sit-in at the Shaw QuikTrip earlier this month.  For anyone curious about what it is like to be arrested for activism, take a look. Here's the first page (below the Halloween story) and here's the second page. In addition, here's the video referenced in the story showing the police officers using force on Greg to break the line of seated protesters. The Ferguson October events, which included this sit-in, produced a new wave of demonstrations that captured national attention. Depending on the outcome of the grand jury decision, we may soon see even more.

"Wasn't it a revelation...?"

Galway Kinnell thought cancer would kill him years ago. After a prognosis gave him only a short while to live, he wrote the poem "Why Regret," which takes the form of a series of questions--to his wife or to the reader. Shortly after, he found he had years more to live. Kinnell's ecstasies in that poem and others like it--"That Silent Evening," "St. Francis and the Sow," and "Rapture"--are all the more intense and believable for the way in which he sucks the marrow of ugliness in much of his other work, such as "The Bear" and "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible." Poems like those won him his critical acclaim, establishing him as the nature poet unafraid of the inhumanity of nature. He told the Los Angeles Times that “I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”

But now that Kinnell has finally passed away from leukemia, perhaps it is time to return to the rhapsodic poem he wrote when he believed he was dying--to focus more of our attention on what brought this poet of fingernail-rot and earthworms his deepest joys. 

Three Watercolors Find a Home

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, which published my poem about biting an apple in 2013, was kind enough to publish some recent watercolors of mine. Two are from Ireland and one is of a Monarch butterfly emerging in our backyard in St. Louis. Now to find homes for my other stray poems and paintings!

Index Ferguson Feature

Here's the link to my feature for the Truman Index on the Ferguson protests. For those of you who read the perspective that Nick and I wrote for the Prep News, it's mostly similar stuff, but this one is more from my viewpoint as a participant and less as an observer analyzing the situation at a remove, and is therefore a bit more personal to me. I also felt that the need for this kind of work at Truman was greater than at SLUH, since in Kirksville we are hours away from St. Louis, and many of us come from elsewhere and do not have a local angle on the story. 

I wrote this thinking it would just be in my normal opinions page column spot, but they made it a full-spread feature. I'm not sure how I feel about the design above the story, but I'm glad they used some of my pictures (recognize anyone in the bottom left corner?)

More importantly: the #HealSTL office, led by Alderman French, is open as of this morning in Ferguson. They are calling for volunteers from anywhere and everywhere to help work on solutions for St. Louis. Their website is due to launch soon, but their Twitter is live.

Ferguson Perspective

Nick Fandos and I teamed up once more for the Prep News as emeritus editors to write a perspective on our experience of attending a protest march in Ferguson. I was deliberately hesitant to publish thoughts on the Ferguson crisis on this blog, because I feel that there is a lot of substantial work as well as a lot of unhelpful noise out there on the Internet already about this issue. While the press corps has done good in bringing national attention to the protests, some have also done a disservice to the community by only focusing on the late-night confrontations with militarized police forces, making what was in fact mostly a series of peaceful, passionate protests look merely like a string of dust-ups. I don't want to add even in a small way to that mistake. The minority of violent agitators are as much of a menace to the nonviolent protesters as they are to the police. 

But we sat with our thoughts for a while, and this piece is what we have so far.  (If you're like me and prefer to pretend you're reading a print newspaper, click here and turn to page 6. Check out the other great coverage there, too.) What we hoped to do with this piece was engage with our high school community, the place we learned big lessons in journalism, civic engagement and the value of urban neighborhoods. However, I think it could also serve as one source for my friends who do not live in St. Louis to get a handle on the situation, which looks quite different day-to-day than what cable producers have typically chosen to show.

But for the developing story, I suggest you follow protest leaders on Twitter. The hashtag #HealSTL was recently created to bind together actions directing the protest's energy towards initiatives to move forward and combat racial injustice.  Look up State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (@MariaChappelleN), Alderman Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) and Committeewoman Patricia Bynes (@patricialicious), for a start. We could be nearing the crucial point at which protesters either disperse slowly or coalesce into a unified movement, and leaders like these have a good sense of what's happening on the ground and what's coming next.

While I will welcome questions and comments about this issue, please be civil, and please read up elsewhere on the issue before making claims about it. Our feelings and opinions are complex enough; we can at least try to be familiar with the set of established facts and debunked myths.

Orono Sketches, Part 2

Well, I don't like this one as much as the one I did at NUI-Galway, and I paid for the dusk setting in blood collected by the diligent campus mosquitoes, but I'm glad I got to give watercolor a shot here.  This is Stevens Hall at U. Maine-Orono.

Summer Leaves

Here's the link to my first post for the blog of the vernal pool research program at University of Maine-Orono, "Of Pools and People." They're also on Facebook. It's my first foray into writing about a branch of ecology which is still very new to me: biogeochemistry, the study of fundamental environmental processes. There's a couple formatting hiccups in it that will probably be rectified soon, but I figured I might as well just link to it now, trusting in your generosity not to condemn me too badly.

Mind-Congestion Release-Valve of the Weekend

"All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas."

-Dean Young, "Belief in Magic," Poetry magazine (July/August 2014)

Risking Delight

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

                                                —Jack Gilbert

This Fourth of July, my bike lock fell off my handlebars sometime on a three-mile trip to the grocery store. This is one of those things that instantly reminds me of the feebleness of my body without wheels, and reawakens my dread of losing the ability to travel freely and without the worry that my vehicle will be stolen. I checked every foot of trail between my apartment and the grocery store, under a bright gray headache-inducing sky and steady cold rain. I did not find it, and decided to look for a bike lock at gas stations, the only other places open on this holiday.

The first, nearer one did not have a bike lock, nor did another convenience store. I had been in the rain for almost two hours at this point and was losing courage fast.

But like in an old story, an inner voice told me—Just ride to the top of yon hill, lad. Then ye may return home. This inner voice was apparently from northern England.

And upon reaching the top of the hill, I saw the sharp lights of a gas station, like Jane Eyre seeing the parson’s house across the moor.

I arrived at the convenience store and found an attendant leaning against the outside wall, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” she replied, clearly peeved at being distracted on her smoke break.

“Do you sell gas—er, bike locks here?” The speaking part of my brain was short of oxygen.

“No,” she said, looking back at her phone.

“Okay.” I mounted my bike and turned back to ride through some more oily puddles.

In a moment my story had changed from one of classical Providence to something like Sergey Dovlatov’s tragi-farcical sketches of late Soviet life.

At least I had already bought ibuprofen.

This morning, I had been planning to go to Acadia National Park. However, I woke up to howling winds and driving rain. I knew it would rain, but not this hard. I had already begun composing an essay in my head about my trip. It would parallel Ishmael’s arrival in port during a storm in the opening chapters of Moby Dick. It would celebrate the sights of huge waves driven by (comfortably distant) hurricane winds, and perhaps speculate about unseen whales in the Atlantic, the horrors of modern whaling, and our changing relationship with Leviathan in the days of climate change.

But I won’t be able to write that essay yet, because I was not willing to go to Acadia on a day forecasted to have two inches of rain. Apologies, Ishmael.

Instead, I went into town, bike-less, in the pouring post-hurricane rain, ordered French toast and corned beef hash at a diner, and listened to an audio recording of Patrick O’Brian’s H.M.S. Surprise. All the time hearing, for some reason, David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” in my head. And I had a grand time doing it, especially since I knew I was denying Fate the satisfaction of making me miserable.

It made me think of something I had thought of many times before—what matters is not external events but one’s response to them—which is often a matter of rallying against them. To me, this is a source of happiness: the knowledge that we are making an effort to live well in the world. What draws me to Moby Dick is ultimately not its setting but Ishmael’s narrative voice, delighting in absurdity even in strange and terrible conditions. It's the same reason I admire Lizzy's voice in Pride and Prejudice, delighting in other absurdities, though in surroundings usually reckoned much more pleasant than the 'tween decks of the Pequod.

Compared to the suffering of many people, the kind of problems I have would be relief. And yet I don’t advocate being thankful for the kind of problems we have—an impossible if possibly noble task. Nor yet do I advocate feeling guilty for one’s gifts, an unproductive and merely Puritanical task. I suppose we have to risk delight, wherever we are, as Jack Gilbert encourages us.

Reading in the afternoon of a day that was no longer titled “The Day I Didn’t Go to Acadia” but instead a free day whose meaning I was still uncovering, I arrived at this passage in Moby Dick: describing the Pequod for the first time, Ishmael tells us, “Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.” The wide-traveling experience suggested here instantly delighted me. It led me to consider the degrees of separation between me and the (imaginary) French grenadier. First there were the original, and probably none too enjoyable, experiences of shooting musket-balls at the British in Egypt and the Russians in Siberia. (By the way, Napoleon's army was turned back near Moscow. Poetic license.) Then there was the distance of time, which allowed the grenadier to pick out the meaningful parts of those experiences and craft them into a story which he wore proudly on his weathered cheeks. Then Herman Melville either saw such a person—or, more likely, read about one. One day at the docks, in an imaginative moment, he connected this person with a ship he admired. Finally, he wrote this thought down, and over a century later, I read it.

And yet all those sequential frames are instantly fused into a single windowpane by the magic of human communication—in this case, by the written word and the power of story. Is telling and listening to stories, however small, our most accessible way of risking happiness?

Orono Sketches, Part 1

Here's the first of what I hope will be a (small) series of sketches of the town of Orono, Maine. This is the Orono Community Center, with a well-trafficked thrift shop on the second floor, senior center on the first floor, and a community garden beside it. Sitting on top of a grassy bluff above a stream, it seemed to have the air of an English country house (which may have something to do with my reading Pride and Prejudice at the moment.) Don't think I was being lazy: there really were only nine windows from where I was sitting. For all its fine angles, it is strangely lacking in the category of windows. I may go back and add color later.

Penobscot County Busride

You might think it strange that I haven’t yet written about my work on the vernal pool research project here. (After all, at right is what one of our vernal pools looks like.) However, as lucky as I am to have gotten this opportunity for biology field work, it is nonetheless work, and I’m therefore more inclined to talk and write about what I do on my free time.

And experiences in Ireland, New York, Boston, St. Petersburg, St. Louis, Chicago and now Maine have convinced me that boarding a public bus or light rail train car is one of the most rewarding things you can do with a free day or even with a free forty minutes.  So that is what I did with this Saturday: took the bus 20 minutes southwest to the city of Bangor. Perhaps from the outside buses might look like poorly lit mobile caves, but inside you find that the whole cabin is surrounded by wide windows, making you feel like you are on a large glass box. After paying less than a candy bar you are free to board. To an enthusiastic mind, the raised rear section of a bus recalls the quarterdeck of a sailing ship. You are then whirled off somewhere else without having to think about it, and are free to read or listen to music.

Or perhaps even talk to someone. In Galway, Ireland, the bus drivers I saw often had friends who would board for a stop or two just to cling on the front pole and exchange witticisms with them. “Are you a Galway man, at all?” an elderly man asked me on the train to Dublin, midway through his wife’s brief account of their family’s life history. She told him of course he isn’t, don’t you see his ball-cap? (I hadn’t picked up a Galwegian accent: I just think he couldn't hear very well.) Sure, I have heard some tedious speeches on the subways of large cities, but for the most part American public transit spaces are often ones of comradely traveler’s small talk, or at least a silence with a positive, and not a defensive, energy to it. Wal-Marts and lame polo shirts carry on their slow, steady arsenic poisoning of American culture, but buses remain. Even in Maine, buses are multiethnic and often multilingual. It is one of the few places left in this country where, while waiting out a long cargo train crossing, a stranger is unafraid of asking another if they’d be brave enough to save up money, get on a train and cross the country, and another stranger is unafraid to answer yeah, of course, why not?

The bus from University of Maine-Orono’s campus to Bangor roughly follows the Penobscot River downstream. Riders are treated to quick views of the river between houses on the banks, and of small mountain ridges in the distance. This is a good time to discuss how the people of New England are often spoiled utterly rotten. I have heard whale watching called “cheesy,” when I believe many of the people I grew up with in St. Louis will never see a whale.  I have heard Mainers talk with great complacency of the low property values here, how it is only good as retirement country—a cold Florida. And yet the number of houses—of apartment complexes and trailer lots—with rock-bottomed salmon rivers a hundred yards wide and more in their backyards is, to my Midwestern eyes, incredible! Cheesy whale watching, forsooth.

We stopped at the central bus depot in Bangor, which was, as I had hoped, right in the  historic downtown. Bangor, whose name comes from a city in Northern Ireland (though indirectly, through a city founder’s favorite hymn), is the third-largest city in Maine. The city plan is haphazard and gangling, not unlike the asymmetric street grids of medieval cities in Europe. It grew quickly as a port for the loggers of Maine in the 1800s, shipping Maine lumber to build New York and Boston. At one time it was an economically crucial city. But in more recent years, the usual outer ring of box stores and strip malls has expanded to serve a broad rural population that includes New Brunswick, Canada. As a result, the center has declined—antique stores are not good evidence for commercial bustle. Yet it still retains some of its vigor. I was deeply pleased to see tall brick buildings, old white-steepled churches, and a café devoted entirely to bagels. On a Thursday when I drove through on the way to a vernal pool, downtown had all the dense traffic a city-dweller could wish for.

I stopped in a café with an Italian name and bought a muffin and a double-shotted cappuccino. The barista took the order from the cashier with every appearance of great personal dislike for me, vanished behind the corvette-red espresso machine, and reappeared to hand over what instantly seemed to me the best cappuccino I had ever tasted, as coffee is apt to do. I sat outside, nominally reading a Jane Austen novel, but in fact watching large bright clouds passing over the sunlit brick buildings.

My wandering about town, up and down the canal, up and down Main Street, satisfied an appetite I have for urban landscapes that has not been fed by the small but adorable town of Orono. Having heard that some undergrads at U. Maine see Bangor, dear little Bangor, as “sketchy,” I was reminded of my hypothesis that somewhere along the line, many white suburban children learn the lesson that there is something inherently dangerous and untrustworthy to places where buildings are close together—even, God forbid, touching along their sides—unless the buildings happen to be in Europe. I don’t know how exactly I escaped this lesson, but I am grateful that I did. Their are few cities I've visited that I don't have affection for. I have a passion for roof gardens (at right) and the tiny, over-planted front lawns of Boston (usually no larger than a kitchen) that is disproportionate to their size.

The bagel shop on the left is closed
on Saturdays--what nonsense!

As I continued to explore, the town continued to cause Galway nostalgia—compact, with canals and a boardwalk. Not surprisingly, I ended up having lunch at an Irish pub which advertised traditional Irish music on Tuesday nights, which I am now determined to go and see. They had a very tasty open-faced Reuben and had a jumble of tables and a seat-yourself policy which prevented a solitary traveler from feeling awkward about his solitariness—another similarity with Ireland. Perhaps both areas are simply dependent on tourists.

The pub.

With only half an hour to go before catching the bus, I headed towards the long boardwalk along the Penobscot. There was a food truck with an entire brick pizza oven stuffed inside, an ice cream truck, and many picnicking families. While the Kenduskeag Stream through the center of Bangor is somewhat dirty (every city worth its salt has filthy rivers—the Liffey, the Chicago, the Hudson) the Penobscot beside Bangor is broad and blue, with a very tall bridge, high enough for ships to pass under, some way downstream. With a very limited knowledge of Maine geography, I wondered—was it possible to ride a bike to the ocean from here? I was about to take a picture of the bridge when a voice startled me from behind. My first reaction was defensive: a panhandler, I thought? Money for the bus? No, it turned out, he was asking if I wanted to be in the picture. First I automatically said no, that’s alright, but he offered again and I accepted. It didn’t end up being a particularly good picture of me, but the mere fact of his offering made me strangely happy as I walked back towards the bus depot. Travel makes us sensitive to the ordinary kindnesses of strangers.

First Days in Maine

I went into the field with the grad student I'm working with the morning after I arrived in Orono. This is Duck Pond, the first of the vernal pools we sampled from. This summer is about background research and preparing for future summers. We anchored light and temperature sensors to the pool floor and waded to put in depth sticks to track the depth of water over the season. We also attached Nalgene tubing such that we could take samples from different levels of the water column by drawing the water from shore. This is done to avoid disturbing the water and the sediment during sampling. Since the differences in nutrient concentrations are subtle, large primates wading in the pool would instantly change the chemistry of the water column. Eventually, we want to compare water samples taken at deep and shallow depths to see if there is stratification in the nutrient concentrations.

They may not look it, but these pools can get pretty deep. We use hip waders, which go up above the waist, and Duck Pond certainly reached to my hip. The next pool, Emerald Pond, was so deep it would have topped our waders, meaning that the grad student I'm working with had to quickly swim in clothes without waders to put in the depth sticks with the sampling tubing attached. (Waders become dangerous and awkward when full of water, as you might imagine.)

It is also relevant to mention that Duck Pond was 46 degrees F, and Emerald was 52 degrees. Not exactly ideal swimming conditions. For science!

Another view of Duck Pond. More about wading in hip waders: the water pressure flattens them against your legs, and the air in them gives them a buoyancy that makes your feet bounce upwards each time you step. The effect is a little like what I imagine moonwalking in a spacesuit would feel like.

The next field day is this coming Monday. Thursday and Friday were for paperwork, training, and preparing field equipment for Monday. I also had some time to wander around the University of Maine's campus after work. Here's the Library (foreground) and the Memorial Union.

Another view of the Memorial Union.

A house attached to the greenhouses. I've always liked the way universities sometimes re-purpose of old houses instead of tearing them down.

A statue in front of Nutting Hall, where our lab is, as well as the rest of the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology. Note that the little juniper behind the bears is trimmed to look like a miniature pine.

The entry hall of Nutting Hall. Very rustic and all that. The thing on the left appears to be a sideways wooden tree that spins. Your guess as to its purpose is as good as mine.

I found a path to campus through a field and some woods managed by the university. Beehives!

Buoys monitoring the water currents of inland Maine. Currently reporting significant evaporation.

Translation-- "WARNING: KICK-ASS SCIENCE INSIDE"

 There's large areas of undeveloped and low-developed land in Maine, and the apartment complex where I live has some trails. I'm a big fan of the birch tree forests here. Reminds me of Mother Russia.

The Penobscot River, on the bridge to downtown Orono. The University of Maine is actually on a large island in the Penobscot. Well, if you are picky about what you call an island, maybe you wouldn't call it an island, but certainly there's a river on both sides of it.

The town of Orono. At last I have reached the region where the jigsaw puzzles with vague origins in "Small-town America" come from. 

Sunset over the Penobscot.

Rhododendrons (right?) on campus after rain-showers. Truman purple! Looks like it's going to rain until Thursday of next week, including during our field sampling on Monday, so y'all have some rainy pictures of spring-fed vernal pools to look forward to. Have a good weekend!

Pictures: End of Spring & Beginning of Summer

While waiting at a bus station in Portland, Maine to go North to Orono, Maine, I thought I would post some pictures from recent adventures and arrival in Maine.

Spring was late this year, and 39 degrees F  in late April was the warmest temperature for our ornithology class's bird surveys at Big Creek Conservation Area, an oak-savannah restoration habitat near Kirksville.

Spring in St. Louis during Easter weekend.

Up early for a bird survey.

Bear Creek on Truman's campus, where I'm doing surveys of the bird community to study the effects of plantings along suburban stream edges.

Spring flowers on Truman's campus!

On Saturday morning after we were all free from our exams, some friends and I got up to see the sunrise at 1000 Hills State Park and eat muffins.

Barn Swallows on the shore.

We had been meaning to rent canoes here for a long time and finally found a morning to do it!

We paddled to a cove of the opposite shore and landed on a small shrubby island, which we believe to be the home of several endemic species of ticks (monographs currently in press.)

The opposite shore.

Finally, Maine: haven't seen much of it yet, but what I've seen so far has been promising. The grassy area in the middle of this picture from the plane is a salt marsh!

In an hour I'm taking a bus north to Bangor, and then it's a short drive to U-Maine's campus. Thanks for reading!