Phenology

"Phenology" is "the study of climate-related biological rhythms."  I learned this recently in this NYT article about a guy who wrote a newspaper garden column for 45 years in Alaska and how his columns provide evidence for climate change.  There's a passage about how everyday nerds (gardeners, fly fishermen, birders. etc.), keeping track/noticing everyday nature, have unwittingly provided this evidence of climate change.

Until the recent past, few people ever set out to create a long-term record of climate change, says Abe Miller-Rushing, an ecologist at Acadia National Park in Maine. Many have done so by accident, though. Foresters write down when trees bud. Flyfishers monitor when aquatic insects hatch. Birders track when migrating birds appear in their yards. Phenology, the study of climate-related biological rhythms — when flowers bloom, for instance, when frogs sing, when birds migrate — had long been viewed as boring, Miller-Rushing says. “Once you had things figured out, you had it figured out, because it happened the same every year.” But then it began to become clear that things weren’t happening the same every year.

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One of the great nerds was Henry David Thoreau, whose notebooks (in addition to his works on Civil Disobedience and living for two years by Walden Pond) are unexamined gold mines.  

Since 2003, Miller-Rushing has pored over dozens of long-term records. He has scoured data from the diaries of Henry David Thoreau for notes on when flowers bloomed. Others have been searching French ledgers that stretch back to the Middle Ages for wine-grape harvest dates, sifting through imperial Chinese documents for mention of the arrival of locust swarms, examining 17th-century Japanese diaries for information about the timing of the annual cherry-blossom festivals. These documents — often created for mundane reasons, because flowers and harvests and pests are what gardeners have always concerned themselves with — have become sources of useful data. “It’s really valuable to have those kinds of observations,” Miller-Rushing says. “How things have changed over the past hundred or 200 or more years can really tell us a lot about the changes we can expect over the next hundred or 200 years

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Another famous Phenologist was Aldo Leopold.... link here.

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All of this delights my nerd self.  I love "middle seasons" and diaries (like my journal history project that keeps track of what happened "this week" for years past), and notebook keeping.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/magazine/gardening-column-climate-change.html?referringSource=articleShare