While I certainly intend to keep putting up blog posts when I have something that fits better here than elsewhere, if you’re interested in keeping up with what I’m doing, for now, Facebook is where I am. There’s a badge at the upper left of the page that you can click to find my personal Facebook profile and send me a friend request.

There’s also a badge where you can become a fan of Peterson Field Guides and I would appreciate it very much if you would do that. At the moment, the PFG fan page is, well, it’s me. But only in that I’m responsible for posting content there and serving as moderator. Like all things social media, it is meant to encourage interaction. And in only a week and a half, we’re already seeing a great response, with fans sharing their own photos and experiences.

Of course, I’m honored that the people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have asked me to take on the PFG fan page. It’s an opportunity to share a lot of great content from the Peterson vaults, create my own, and to have other interested naturalists share theirs. I’m especially pleased that we’ll be covering the vast range subjects of natural history that are featured in Peterson guides, though you can expect that birds will feature most prominently. I know it will be a big opportunity for me to learn, which is wonderful.

As an example of the kind of things I’ve been doing on the PFG page, below is a video I made and posted last week. It’s just a quick sequence of calling Spring Peepers, but I think it’s nice, especially if you haven’t been out and actually watched this classic sound being produced.

You can also click here to go to the HD version of the video on Facebook itself. It’s much better looking in HD, to say the least.

So, that’s where I am these days. I don’t know if six months from now Facebook will be over and we’ll all have moved on, but at the moment–most of the time–it feels like the place to be.

But please, keep this blog on your RSS subscriptions…or check back every once in a while, if you don’t do RSS. You never know when I’ll have something that only fits here. Thanks for stopping by!

Self-portrait by Matthew Sarver

Good news for all of you who enjoy well-written, thoughtful, authoritative, and nicely-illustrated blog posts (and if that’s you, what are you doing here?). My buddy Matt Sarver has been cultivating his web presence, including launching a new blog, appropriately called The Modern Naturalist.

Matt’s a great birder, naturally, but he’s also lamentably talented in just about every field of natural history. Did I say lamentably? I meant laudably. Just a little jealous here, sorry.

Being afield with Matt is a little like drinking from the proverbial fire hose. It seems like he can put a name to everything that flies, crawls, or photosynthesizes. And usually not just a name–he almost always has some interesting tidbit to share about the life history of each animal or vegetable, turning an ordinary walk into something educational and entertaining. Last Sunday, he showed me a bee which despite all appearances, was not a bumblebee. He went on to tell me that this non-bumblebee specializes in eating the pollen of hibiscus flowers. This was just one of dozens of cool critters he alerted me to that day. I was impressed.

Matt’s a hands-on kind of guy. He manages a property he owns in southwestern Pennsylvania, striving to improve the quality of the habitat there. And now that the governor of Pennsylvania has given his blessing to fire as a management tool–look out. I expect to see some pretty hot posts coming out of that. He’s also a sailor, crewing on the Kalmar Nyckel, our friendly neighborhood tall ship. Some say he got that gig in classic high-seas fashion–by sleeping with the captain–but I’ll leave that to him to confirm or deny.

Though he’s only been in Delaware for a couple of years, Matt is already making quite a mark. He and his Captain already keelhauled us in the Delaware Birdathon this year.

I’m betting that Matt will quickly become a star in the nature blogging sky. So click on over and say hello.

…if you don’t stop and smell the roses along the way!

Rough Greensnake near Trap Pond State Park, DE  sunning on road and climbing multiflora rose 

19 May 2009

For now, here’s a couple of shots of an exciting moment on yesterday’s trip to the Norias Division of King Ranch.

That’s me holding a Texas Indigo Snake, a most impressive creature. It was quite docile, making little attempt to bite once I’d gotten a hold of it. Below, you can get a little better sense of just how big this animal is.

photo © Bill Thompson III

I mean, I’m a big animal, too, and this snake was not too many inches shorter than me. It’s clearly longer than the tripod on the ground behind me, so I’m estimating it at around five and a half feet. 

photo © Bill Thompson III

Above, Sharon Lynn feels the cool glossy skin of the snake. Notice that it remained calm despite our shoes being wrapped with shockingly colorful swaths of duct tape. We donned this unusual accessory to help prevent grass burrs from attaching to our socks and shoelaces. It was helpful, if not 100% effective.

It did add a goofy, almost surreal touch to the day, though. It’s hard to take things too seriously when you’re dressed like this. That didn’t stop Robert Kirk of Princeton University Press (in center, facing left) from being cool, though–he looks like he’s in a cologne ad or something.

So that’s a little bit of what I’ve been up to. I hope your days are full of colorful characters, too.

 Today, I saw that I’d taken an accidental self-portrait in the eye of this Bull Frog–you can see me hunched over the camera and Liz standing next to me. Click on this or any photo for a larger view.

Below is a head-on view of another Bull Frog. Frogs must see everything in widescreen, as their large eyes and their sideways arrangement allow them to see forward, backward, and to both sides, seemingly simultaneously. It’s an amazing body plan, perfect for an animal that slips frequently between the roles of predator and prey.

These Bull Frogs were living in a water garden in a local produce stand and garden center that goes by the psychedelic name of Tomato Sunshine. I think there was a brief period in the early 70′s when that moniker would have been considered a reasonable (and laudably unisex) name for a child. Now, the popular boy’s names seem mostly straight from the bible, while the girls read like the credits on a silent film, or perhaps a 19th century poetry anthology. Here’s the most recent list.

The water garden at Tomato Sunshine is filled with water lettuce and water hyacinths, both of which would almost certainly freeze were they to “escape.” I hope. Check out the cool snake gourds on the rock to the left.

Harvest season at Tomato Sunshine. Stop on by, if you’re in town. It’s a lot more interesting shopping experience than the produce section of the supermarket, or the garden center at a big box chain.