Mark L. Hineline - Ground Truth: A Guide to Tracking Climate Change at Home

Mark L. Hineline

With Illustrations by the Author

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34794-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34813-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34827-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226348278.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hineline, Mark L., author.

Title: Ground truth : a guide to tracking climate change at home / Mark L. Hineline, author, illustrator.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |

Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017046037 | ISBN 9780226347943 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226348131 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226348278 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Climatic changes.

Classification: LCC QC903 .H55 2018 | DDC 577.2/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046037

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my granddaughter,

Evee

As did many Americans, I first grew alarmed about global warming in 1989, when Bill McKibben published The End of Nature. I already knew that warming, or climate change, was a problem. But McKibben, along with the conversations that his book spawned, provided a framework for thinking more deeply about this emerging environmental threat. My concerns deepened when, in 1995, I began to teach a course titled History of Environmentalism at the University of California, San Diego, with readings from Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. It was while preparing the lectures for that course that I first encountered the strange, not-yet-quite-really-a-science, phenology, the observation and study of biological cycles having cues in climates and seasons. Within a year, I began to assign the writing of a phenological journal as part of the course. Students chose a patch of nature, identified the plants growing there and any animals that passed through, described them (and any changes, although there is sometimes little change during a Southern California academic term), and at the same time reflected on course readings and discussions.

My interest in phenology and in seasonality broadened when I began to explore a landscape new to me, the Sonoran Desert, where the plants and animals seemed to wear their phenologies on their sleeves and seasons have peculiarities Id not before encountered, such as the monsoonal rains, thunderstorms, and dust storms of Sonoran summer. Guided by the books of Gary Paul Nabhan, Ann Zwinger, and Ed Abbey, I grew to love the region and to enjoy its intersecting phenophases and phenological cues.

Since that time, phenology has shed some of its obscurity, almost entirely due to its relevance for tracking and confirming the consequences of anthropogenic climate change for Earths biota. Today, a host of websites is devoted to aspects of phenology. Almost all of them begin with an introductory paragraph designed to answer the question what is phenology? If the present book does nothing else, I hope that it answers that question with sufficient clarity and verve that phenology becomes as common in the vocabulary of environmentalists and amateur naturalists as paleontology, hydrology, or any of dozens of terms that designate areas of scientific observation, inquiry, and expertise.

As a way of opening new doors to an understanding of climate change, including changes that are unfolding even as you read this, Ground Truth turns to phenology and to related areas, such as seasonality (which deals with physical cycles over the course of a year, as opposed to phenology, which is about annual biological cycles). Both of these are our present reality. This book is not designed to convince you or anyone else that climate change is occurring or that it is caused by human activity. Of course it is occurring. Of course it is caused by human activity. There are presently hundreds of books devoted entirely to showing this. I wont add to that glut. I might as well exhaust our energies proving that day comes after night.

This book is not a textbook. Neither is it a comprehensive manual for pursuing phenology as a citizen scientist, although I fervently hope that citizen phenologists find in these pages a welcome companion. Rather, it is about three things: climate change, seasons, and phenology. I hope that anyone with interests in birds, rocks, trees, wind, butterflies, deer, beetles, blue skies, flowers, and the rest of the natural world will find something of interest here.

observing, record keeping, and the uses to which phenological observations can be put. The fifth chapter examines the nature of change itself and provides some quick guidelines as to how you might measure the changes in your local landscape that will unfold in years to come.

The five chapters that make up look to a set of essential details for following the phenologies of plants, invertebrates and amphibians, birds, and mammals. There is also a chapter on weather, which is not, strictly speaking, a subject of phenological study but is closely related to it.

These chapters are no more than introductions to their several subjects. Those who already watch birds, know their plants, or keep a weather station will find them rather too elementary. My goal is to whet appetites and to offer some guidance, not to provide a definitive overview. Neither have I made an attempt to organize each of these chapters following a unified plan, wherein the contents of one chapter correspond to the next. Instead, I have let the subject matter shape the organization of each chapter.

I discuss the ranges of plants and animals, sometimes by naming states where they are present; but in cases where they range over many states, I will mention the states from which they are absent or mostly absent. I also sometimes mention regions, such as the northern Great Plains or the Mississippi River Valley. More precise range maps can be found in guides to wildlife and plants, and these are listed in the bibliographic essay. It makes no sense to duplicate these here.

In discussions that contain phenological dating, for instance, late fall to early winter, or November to early February, the range of dates often reflects the extent of the geographical range, where late fall events tend to occur in the north and early winter events farther south. In the same way, late winter to early spring events range from south to north.

consists of a single chapter, in which I raise larger issues with respect to anthropogenic climate change.

I present two different conceptions about phenological observation in this book and have taken pains to keep them separate without opposing either of them to the other. For centuries, even before there was . For the most part, these were amateurs, with an interest in describing local phenologies, a curiosity entirely in keeping with their zeal for discovering local plants and animals and even fossils; describing them; thinking of their home as part of a natural tapestry or a symphony. I have attempted to prepare the groundwork for their present-day successors, the people who wish to catalog and to know what I call (after the practice in parts of New England) their dooryards. When I speak of your