Notes from my Knapsack 6-6-24

Notes from my Knapsack 6-6-24
Jeff Gill

Narratives in nature unfolding around us
___


Selborne is a village in southern England, in Hampshire (old, not new), and I've never been there.

However, I feel like I know it well, thanks to Gilbert White.

White was a clergyman in the Anglican Church, a graduate of Oxford, and both grew up in and returned to Selborne for most of his adult life. His fascination with birds makes White perhaps the "original" birdwatcher; while not a professional scientist, there were very few in the late 1700s, so he is by default a naturalist and ornithologist of his time, and in many ways a pioneering environmentalist.

But all of this is due to his writing, more than his scientific work, such as it was. He wrote "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," which to my chagrin is better known today simply as "The Natural History of Selborne" with the antiquities, the history and archaeology, clipped off to make a shorter and more straightforward volume which has never been out of print since 1789.

I've mentioned Rev. White here before; he shames me a bit because his record keeping supports his lyrical writing about nature and creatures around him in rustic Selborne. He practiced what's called today "phenology," or the study of cycles and starting points: when trees leaf out, when certain blossoms bloom, and of course the arrival of migrating birds.

White in a comic mode is almost certainly the reason British birdwatching helped create the running joke in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which I can't pause to explain here, but many of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. If you know the bit, it will echo in your head at many points in "The Natural History of Selborne."

As I've also noted before, there is an Ohio State "Phenology Calendar" which you can consult online at "weather.cfaes.osu.edu/gdd/" for your zip code. To track recurring biological events makes you more aware of weather and the climate more generally, starting with something as simple as the frost free date. If you are planting tomatoes, "Mothers Day" is a standard metric around here, but if you lived further north you'd have grown up with a different bit of folk phenology. We all can watch bird migration and think about when those new arrivals relate to calendar events in our own lives; I think about the seasonal appearance of insects across the summer season from my many years of Scout camp staffing.

This column has often been directly as well as indirectly inspired by Gilbert White; it has never quite been "The Natural History of Granville" but writing something similar certainly has crossed my mind (but inevitably with "and Antiquities" added, even if a later generation would take it back out). Tony Stoneburner has written me on occasion to encourage my keeping up with such observations, and I wish I'd done more along those lines.

It fascinates me that we tend to think of summer, and high summer at that, as "normal," with leaves covering the trees and hillsides obscured by foliage, birds overhead. In fact, that's less than half the year. My dad always pushed me to learn trees by bark and by shape "because they don't have leaves all the time, do they?"

But nature is all around us all the time, ever changing.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to walk as much as he writes this summer. Tell him what's normal in your environment at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.