Shannon Rhodes, Author at Wild About Utah

March 13, 2023March 17, 2023

The Bees and the Birds

March is a thrilling month to be in an elementary school. Besides fifth grade maturation sessions, shamrocks pop up and many spotlight the impact of Dr. Seuss. Besides green eggs and ham eaten by children wearing tall red and white hats, we read and re-read books filled with fanciful characters and rhymes that roll off the tongue. I learned this year along with my students that Dr. Seuss’s father was the superintendent of parks in Springfield, Massachusetts, so naturally young Theodor took his sketchpad and pencil to observe and record whenever he could. When an animal lost an antler at the zoo, he would use it to craft a sculpture just as whimsical as the imaginative ones in his books. He called them pieces of The Seuss System of Unorthodox Taxidermy and placed them early in his career as promotional advertisements in bookshops. Kangaroo Bird with its teal stripes and pouch-perched hatchling and the Andulovian Grackler’s fur tufts and orange bill intrigue me. He also painted the stunning “The Birds and the Trees” featuring a white flock flying between red and pink palm trees that inspired the Dadake Day in “Oh the Thinks You Can Think.” As we studied Dr. Seuss’s “Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?” released 50 years ago this year, students noted how many birds appeared in the pages, leading us to do a Seuss bird scavenger hunt, our version of the birding counts chronicled in Mark Obmascik’s “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession” (that’s f-o-w-l).

I do know I was lucky to teach once on a fifth grade team with a man students called Mr. J. Among many other things, he taught them how to recognize and identify birds. He preserved a time each day to review birds they had learned and add facts about a new species, how it looks, how it sounds, and how it behaves. He could display photographs and even silhouettes; students knew the shapes enough to identify them. He could play short audio clips, and students shouted out the corresponding birds too. I’ve discovered since The Bird Song Hero app that provides a spectrogram showing pitches visually that allow people like me another way to memorize those various bird songs. I remember I popped in the day they were discussing how our loggerhead shrike impales insects, rodents, snakes, and lizards on fences and really anything sharp and off the ground. When we took them on the bus through the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, I couldn’t believe my ears as kids with binoculars and without them were confidently shouting, “I see…” and tallying on their clipboards. For weeks that spring I would find students at recess peering up in the sky above the schoolyard doing the same thing. When I marveled at this phenomenon, Mr. J. smiled. “You know, Shannon, it isn’t about the birds. It’s about being aware.”

So often his “It’s about being aware” mantra pops in my head, like it did this week when my students huddled around our class pet cage housing a bee that emerged early from my Crown Bee tube “free-bee” from a recent science-teaching conference. Just like Dr. Seuss’s Bee-Watcher-Watchers, these six- and seven-year-olds eagerly missed romping in the fresh powder playground to watch a bee perched on a strawberry. I’ve done the same thing, standing mesmerized, lost in thought, watching a bee on a western coneflower, repeating the Seuss rhyme “Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky.”

For Wild About Utah, I’m Shannon Rhodes.

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Friend Weller, https://upr.org/
Text: Shannon Rhodes, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Shannon Rhodes

Additional Reading:

Wild About Utah Pieces by Shannon Rhodes, https://wildaboututah.org/author/shannon-rhodes/

The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection. The Birds and the Trees. https://www.drseussart.com/the-birds-and-the-trees

The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection. The Bee-Watcher. https://www.drseussart.com/illustration-art/the-bee-watcher

The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection. The Seuss Collection of Unorthodox Taxidermy. https://www.drseussart.com/taxidermy

Bird Song Hero. https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/features/bird-song-hero/bird-song-hero-tutorial

Cane, Jim. The Native Bees of Utah. July 7, 2011. Wild About Utah. https://wildaboututah.org/the-native-bees-of-utah/

Kervin, Linda. Shrikes. October 31, 2013. Wild About Utah. https://wildaboututah.org/shrikes/#:~:text=Utah%20has%202%20species%20of,with%20their%20thick%20hooked%20bill .

Newberry, Todd & Holtan, G. (2005). The Ardent Birder: On the Craft of Birdwatching. Random House LLC. https://www.amazon.com/Ardent-Birder-Birdwatching-Newberry-2005-10-01/dp/B01FGJKGUS?asin=1580087159&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Obmascik, Mark. The Big Year. http://www.markobmascik.com/books/ and https://www.audubon.org/content/mark-obmascik

Seuss, Dr. Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973). New York: Random House.https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/42980/did-i-ever-tell-you-how-lucky-you-are-by-dr-seuss/

Seuss, Dr. Oh the Thinks You Can Think. (1975). New York: Random House.https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/43101/oh-the-thinks-you-can-think-by-dr-seuss/

January 9, 2023January 9, 2023

Why, It Was Definitely the Snow!

“Utah’s Winter King: A Key Individual in the History of Utah’s Ski Industry”
Photo from 1989 Utah History Fair
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes

Snow-frosted Hoodoos of Bryce Canyon
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Snow. Tiny specks of dust and other particles in the air that attract water vapor to become ice crystals. That is what fascinated a man named Wilson ‘Snowflake’ Bentley enough to capture thousands of one-of-a-kind snowflake photographs and what drew my friend Alf to Utah. In the winter and early spring of 1989, I sat as a Bonneville Junior High ninth grader with Alf Engen in his office at Alta. As a presenter at the Utah History Fair that year, I was gathering stories and artifacts for my project titled Utah’s Winter King: A Key Individual in the History of Utah’s Ski Industry.

Engen shared stories about building ski jumps over the fences between his home and school and his journey from Norway to America, not to ski but to buy back the Engen estate divided up at his father’s death of the Spanish Flu in 1919. He said, “I was going to make enough money to go back, but I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I didn’t even know there was much snow here, I never read about that.” After sharing stories about arriving in Ellis Island, playing soccer in Milwaukee, scaffold hill jumping on Ecker Hill, and cross-country skiing as a forest service employee over Catherine Pass to imagine Alta as a ski hub, he ended with how he felt about jumping Utah’s snow: “They would say “Send Gummer–that is ‘old man’ in Norwegian–over first,” and I would have to do anything new. I knew I could do it, even if I had never tried it before. Once you are up there, you can fly.”

I had forgotten about that experience chatting about snow with a Utah snow giant until a few weeks ago, gazing out at the snow-frosted hoodoos of Bryce Canyon. I gripe about snow plowing piles and delayed-start school days, and I’d rather cut snowflakes from paper than be out in it most frigid days. Yet, this Christmas a friend gave me a blue and white book titled “The Little Book of Snow.”

For someone who grew up in “the greatest snow on earth,” I thought I knew snow well enough, but in addition to discovering linguistic similarities for the word snow and that some have estimated the number of snowflakes that fall to earth each year to be a number with at least 24 zeroes, I confirmed my suspicions about snow that is not white. I’ve often encountered pink snow patches at the high altitudes of Utah, and with a nudge from the watermelon snow paragraph, I found an intriguing citizen science opportunity online called The Living Snow Project led by Dr. Robin Kodner at Western Washington University. By contributing data about spring snow algal blooms through sample vials or at least observation photographs, scientists can study microscopic snow communities and their impact on snow melt.

Snow. When I asked him what about Utah made him stay, Alf Engen said, “Why, it was definitely the snow.” Snow is the stuff of which stories, science, and wonderful dreams are made.

I’m Shannon Rhodes, and I’m wild about Utah.

Credits:

Additional Reading:

Blanchard, Duncan. 1970. The Snowflake Man. https://snowflakebentley.com/snowflake-man-bio

Coulthard, Sally. 2018. The Little Book of Snow. https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/the-little-book-of-snow

Engen, Alan K. 2001. Alf Engen: A Son’s Reminiscences. https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume69_2001_number4/s/10191712

Greene, Jack. 2020. I Love Snow. Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/i-love-snow/

Larese-Casanova, Mark. 2014. Utah’s Rich Skiing History. Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/utahs-rich-skiing-history/

Libbrecht, Kenneth G. 1999. Guide to Snowflakes. https://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/class-old.htm

Liberatore, Andrea. 2011. Snowflakes. Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/snowflakes/

Living Snow Project. https://wp.wwu.edu/livingsnowproject/

Local Lexi. 2021. The History of “The Greatest Snow on Earth” https://www.skiutah.com/blog/authors/lexi/the-history-of-the-greatest-snow-on.

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs. 1998. Snowflake Bentley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. https://www.amazon.com/Snowflake-Bentley-Jacqueline-Briggs-Martin/dp/0547248296

Strand, Holly. 2009. A Utah Skier’s Snow Lexicon. Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/a-utah-skiers-snow-lexicon/

Rascoe, Ayesha. 2022. Why Snow Is Turning Pink at High Altitudes. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/18/1143929924/why-snow-is-turning-pink-at-high-altitudes

Weller, Kristine. 2023. In a State Obsessed with Snowpack, Finding Pink Snow in Utah Is a Problem. https://www.kuer.org/health-science-environment/2023-01-03/in-a-state-obsessed-with-snowpack-finding-pink-snow-in-utah-is-a-problem

December 12, 2022December 13, 2022

An Ice Fishing Learning Journey

Teaching Yellow Perch Survival Structures Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer — Ice Fishing Basics
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning
Eric Newell Director & Photographer

Teaching Yellow Perch Survival Structures
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning
Eric Newell Director & Photographer

Fish Mathematics
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning
Eric Newell Director & Photographer

In 2019 my friend Josh Boling shared his perspectives on place-based education beyond the walls of a classroom in a Wild About Utah piece titled “Why I Teach Outside.” I sit here today with another colleague teaching second grade at Edith Bowen Lab School in Logan, Dr. Joseph Kozlowski, who has unpacked the potential of teaching children outside.

Dr. Koz, tell us your story.
Well, first, thanks so much for having me on. I am excited to be here. I grew up in an outdoor family. My dad was a wildlife biologist with the Forest Service, so I appreciated being outdoors growing up. Then later, my uncles introduced me to hunting and fishing, and that became a big part of my life where I found problem-solving and a sense of connection to nature. When I got my first job in northern Wyoming, I became involved in a group called Adventure Club. On Fridays and weekends we would take students from the school on experiential learning trips to historically-relevant sites in the area such as Devils Tower, Jewel Cave, the Battle of the Little Bighorn area, and really help these students connect to the place that they live and the culture and the history. So, those kinds of experiences are really what help kids connect learning and connect who they are to where they are. A lot of my philosophy is behind John Dewey who talks about rich experiences being the foundation of thinking and for learning.

Can you give us an example of an experience that embodies this philosophy?
Definitely. Last year, our second grade class at EBLS set up a trip to Hyrum Dam to take the students out ice fishing. We partnered with DWR (Utah Division of Wildlife Resources) employees, expert parents, and Dr. Eric Newell, our director of experiential learning. We wanted to go out there to help students connect with that place but also learn about characteristics of animals, what they need to survive and traits of the habitat. The students were out there on their buckets, ice cold fingers, ice developing on the top of those little rods, so focused on watching one little bounce of the line, hoping to catch a fish. We ended up being able to have a rainbow trout and a yellow perch, getting to look at the different colorations on the body and these black vertical stripes on the perch and talking about how that blends into the dark reeds on the bottom of the reservoir. And the mouth structure, how one has these sharp, aggressive teeth and one has wider teeth and a wider mouth. Then, finally we looked inside their bellies where different food were in different types of fish, little minnows in the trout belly versus macroinvertebrates and little snail-like things in the perch belly, looking at how those matched the different parts of the water that those fish would live in. That type of a thing is an example of how students connect to this place in this very authentic and meaningful way.

How do you justify this type of teaching and learning in the current educational landscape?
Basically, from an ‘academic accountability’ perspective, there is not a shortage of research, specifically in early childhood where I work, which links rich at-home vocabulary, at-home math experiences, and in general rich experiences with later academic success.

Providing hands-on learning that fosters rich connection to place makes so much sense and is engaging as well. We are Shannon Rhodes and Dr. Kozlowski, and we are wild about Utah.

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS) Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Audio: Courtesy & © J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin
Text: Shannon Rhodes and Dr. Joseph Kozlowski, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Shannon Rhodes

Additional Reading

Boling, Josh. Why I Teach Outside. 2019. https://wildaboututah.org/why-i-teach-outside/

Boling, Josh. You, Too, Can Teach Outside. 2020. https://wildaboututah.org/you-too-can-teach-outside/

Gibbon, Peter. John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker. 2019. National Endowment for the Humanities. https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker

Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. Four Great Waters to Ice Fish in Northern Utah This Winter. 2022. https://wildlife.utah.gov/wildlife-news/42-utah-wildlife-news/834-find-a-baby-bird-heres-what-to-do.html

November 14, 2022November 14, 2022

Hands on Stoneflies and Sculpin

Benthic Macroinvertebrate Harvest Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS) Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer https://edithbowen.usu.edu/ — Exploring the Logan River
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer

Benthic Macroinvertebrate Harvest
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer

**Merriam-Webster** Benthic: of, relating to, or occurring at the bottom of a body of water

Student with a Stonefly Nymph
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer

Stonefly
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer

Sculpin
Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer

I remember my father on wintery Saturdays mounting his fly tying vice on the kitchen table, and then, from the cavern under the stairs, he’d emerge with his hooks, pheasant and peacock feathers, and other magical threads. I’d watch him spin intricate flies but never realized as a child that they were imitations of creatures I would meet and teach in the wild. When he took me to lakes and rivers to fish, we just used worms and pink marshmallows.

On an animal adaptation learning journey at Wood Camp along the Logan River this fall, our Edith Bowen Laboratory School first graders turned over river rocks, sweeping up all sorts of aquatic critters with nets and buckets to then probe playfully with tweezers and bare fingers. Trip Armstrong, Assistant Director of the National Aquatic Monitoring Center at Utah State University’s Department of Watershed Sciences, led our young investigators and several adult volunteers in identifying these benthic macroinvertebrates, especially the stonefly nymphs we found in every scoop.

These especially intrigued the children because they resemble something from outer space scurrying about on six legs. Stoneflies, both the nymphs and the adult insects, are large compared to mayfly and other critters you find in a river sample, so they stand out in a crowd. The adults have long wings, thus the Greek name Plecoptera meaning “braided wings,” but they are known to be poor fliers. The larvae have two tails or what biologists call cerci, while mayflies have three. Stoneflies have two hooks on their legs; mayflies have one. Stoneflies like oxygen-rich water flowing through their gills along their thorax and under their legs. We noticed some doing push-ups in the bin of river water, indicating it was time to return them to their habitat. Both mayfly and stonefly nymphs are pollution-sensitive, so finding them in such large numbers indicated that this part of the river was very healthy.

When a student approached from the river’s edge with a larger specimen cupped in her hands, I was stunned and a little spooked. “It’s a sculpin,” Armstrong said. These are bottom-dwelling fish that some say are basically big mouths with tails and have unflattering nicknames like “double uglies,” yet I learned later they are quite common. I’d just never met one. In fact, although biologists have determined that the Utah Lake sculpin has been extinct since the 1930s, the native Bear Lake sculpin and sculpin living in the Logan River are sources of food for the Bonneville Cutthroat and other trout.

I guess the lesson, as a wise first grader reminded me this week during our opinion writing session, is “Don’t yuck somebody’s yum.” Stoneflies and sculpin: flyfishers and bigger fish love them. I’m thankful for opportunities to teach in Utah’s wild places because every time I do, I learn something new.

I am Shannon Rhodes, and I’m wild about Utah.

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Edith Bowen Laboratory School (EBLS)
Experiential Learning Eric Newell Director & Photographer https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Audio: Courtesy & © J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin
Text: Shannon Rhodes, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Shannon Rhodes

Additional Reading

Beaudreau, Andrea. 2017. Why I Love Sculpins (and Why You Should Too). Coastal Fisheries Ecology Lab. https://annebeaudreau.com/2017/09/05/why-i-love-sculpins/

Bouchard, R.W. Jr. 2004. Guide to Aquatic Invertebrates of the Upper Midwest. 2004. https://dep.wv.gov/WWE/getinvolved/sos/Documents/Benthic/UMW/Plecoptera.pdf

Curtis, Jennifer Keats with Stroud Water Research Center. 2020. Arbordale Publishing. https://www.arbordalepublishing.com/bookpage.php?id=CreekCritters

Dickey, Amy. Water Quality and Macroinvertebrates. https://deq.utah.gov/communication/news/water-quality-macroinvertebrates

Larese-Casanova, Mark. 2013. Aquatic Insects, Harbingers of Health. Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/aquatic-insects-harbingers-of-health/

Leavitt, Shauna. 2017. Bear Lake Sculpin. Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/bear-lake-sculpin-cottus-extensus/

National Aquatic Monitoring Center. https://namc-usu.org/

Pennsylvania League of Angling Youth. 2006. PLAY. https://www.fishandboat.com/LearningCenter/PennsylvaniaLeagueofAnglingYouthPLAY/Documents/AquaticMacrosEnaElpaMayflyPondstream_Allpages.pdf

Stroud Water Research Center. Macroinvertebrate Resources. https://stroudcenter.org/macros/

Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. Five Aquatic Species You May Not Know Live in Utah. Mottled Sculpin. https://wildlife.utah.gov/guidebooks/962-r657-29–government-records-access-management-act.html

Utah State University Extension. Bugs Don’t Bug Me. https://extension.usu.edu/waterquality/files-ou/Publications/AllBugs.pdf

Zarbock, William. 1952. Life History of the Utah Sculpin. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1577/1548-8659%281951%2981%5B249%3ALHOTUS%5D2.0.CO%3B2