Start with a circle

 A person who is interested in natural history gradually becomes aware of a cycle of learning and discovery. You can discover the relationship between yellow-billed cuckoos and the tent caterpillars in your neighborhood for yourself. But you can do so only if you’ve learned to identify some birds and bugs.

You have to learn some things from teachers and books to be able to discover things for yourself. Those discoveries might help you learn more things from teachers and books.

E.O. Wilson, the great naturalist, pointed out another element to that cycle. Here’s his description of his sophomore year in college:

 

My resolve to be a biologist was reinforced when I discovered the ideal social environment for developing a scientist — or at least one of several possible ideals. It is the same as for a political revolutionary. Start with a circle of ambitious students who talk and work together and conspire against their elders in order to make their way into a particular discipline. They can be as few as two or as many as five; more than five makes the unit unstable. Give them an exciting new idea that can transform the discipline and with which they can advance their ambitions: let them believe that they own a central truth shared by few others and therefore a piece of the future. Add a distant authority figure, in this case a scientist who has written a revolutionary text, or at least a circle of older revolutionaries who have generated the accepted canon. The farther away these icons are from their acolytes, the better. At midcentury, Europe was best of all.

 

I love that description of a circle of friends learning together. The notion of collegiality in colleges seems endangered to me, though I’m no expert.

Wilson wrote about science as a social activity. If I had another life to live, researching that activity — that cycle of learning and discovering — would be a good way to spend it

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 107-8.

For an explanation of cuckoos and tent caterpillars, see “The case of the missing caterpillars,” July 22, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-case-of-missing-caterpillars.html

A caterpillar with horns

 Foresters speak of “skeletonized” leaves. If you see an oak with leaves that have been eaten back to the main stem and veins, you’re looking at the work of orange-striped oakworms, Anisota senatoria.

Most of the caterpillars are still in the trees eating, but we were hiking after a storm, which knocked some to the ground.

They were about an inch and a-half long, black with eight yellow stripes. As the common name suggests, some have orange stripes, although the ones we found did not. The caterpillars have two black spines behind the head. I imagined a tiny longhorn.

The moths are about an inch long, reddish brown with a white spot on the forewing. The female lays about 500 eggs — imagine tiny green BBs — on an underside of a leaf. The caterpillars hatch in about a week and start eating.

When they are grown, the caterpillars dig a hole in the ground and pupate, say the entomologists at the University of Georgia. That I have not seen.

Stone Mountain, early August

 The tall goldenrod, Solidago altissima, is suddenly shoulder high. Georgia has about 35 species of goldenrod, and this is the one I can identify. Later this summer, the plants I saw might get to 7 feet.

Height is a rough way to identify a plant. Sorting out the other species is beyond my abilities.

But since I know what a basal leaf is, I can distinguish two groups: clumping and rhizomatous. Clumping goldenrods have basal leaves. Each plant will spread its seeds, of course, but the plant itself will stay put. Rhizomatous species, like S. altissima, also spread by their roots. S. altissima is the most common goldenrod here because one soon becomes many.

The ripe berries on American pokeweed, Phytolacca americana, are mostly gone, picked over by songbirds.

What’s blooming in the woods: Liliturfs, in genus Liriope; pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana; and wild potato vine, Ipomoea pandurate. I saw some Asiatic dayflowers, Commelina communis. They are a lovely blue — the blue in the French flag — but invasive. I also saw one Hibiscus, which escaped someone’s garden and seemed to be thriving in the woods.

On the ground: persimmons, hickory nuts and green muscadines knocked down by the storms.

Lesson learned

 When I was a boy, my grandfather found a wasp’s gall. He cut it off with his pocketknife and put it in his shirt pocket, next to the Prince Albert tin.

He had intended to sit in his easy chair and, with the 8-year-old version of me as an audience, dissect the gall with a spey blade, showing the wasps within.

But he forgot. Grandmother found the gall while sorting the laundry.

In some families, certain offenses require all the women in the family to weigh in. Grandfather had two daughters, one of which was my mother, and I think at least one great-aunt was visiting. Grandfather was thoroughly blessed out. The lesson I learned had nothing to do with the biology of wasps but with the social order within human families.

I thought of that lesson when I was clearing the blackberry vines off the path to the woodlot and came across a gall. It was made by a blackberry knot gall wasp, Diastrophus nebulosus.

The gall was big enough to have several chambers, and I thought that a dissection might reveal at least six little wasps.

But I learned my lesson. The gall is still on the vine, the one still standing by the path.

It's not a trick of grammar

 The Wise Woman, who earned a Ph.D. and taught college English, is skeptical of books about writing.

She saw many students who were terrified of writing. They came to her classes thinking that they were about to confront 10,000 rules, each of which would show them to be wrong about something, possibly in a way that suggested stupidity.

Telling stories is one of the things that makes us human, the Wise Woman said. How did this deeply human activity become so anxiety-ridden?

I had asked about good books on writing because I was thinking about what I’d learned in a lifetime of writing. But there was fire in her voice. I let the matter drop, and we tramped down the trail through the woods quietly.

Along the way, I remembered that one of the writers of one of the rule books had said something on the subject. I had to look it up.

 

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.” This moral observation would be out of place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather than what he knows, will at last determine his style. If one is to write, one must believe — in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.

 

• Source: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1972, p. 77.

Reaching people

 The political ads running in Georgia are designed by consultants and should be good — or at least provocative. But they are irrelevant to most of the people I know.

If someone put me in charge for a day, I’d run spots that showed all kinds of people — all colors, genders and ages — pulling up to the fuel pumps and telling us what they were paying for a gallon of gas. I’d have a note saying that the average price in Georgia was $2.78 before the president decided to start a war. 

If you’re not from Georgia, we’re paying $3.86 on average.

I am not a consultant. The people in charge have other ideas about what ordinary people care about.

Does that depend on understanding?

 I’ve heard thoughtful people say that this country is more divided now than it’s been since the Civil War.

I can’t quite believe that. I grew up during the social upheavals of the 1960s and listened to the debates at family gatherings and public meetings. Eric Hoffer, writing during that era, said:

 

How many and deep are the divisions between human beings! Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes, and religions but also an almost incomprehension between the sexes, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. There would be no society if living together depended on understanding each other.

 

Hoffer always makes me think, but I’m not sure I believe that — that we can have a society without understanding each other. I don’t think a society would last if it couldn’t find some common ground. To my mind, deciding that we can go on without trying to reach an understanding is a bit like deciding that the termites in the foundation aren’t that big a problem.

I have the same doubt about our relationship with the natural world. I think this might be the biggest lesson we humans have learned during my lifetime: We’d better get better at understanding the natural world and our place in it. If we don’t, our societies, our cultures and our civilizations are not going to last.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 85.