Author: Shannon Rhodes

Posted on

Cattail and Teasel

Cattail and Teasel: Josie's Nature Log Page. Used by Permission. Photo Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Josie’s Nature Log Page
Used by Permission
Photo Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Teasel in Bloom with Bumble Bee Photo Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer Teasel in Bloom with Bumble Bee
Photo Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Cattail and Teasel in Bloom Photo Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer Cattail and Teasel in Bloom
Photo Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Dried Teasel Photo Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer Dried Teasel
Photo Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

For many, this is the season transition between summer and back to school. This month, along with the generous gifts of caramel apples, whiteboard markers, and number 2 pencils, a child handed me a green notebook and a request. One of the greatest compliments a teacher could possibly receive, in my opinion, from a student having never been on any of my class lists, is an invitation to make a writing dialogue journal, a pen pal exchange with no grades or due dates attached. Today her entry concludes with, “Also I drew a picture of you and me in pencil.” I withdraw from the notebook’s back flap a flattering illustration of flowers, smiles, and sun rays, grab my colored pencils, and head outside to write.

Terry Tempest Williams honors a similar marshy invitation, begging us to enter the wonders of the wetlands, in her book “Between Cattails” with exquisite Peter Parnall illustrations. Amid snails and scuds, damselflies and waterlilies, red-winged blackbirds and mosquito tumblers, I am drawn to the familiar cattails. Having just spent some lazy summer days reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants,” I now know that one can appreciate a cattail for its cucumber-tasting pith and protein-packed pollen, its gel that can soothe sunburns, and its fluff that can be used as tinder to light a fire or as soft yet absorbent layers in bedding. She taught me that “one of the words for cattail in the Potawatomi language …. means ‘we wrap the baby in it.’” When she takes students outside, she lets the plants teach them.

Many children I teach can identify cattails, but as I take my Josie journal out to the marsh to compose my writing response, I find another familiar plant that I cannot name. Quickly I realize that it has pale purple flowers; I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in any color other than brown. Once again I find how unaware I have been, and a simple plant guide check reveals the name Dipsacus fullonum, or common teasel. It is an invasive tall plant with a spiky thistle-like flower head and more spiky spears growing up around it. Small dense flowers, from 250 to over a thousand of them, each blossom for only one day. I had only ever noticed it after its biennial life cycle: flowering, dying, then persisting as a dried stem and flower head the next season. Dipsacus comes from a Greek word meaning “thirst,” referring to the leaf cups at the stalk that collect rainwater and catch insects. Sometimes listed as noxious species, this non-native plant was brought from Europe and valued for teasing wool. Today I see bees are drawn to them, and next year finches and other seed-loving birds will visit.

Turning her drawing into my nature journal for this day’s outing, I add my plant perspective. I add some silver to the brown in my teasel-y hair and purple flowers to her shirt. She wrote that “writing makes me feel in my element” and when I take writing outside and really take time to notice the details, I couldn’t agree more.

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

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Nature journal entry used with permission from Josie Dorsch and her parent Breanna Studenka, All Rights Reserved
Audio: Crickets Courtesy & © Friend Weller, https://upr.org/
    Birds: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
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/

iNaturalist. Wild Teasel. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/56002-Dipsacus-fullonum

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. 2013. https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/

National Park Service. Exotic Species: Common Teasel. https://www.nps.gov/articles/common-teasel.htm

Tilley, Derek. Commonly Occurring Wetland Plant Species for Idaho and Utah NRCS Wetlands Delineators. March 2019. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/plantmaterials/idpmctn13441.pdf

U.S. Department of Agriculture. Common Teasel. https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/plants/common-teasel

Williams, Terry Tempest. Between Cattails. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1985. https://www.terrytempestwilliams.com/

Posted on

What’s On Your List?

What's On Your List? Canoeing in Benson Marina, Benson, Utah Courtesy & Copyright Shannin Kishbaugh, photographer
Canoeing in Benson Marina
Benson, Utah
Courtesy & Copyright Shannin Kishbaugh, photographer

A Leech on Trip Armstrong’s Thumb Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer A Leech on Trip Armstrong’s Thumb
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

A Leech Escaping a Container Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer A Leech Escaping a Container
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

If I were to ask you to craft a list of words that represent your connection to the natural world, which words immediately pop into your mind? Of course, President Theodore Roosevelt said, “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.” Yet, Brooke Smith published her book “The Keeper of Wild Words” in response to learning that nature words she loved were replaced in the Oxford Junior Dictionary for words like chatroom and voicemail.

Grandmother Mimi tells young Brook, “If we don’t use words, they can be forgotten. And if they’re forgotten, they disappear.”

That voice was the person who gave me this beautiful book, fellow Edith Bowen Laboratory School teacher Shannin Kishbaugh. I invited her with me to talk about wild words.

What words top your list? I would say calm, peaceful, freedom, exploration, and wonder.

My list evolves, but it always has wapiti and mica schist. It includes caddisfly casings on river rocks and cumulonimbus clouds in the sky. I love red-winged blackbirds I saw this morning in the phragmites along the roadside, curlycup gumweed I discovered at Hardware Ranch, stinging nettle walking the banks as a child with my father just off Fireclay Avenue in Murray, and hoodoos in Goblin Valley.

My most recent word is leech. Shannin, when you hear that, what are your words? Uncertainty, fear, dirty, slimy, old documents and uses in medicine. I’ve become a lover of water bugs this year, but still leeches feel extreme.

Well, those are very different words from your nature words. Not long ago at a conference cleverly titled “In Mud” about place-based education for young children, I stood with teachers from Washington state to Washington D.C. While the goal was discussing developing nature inquiry projects based on interest of the students, a colleague saw a dark blob on another’s boot and for the remainder of the workshop, we as educators huddled in a circle playing with the leech like children. It slithered and reached; we gazed in wonder and some apprehension. I realized I’d never spent time appreciating a leech.

There are lots of leech species, including some found only in Utah. They begin life in a cocoon which surprised me, they have suckers that give them the reputation as selfish parasites even though they don’t all suck blood, and they play an important role in the food chain. This spring when we took our first graders out again to explore what lives in the water, this time to Benson Marina of Cutler Reservoir, our students canoed past an osprey nest, captured the cattails in watercolor, and even observed a leech clinging to our guest scientist Trip Armstrong’s thumb. As the students worked, your idea was to collect the words, their exclamations, and offer them back to them to use in writing list poetry.

Let’s end with some of the nouns, adjectives and verbs from their list: “paddle whirlpools, dunking ducks, pelican peace, and ripple reflections.” And of course, “little leech. It was the best feeling. Happiness all around me.”

We are Shannon Rhodes and Shannin Kishbaugh, and we are wild about Utah words.

Credits:

Images: Canoeing – Courtesy & Copyright Shannin Kishbaugh, Photographer
Leeches – 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/

Andrews, Candice Gaukel. (2009). Nature Words on the Brink of Extinction. https://www.nathab.com/blog/nature-words-on-the-brink-of-extinction/

Black, Riley. (2021). New species of leech found in Utah. https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/2023/05/new-species-leech-found-utah

Govedich, Fredric R. and Bonnie Bain. (2005). All About the Leeches of Montezuma Well. https://www.nps.gov/moca/learn/nature/upload/montezuma_well_leeches.pdf

Morse, Susan. A Few Words for Nature Nerds. https://www.fws.gov/story/few-words-nature-nerds

Smith, Brooke. (2020). The Keeper of Wild Words. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/the-keeper-of-wild-words

U.S. Department of the Interior. (2020). The Conservation Legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. https://www.doi.gov/blog/conservation-legacy-theodore-roosevelt

Utah State University Extension. Key to Aquatic Macroinvertebrates in Utah. https://extension.usu.edu/waterquality/macrokey/no-shell/worm-like/

Posted on

Find the Story

Percy the Utahraptor by Justin Tolman, USU Museum of Geology, https://www.usu.edu/geo/info/geology-museum/ Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Percy the Utahraptor
by Justin Tolman
USU Museum of Geology
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah, Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah
https://www.blm.gov/visit/fossil-point-trailhead
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

In their picture book “Everywhere, Wonder,” Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr challenge readers to find a story in places and phenomena both ordinary and extraordinary. Black ants marching in a line have a story just as interesting as red-rock canyons and a footprint on the moon. Sunlight patterns through a window are just as beautiful as Brazilian jungles and wildebeests in Kenyan savannas. They remind us to keep our eyes open and weave the stories of our noticings. As I wander among Utah’s wild wonders, it’s easy.

This spring I realized the fun of finding my wonder story as I stumbled upon the sign for Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah. The odds were pretty good, I suspected, that I could find fossils there, but I didn’t know exactly what I was hunting. My eyes are always drawn to the fact-filled stories on interpretive signage, even if I’ve read them before, but at this spot all I knew was the title. No kiosks with hint-filled maps and tips for discovery or guardrail paths making it obvious where to walk. Just a pile of boulders.

Although I wouldn’t consider myself a dino-fanatic, I have been a frequent visitor throughout my life at the Dinosaur National Monument and other Utah fossil museums as well as more dinosaur trackways and quarries not housed in buildings. I’ve read hundreds of dino readers and scanned even more dinosaur books, but here I was without many clues to what I might find. Resisting the urge to look up internet hints, I started up the Fossil Point slope. Was it trilobites the size of dimes and quarters or prehistoric swamp ferns? I will not reveal what I found at Fossil Point so that you can discover the wonder yourself, but it motivated me to catch up on Utah’s contribution to the more than one hundred characters in the dinosaur story, as depicted beautifully in the Dinosaurs of Utah tools at the Utah Geological Survey website.

So many students I’ve met have been fascinated by the T-rex and Utah state fossil Allosaurus, and they know all sorts of theories about how the Utahraptor, our state dinosaur since 2018, might have had feathers and hunted in packs. Fossils provide hints to the size and shape of prehistoric life, but they leave a lot of the colors and textures to the imagination. Tucked in the back corner of the Geology Museum at Utah State University I found another story, this one titled “Percy.” While the stories of Percy’s relatives are preserved in the nine-ton Utahraptor Megablock extracted from the area that is emerging as Utahraptor State Park, this story took sculptor Justin Tolman an astounding 350 hours to create. This incredible replica sports colors resembling my grandbabies’ Easter egg-dying hands as they toddled along the base of Fossil Point with me hunting evidence of a Mesozoic story. It is a story I’m glad I found
almost all on my own.

For Wild About Utah, I am 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/

Bureau of Land Management, Fossil Point trailhead, https://www.blm.gov/visit/fossil-point-trailhead

Rodgers, Bethany, Governor Spencer Cox signs bill to create Utahraptor State Park near Moab. 2021. The Salt Lake Tribune. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/03/17/gov-spencer-cox-signs/

Sidwell, Owen. University student sculpts Utahraptor for USU Geology Museum. 2018. Utah Public Radio. https://www.upr.org/arts-and-culture/2018-04-12/university-student-sculpts-utahraptor-for-usu-geology-museum

Swanson, Matthew. Everywhere, Wonder. 2017. Imprint: New York. https://robbiandmatthew.com/everywhere-wonder/

USU Museum of Geology, Come meet Percy the Raptor, https://www.usu.edu/geo/info/geology-museum

Popular Geology: Dinosaurs and Fossils, Utah Geological Survey. https://geology.utah.gov/popular/dinosaurs-fossils/#:~:text=Utah%20also%20contains%20abundant%20fossils,of%20millions%20of%20years%20ago.

Posted on

The Bees and the Birds

The Bees and the Birds: The Bee Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
The Bee
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

The Bees and the Birds: The Bird [A Mallard Drake] Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer The Bird
[A Mallard Drake]
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

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. https://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/