Nature's Archive Podcast

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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Today’s episode could be broadly described as how to maximize your time in the field, whether it be casual, hikes, random walks in nature, goal-driven hikes or bioblitzes. And by maximize your time. I mean, find all the cool stuff. And our guests are Chloe and Trevor van loon. So Chloe has a background in ecology and environmental science.

[00:00:18] And while Trevor’s educational background is in math and computer science, he’s become a fanatical amateur naturalist. In fact, both Chloe and Trevor are highly skilled naturalists and they’re prolific. I naturalist contributors. No biome or habitat is off limits to them and they have an insatiable drive to learn more. Chloe and Trevor today, offer tips and techniques to identify the plants, fungi, and insects that you find, regardless of whether you’re a budding nature lover or a seasoned naturalist. We discuss approaches to make new, personal discoveries, how to use eye naturalists to locate nearby and interesting taxa and many specific techniques, including using UV lights at night using a sweep net. And challenging your own assumptions about where to find interesting things who knows, maybe you two can observe a nivolumab alien fallout, just like they did.

[00:01:06] But you’ll have to listen to learn about that is.

[00:01:09] There are so many actionable suggestions and ideas in our discussion that I really just gave up on the idea that this intro would do the episode justice. So please give it a listen and be sure to check out the show notes at nature’s archive.com for more links and resources to everything mentioned today.

[00:01:24] So without further delay, Chloe and Trevor van loon.. Chloe and Trevor, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:31] Trevor Van Loon: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us on the podcast. Yeah.

[00:01:33] Michael Hawk: And as listeners heard with that introduction, you both are extremely experienced naturalists, kind of prolific all over reporting observations and iNaturalist all the time.

[00:01:44] And there’s so many things that we’re going to talk about today. I’m actually a little bit nervous. There’s so much to cover, but I’m sure it will all be a lot of fun. And maybe before we jump into that. Let’s start with you, Trevor. Can you tell me a bit about how you got interested in nature?

[00:01:58] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, thanks for the question.

[00:01:59] I grew up in uh, British Columbia on a farm, about 200 acres, in the Parmenon Valley. This valley is surrounded by mountains and full of nature. We would look out our door in the wintertime and see moose wandering around, and often in the summertime grizzly bears would be wandering around our yard when we came back from the school bus.

[00:02:17] So we’re always immersed in nature and surrounded by nature, so really fostered a connection to nature that. Hasn’t left me since. And my brother and I would go wandering the old growth forest, building forts, enjoying the great outdoors. And so that’s really where my personal interest came from. That, that version and developed into something into adulthood where now I remember moving down to California and reconnecting with this nature passion after university when my neighbor gave me a parting gift, Sibley’s, Birds of California, and I just remember cracking open that book and thinking, wow, like What have I been, I’ve been missing all this stuff all along.

[00:02:54] There’s so much to be discovered. There’s all kinds of different birds in California and there’s yellow billed magpies and all these crazy looking birds that I didn’t even know existed. And that really got me back into nature. We started birdwatching quite avidly and the rest is history from there. We went from birds to plants and birds was kind of the gateway drug for us, but everything developed from there.

[00:03:15] So that’s really where it all came from. I mean, it’s a. It’s been an exciting ride ever since.

[00:03:21] Michael Hawk: Yeah. The birds really do seem to be the gateway drug for so many people. I know they were for me as well. And in fact, I use that same phrase. So it’s funny that you say that. And Chloe, how about for yourself?

[00:03:30] Chloe Van Loon: Yeah. So I think I grew up always loving animals and nature. My mom was the person that was like, we don’t squish spiders in this household. We take them outside and let them free. So I always had the fondness towards animals, but I think that grew over time. Teachers and profs in high school and university, like my honors bio teacher, she was the first person that I saw.

[00:03:54] that had this intense passion and energy for biology. And then when I went to university, I got to do some field work and undergraduate research with honeybees and then two summers with frogs and working along grad students who were just like so deep in a topic and to be right there with them doing the research was just so And just amazing and incredible and inspired this further passion for all sorts of different creatures.

[00:04:21] And yeah, again, like what Trevor said, we moved down to California and that kind of birding sparked this love of what’s around us and what’s new to us. And it totally just snowballed. I really had not heard of the term, like, iNaturalist. I had not heard of that term even doing a biology degree. And so to then find iNaturalist, it was just this perfect peak culmination of everything we’d been building up to and took it even further.

[00:04:50] And it’s just so cool. You know, going and going and going to what we have and look for today. So it’s, it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

[00:05:00] Michael Hawk: Now, I like to, in your story, the engagement you had with the grad students. And how finding a community of really enthusiastic people is also another thing I think that’s, that’s just really important to help accelerate or, uh, at least maintain the enthusiasm for something.

[00:05:17] And that’s what’s so great about the naturalist communities. There’s so many really fun, enthusiastic people in the community.

[00:05:23] Chloe Van Loon: Absolutely. So

[00:05:24] Michael Hawk: you said the magic word, iNaturalist, and we’re going to talk a lot about iNaturalist because these days, while it’s still really fun to keep a nature journal and journal observations and things like that, I think iNaturalist has taken over in many people’s lives that role that maybe existed before you combine a camera with that app.

[00:05:45] One of the things that I noticed about you two is that you’re extremely prolific on iNaturalist. You’re closing in, I think, on 30, 000 observations, and that’s pretty impressive. Over how much time? A couple years? Not very long.

[00:05:58] Chloe Van Loon: Yeah, just a few years. Started with, we’re only putting up the birds that we photograph.

[00:06:04] That was like solely photographs of birds. And then I wanted to switch jobs, and I saw every job I wanted to get required knowing, the plants of California. So I was like, okay, I’m gonna start looking at plants. And then you look at plants, then you’re looking at what grows on beneath the plants, like the fungi.

[00:06:22] And now we’re looking at what’s on the plants, which are the insects. That’s kind of where it started.

[00:06:27] Michael Hawk: Okay. So that makes a lot of sense. Trevor, was it a similar experience for you? I mean, I imagine you and Chloe are in this together.

[00:06:34] Trevor Van Loon: It was. And yeah, I mean, through Chloe, uh, she was begging me to, to care about things other than birds.

[00:06:39] I was like, I’m a very obsessive person. So I was like really, really, really hard for. birder put on that hat for a while. And we kind of chased birds. We were roaming around California looking for birds in all different habitat types. And once you start to appreciate this ecological partitioning and the fact that like birds occur in different, whether it’s different slopes of the Sierras or chaparral versus oak woodlands, you start to also realize there’s also plants that have that same property.

[00:07:04] And so Chloe nagged me to pay attention to plants. And once I started to look at flowers, it was kind of like, My obsession flipped so fast. I was like, wow, there is so much to discover with plants. This is the best thing in the world. And I was like, all in on plants, right? So, uh, that’s kind of part of it’s my character, right?

[00:07:21] Where I’m, I am that obsessive person actually. I noticed a lot of iNatters are like that too. Uh, so it comes with the territory, but yeah, it’s, it was a similar experience for me. Just seeing those interactions, right? Birds are not in isolation in their environment. They’re connected with the environment.

[00:07:36] So, yeah. Appreciating those connections and starting to dig deeper was really a big step for us.

[00:07:40] Michael Hawk: So why don’t we talk a little bit about, and I think a lot of the listeners know what iNaturalist is. This topic comes up quite a bit, but it’s always useful to give a kind of a quick review of what the platform is and how it’s used generically.

[00:07:52] And I think we’ll dig into some specific ways that you use it throughout the course of the conversation. So can you give a quick rundown on what iNat is and how you use it?

[00:08:03] Chloe Van Loon: iNaturalist is this citizen science platform, community science platform, it’s an app and a website. We mainly use the website almost entirely, and it’s a way for people to explore what’s in their neighborhood, take pictures of it, upload to the platform, and a community of other, other people.

[00:08:23] iNaturalist, other scientists, whether they’re novice or total experts in the field for 30 plus years, are able to see what you have observed, where, when, and help you identify what you’ve seen. So it’s an amazing way to connect. to like minded people, but also scientists. We’ve had incredible connections with beetle experts, nudibranch experts, bird experts, all across our travels, California, BC, but also the tropics.

[00:08:54] But it doesn’t have to be about traveling. It is about like, what’s in your backyard? What have other people observed in your neighborhood? And just, Making those connections to yourself, to what’s out there is what I see iNaturalist as this incredible platform and community.

[00:09:11] Michael Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. I, my, my little story with iNaturalist is that I attempted to use it a few years ago.

[00:09:18] And I found it kind of overwhelming. And I think it was because I was looking for perfection. Like I was wanting to be able to identify everything down to species. And when the pandemic started, I started this backyard observation habit and just checking out what I could find. And with the extra time of being home during the pandemic, that’s what I found.

[00:09:38] This whole world that I didn’t know existed beyond the birds. Yeah, right here in the backyard. One of the themes today is I want to help people, I want you to help people become better observers, better naturalists, find things, find that novelty that you’re talking about. And I know that through your travels, you’ve picked up many different techniques, and it ranges from like how to even pick a location to the actual approaches you take once you’re on site.

[00:10:07] So I’d love to start to dig into some of that, and maybe starting with, like, how do you even choose where to go if you want to go out on a nature hike and find cool things?

[00:10:17] Trevor Van Loon: For us, it’s a matter of trying to find and connect with biodiversity in any form, right? So it’s looking around us and saying, what is around me at this given moment, wherever you are.

[00:10:26] Right now, I can look out, we’re in Morro Bay, and there’s all kinds of different ecological niches here to explore. There’s coastal scrub, there’s beach habitats and dunes, there is oak savannas, there’s traperole, there are riparian areas, there’s estuaries, there’s redwoods not too far away, so California is an extraordinarily diverse place, and that’s true of almost any place you can be.

[00:10:52] If you just look around and you step back and look at what are the little habitats that I could go out and explore. And once you start to look at each of those habitats, they all have their own unique diversity. So each of them, if you go from, let’s say you do a hike and you’re walking through oak forest and then you transition to chaparral, you’re going to see different species in each of those little microhabitats.

[00:11:12] So when we put together a location or where we want to go next, it’s often where can we go to maximize the number of interesting habitats we’re going to see along the way. Or maybe it’s a particular kind of habitat we’re looking at, like a vernal pool, or a serpentine seap, or something unique like that.

[00:11:30] There’s really so much diversity and association with those habitat types, so that’s often where we start thinking about it. But more mechanically, It’s like one of the beauty of iNaturalist is the ability to explore what’s around you. So even if you don’t want to break it down to these abstract different ecological zones, which is obviously more advanced and maybe people don’t have that level of appreciation or awareness, you can still just go on iNaturalist and explore what’s around you.

[00:11:55] And there’s a map that shows you what other people have observed. There’s this cool function called unobserved by user ID where you can plug in your user ID on the URL parameters. It’s a bit advanced, but basically You can find out what you haven’t seen around you. We use that function a lot. It allows us to see, okay, what’s out there around us right now, when we move to a new area, let’s say, that I haven’t seen, right?

[00:12:17] And then that can inspire ideas for, okay, maybe we’ve undersampled this particular coastal scrub for arthropods or something. So we go out there and we look for them. And so there’s just. Really, you can’t go wrong when you pick a location, but especially when you’re a beginner, there’s so much diversity, right?

[00:12:34] It’s more about the techniques you use when you go to that location that can really enhance your connection to nature. But for us, it’s just getting out there and going to a place, often a place where people haven’t gone before, but Really, there’s so much beauty and diversity, even in urban areas, to enjoy and to appreciate.

[00:12:52] I would just say the first step is getting out there, and that’s the key part.

[00:12:55] Michael Hawk: I’m thinking about when I was primarily a birder, how very often I would be driven to go somewhere based on, say, looking at eBird and how many species were seen in a specific hot spot. Or maybe I had a target species, and that would dictate where I go.

[00:13:09] And what I’ve found now, when I take the broader naturalist perspective To your point, it doesn’t really matter where I go. I always find new and interesting things. And, and I, and with iNaturalist, I guess you could take any of those approaches. You know, that’s the, I think the theme I’m getting from you is like you could search for a given species that you’re looking for and see where it’s been found.

[00:13:30] Found on iNaturalist and go to that spot, or you can just search generally like what’s being seen around me and what looks interesting. And yeah, there’s so many options.

[00:13:38] Chloe Van Loon: I think some days, like we go out every single day. We try to get an observation one per day.

[00:13:45] Michael Hawk: By the way, what’s your streak right now?

[00:13:48] Chloe Van Loon: Uh, I don’t know our streak, but I think it’s about a year and a half we’ve been doing this. Amazing. And it was inspired by the naturalist in Santa Cruz, Jay Maughan, I think is how you pronounce his last name. And he has like a seven year streak, and it’s insane. So we saw that we’re like, oh my gosh, we got to do this.

[00:14:07] So some days it is like, okay, we’re going to go down the street to this like pygmy coastline of oak forest. Or, we know, hey, we want to go find this one particular manzanita that we haven’t seen yet that’s a new species to us. So we’ll know, go to somewhere where we think it is, or based on calflora points or other sites, we’ll go to that place and try and find the specific thing.

[00:14:30] But, On route to that specific plant, we’ll be looking for bugs and wildlife and other plants too. So it’s definitely, you could be very specific or extremely broad. And that’s the beauty of iNat, explore function.

[00:14:46] Michael Hawk: Have you ever found yourself back to that streak for a moment where it’s like late, it’s getting late and you’re like, Oh no, we haven’t done anything yet.

[00:14:52] And, and you have to like crawl around in your basement or something to find a spider.

[00:14:57] Trevor Van Loon: On that point, yeah, we actually did. One time we were moving places, apartments, and we were like frantically moving, and it was getting late, and we were loading up our U Haul, and we’re like, oh no, last minute we forgot, it was like nine o’clock.

[00:15:11] We haven’t got our observation for the day. So we’re like, we’re gonna lose our streak. And I remember looking around the ceiling and I saw this little felonious asparagus jumping spider on the roof. And I was like, oh, there’s our observation and snapped a photo of it. It was just like a lucky. thing that it sort of manifested itself just at the right moment, but it does occasionally cause us stress, but it’s natural enough for us that we don’t have to overthink about getting observation.

[00:15:36] We’re more or less out there every single day.

[00:15:38] Michael Hawk: Well, you know, I would argue that wasn’t luck. It’s just, it demonstrates shifting your mental search image, like your mental acuity onto that. And, and things are all around us all the time. And once you just kind of flip that switch, you’re going to find it.

[00:15:52] Trevor Van Loon: There you go.

[00:15:54] Michael Hawk: So. Yeah, all these different reasons to get out, locations to go, ways to, to go about it. And one other thing I just would throw in is something I sometimes do is I, depending on where I’m at, I love to find another iNatter who’s in the same area I’m at, who seems to be a consistent contributor and just follow them and see what they’re seeing, because that will very often reveal some thing that A is currently being seen and B was previously unknown to me.

[00:16:24] That I, it gives the opportunity to go have that novel experience, learn about something new, learn about some other. Ecological niche that, that this organism is filling.

[00:16:33] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, that’s a great one.

[00:16:34] Chloe Van Loon: There’s a lot of great Instagram accounts too. That if you find a person that lives in a specific spot or someone that travels around that finds unique things, I think that definitely inspires me.

[00:16:45] Cause like, Ooh, they saw this nudibranch. I want to go find it. Yeah.

[00:16:49] Michael Hawk: Yeah, for sure. Now that you’ve picked a location, you’re out in the field. And. I guess there’s two ways we could take the conversation. We could dig into the, like, hardcore naturalist stuff. Like, how do you find things? Leverage that mental search image, or what techniques do you use?

[00:17:06] And the other branch we could take is, how do you actually use your time efficiently? Because if you’re, if one, I mean, one of your goals seems to be to actually document as many observations as you can. Good observations in iNaturalist. So there’s sort of a workflow and process to that as well. So why don’t we start there and we’ll get into to the, maybe the more fun naturalist stuff next.

[00:17:30] But so when you’re in the field, sorry, long winded intro, but when you’re in the field and you’re thinking about now, what’s my approach, you’re going to be seeing lots of things, lots of things to photograph, do you have a workflow that you follow to optimize your time and get the most out of the experience?

[00:17:47] Trevor Van Loon: It really depends. There’s always. a goal for each of our outings, typically. So we got to the point where we have to be more strategic about seeing new things because we’ve seen a lot of things in California, and so we try to strategize a bit more. So we’ll do our homework, we’ll look around us, what’s going on with nature around us, what haven’t we seen, what might be interesting, what’s in season, right?

[00:18:07] Because sometimes certain things are in season, so it makes sense to target specific species or groups, like for example, migrationary bird season. You’re going to want to get out there in September and see what kind of migratory birds you can see. So that’s one thing. We also will look, as we talked before, at different locations.

[00:18:23] Maybe there’s places that have a lot of cool nature we haven’t seen. But when we’re out there, we’ll either just go out there and maybe go to a place nobody’s ever observed stuff before on iNat and say, okay, let’s just go and see what we can find. So there’s those kind of trips where we’re like, let’s go and use our techniques out there in the field and try to find as many things as we can.

[00:18:42] There’s also trips where we focus on one thing, right? Because often with your brain, it’s hard to Focus on many different things at once. So last fall, I remember we, we just went and we looked for goals and that’s all we looked for. And so when you have that particular goal, it affords you the opportunity to focus your mind on one particular thing and not to get distracted by the huge amount of nature around you.

[00:19:03] And I find that that actually helps a lot because once you start to look closer at the details of whatever it is you’re looking for, it becomes much easier to connect with the rarer, more obscure members of that particular group. So, for example, we plan on next week going to the Elfin Forest here in Morro Bay, which is a little dwarf oak forest, just to look for lichens in coastal scrub, right?

[00:19:25] So, very particular goal. It’s really hard, we find, to stop, take the time to actually document a lichen. When you’re looking for like bugs, because your brain gets overloaded and overwhelmed with too many things to look for. I think it’s sometimes streamlines the process to just have one particular goal in mind.

[00:19:42] So that’s a few tips that we try to use. Polly, do you have anything to add to that?

[00:19:47] Chloe Van Loon: Yeah, I would say that in general though, we don’t go for quantity. We more so go for quality, unless we’re doing a bio blitz, like a designated bio blitz for an event. So when we go out, we’re mainly documenting things. That are either brand new to us, or they look unusual or odd, or maybe like the coloring is different, or we know it hasn’t been documented in this park or preserve wherever we are.

[00:20:12] And so we’re not just bioblitzing everything. We’re not taking down every coyote brush we see. Maybe I see 10 spine urchin. Gulls or something, but I’ll just document one. So when you pare it down, then it’s a lot easier to manage when we get home and we actually iNat, because we’re only maybe dealing with like, 5 observations each that we both saw, but also when we go out, sometimes we kind of partition what we’re doing.

[00:20:40] Like, I might be looking for birds and gulls. October specific, but Trevor is sweeping and then we’ll both look at what he finds down the ground on a sheet. So we’re kind of like divide and conquering, but also still have the same mindset of we’re looking for odd new things.

[00:20:59] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I think one thing, Chloe, that you mentioned that is a good point is that iNaturalist really isn’t designed from, at least from the community science standpoint, to track abundance.

[00:21:09] It’s more about tracking whether something’s actually there or not. So yeah, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to spend all of your time documenting every single urchin gall that you find on the tree. And I think that people coming like from an eBird platform, that may not be obvious at first. So that’s a really good tip.

[00:21:25] And Trevor, you wanted to add something?

[00:21:27] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, the thing I wanted to add is, I think it is a pretty tricky question as to how do you actually strategize. If you do want to go out and see a lot of things, like One thing we struggled with initially was we’d stop and spend a lot of time on one thing, learning what it is, and then we’d burn through our entire day out in the field.

[00:21:43] So that’s something I think we have a pretty good, happy medium right now, where we’ll like, get all the pictures we need to of this observation and take all the notes, be a detective and think what it is that I need to acquire for information in order to figure out what I’m looking at. But then we’ll be able to go back home and sort it out so we can maximize the amount of time we’re actually out there in the field looking at things.

[00:22:04] I think that’s a difficult balance to strike. I think there is a lot of value to sitting there and keying something out or really digging deep into what it is, but it has to be balanced with, like, if your goal is to see a lot of things, you don’t want to spend two hours on a plant. Often it’s easy to do that.

[00:22:17] So that’s just one tip that I wanted to throw out there. Michael, you touched on the notion that, like, people, or there may be some taxa that are over identified or sampled in the dataset. Like, people have put up ten different peyote bushes or something on the same day. Right. I think one thing that we try to do is to add data that may be underrepresented to the dataset.

[00:22:37] I natural is a really powerful tool. It does happen to have some biases. I think those are well studied. There was recently a study out of Florida that looked at biases in iNaturalist dataset and found a real bias towards like urban areas. So we see ourselves as filling in some of those gaps. We both have quite a large amount of wilderness experience from growing up and doing a lot of backcountry stuff, so we tend to go to places that are really rugged.

[00:23:00] This summer we went to some really crazy places in British Columbia that had never been sampled by scientists ever. And we were excited to add data to the iNaturalist platform, but also to science in general in places that nobody’s ever looked before. So, there’s also that aspect of it, like looking around and seeing, okay, maybe someone’s never gone to this trail and looked for plants.

[00:23:22] There’s areas in California we go, like serpentine areas, where we’ll Go to these areas that, for what we can tell, have not got any alfalfa or botanical records at all. And maybe there’s something there that people have overlooked. Maybe it’s a range extension. Maybe there’s interesting bugs to find there.

[00:23:36] And so there’s really no end to the amount of places to look out there. And so that’s one tip that we use, which is trying to enhance the dataset by bringing in observations where other people may not have looked.

[00:23:49] Michael Hawk: So one thing that’s a big selling point for iNaturalist is the fact that there is an app, and it’s pretty easy to take observations With the app itself, just taking photos and inputting it in to the system directly.

[00:24:01] And at the beginning, pardon me, I don’t remember which of you two mentioned that you primarily use the website as opposed to the app. I’m curious as to why that is, or are there certain situations where you would use the app?

[00:24:13] Chloe Van Loon: So we basically operate as if we have no cell service, a hundred percent of the time, basically most of the time, because of our experience and love of going to the wilderness in BC, like you just don’t have cell service.

[00:24:26] So even in areas where we do in urban areas or preserves that may have spotty coverage, our workflow and system basically operates off of no. Mobile data, that way we can take all the pictures, the measurements, anything that we might need that would make the observation that we later upload to iNat that night, or maybe 2 weeks down the road, is important.

[00:24:52] The best possible that an identifier could use to actually make a full ID or as close as you can get, because there’s some things that with insects, you need the genitalia or mushrooms, we didn’t taste it or see what color it stained after half an hour, whatever it is. But the app is great for people who do have data and want to just make a casual observation once or twice on hike or whatever it is.

[00:25:16] That’s the beauty of iNat, there’s so many ways to use the platform, however you want to, but we operate as if we have no service all the time.

[00:25:25] Michael Hawk: Sure. That makes a lot of sense. And like so many things, it really depends on how you’re using it. And I’m thinking about like, when I do an urban BioBlitz, I found just, I guess with time and experience, I’ll use my phone.

[00:25:39] For most of the plant observations, because it’s really quick and I can do it right then and there in the field. And then the insects are some of the more complicated things where I need lots of angles, lots of photos. I’ll use my SLR camera and go back and upload those later. And yeah, when I developed that habit and then I went to a location that was out of cell coverage, I struggled for a little bit because I wasn’t prepared for that, for that situation.

[00:26:03] One more question, I think, on the mechanics of How you capture things. I heard Trevor, you mentioned acting like, I don’t know if you use the word crime scene investigator, if I just read that, but what does that entail? Like, do you have a notebook in hand as well? Or are you just trying to get a whole bunch of photos from all sorts of angles and getting as much information as you can visually?

[00:26:27] Trevor Van Loon: Originally when we started out, we didn’t, uh, appreciate how diverse nature is and how difficult it is to. identify things. I remember thinking there was one kind of lupine in the world and one kind of ladybug, and then you find out there’s really so much out there. And so capturing the nuance really is key.

[00:26:46] So what we tend to do is we try to take multiple angles of the photo. So if we’re documenting a plant, it’ll be pictures of the flower itself, the petals, maybe the reproductive structures like stamens and things like that. The sepals of the plant, Looking for glandular hairiness on the plant. Some measurements as well.

[00:27:05] So, recently we went and saw subrare manzanitas. There’s like 80 species in California. And so if you want to be able to identify a manzanita, you have to be very rigorous with your observations. So, we knew going in that like, we had to take petiole measurements and look for clasping leaves and look for the dorsal and the ventral surface of the leaf to look for different shades of colour or different hairiness textures or The nascent inflorescence bracts, are they flat or are they scale like?

[00:27:33] Like, really obscure stuff like that. So, what I would recommend to people is not to be overwhelmed by trying to find all those weird features you need to photograph, but more acting like a detective and saying, Okay. At a high level, what pictures do I want to capture to show this plant? Maybe it’s an overall picture of the plant and what it’s growing around.

[00:27:51] Maybe it’s a substrate of what is it growing in. Maybe it’s making sure to get the flowers as well as the leaves. You could be an advanced detective or you could just be a beginning detective. But I think it’s important to note that capturing the context around that thing you’re observing is also relevant.

[00:28:08] What’s it interacting with? Making some field notes and taking some measurements. So that’s typically how we think about it. But we have gotten more advanced and sophisticated in the sense that we now know mostly what features to capture for every different genus of plant, let’s say, and sometimes even for bugs, for certain beetles, I know to look for tarsal claws, like to see very obscure characteristics of the tarsal claws and things like that.

[00:28:31] So. As you develop, you learn a bit more about what to hone in on as a detective in nature, but I think that the bottom line is don’t be overwhelmed. Just get out there, get a good holistic picture, get lots of photos of different angles and, and mostly enjoy it.

[00:28:45] Chloe Van Loon: When we’re out there, maybe perhaps looking at like a plant, usually one of us is measuring and then the other person is just.

[00:28:52] Taking notes in our like phone app and that’s basically how we do it when we’re down in the tropics or something. Then I bring a waterproof notebook and take notes because electronics and a humid forest, jungly forest, don’t always mix well. So it can look different for different scenarios and for different people but we definitely always try and take in terms of flowers definitely measurements and also for insects how long they are.

[00:29:17] When you have macro photos it can be deceiving how big or small something is. And that all helps with later getting identification from experts.

[00:29:26] Michael Hawk: So I think it’d be fun to explore then. Maybe some specific taxa and how you go about looking for them and documenting them, because there’s certainly different techniques for different things.

[00:29:37] And Trevor, I guess you started to hit on a few of those with respect to the flowers and the manzanitas. Now we start with, uh, fungi and mushrooms.

[00:29:45] Chloe Van Loon: So in terms of what time of year to go for looking for mushrooms, you definitely want to take that into consideration based on your location. So here we are in California right now.

[00:29:58] It’s going to be like the winter time after the rain has come a few weeks after that. And looking for mushrooms, you can find them in surprising places. Like I love looking at Damon, Taiza, Instagram and iNat uploads, and he finds mushrooms all over urban environments. But we tend to try and go out in forests and look along trails, or if we’re up in BC, then we’re going off trail and looking in kind of wet, moist, cold places.

[00:30:25] That also means looking on logs, looking on standing trees, looking underneath things. You know, mushrooms are awesome, but so are slime molds. And those are some of my favorites to look for and document. And so if we come across a mushroom that’s new to us or we feel like that’s worth documenting, that means taking like an overall picture, taking a picture of the gills or the spines, whatever is underneath the cap.

[00:30:52] We take measurements of the cap. And of the stem, or even taking a photo of like your hand next to the mushroom will help give a concept of scale, you can go further. And we are by no means mushroom experts. There’s a lot of people that know a lot more about fungi than us, but staining the gills, seeing, like, pressing on the gills or the stem, what color they change immediately, or if any latex exists, exudes from them.

[00:31:20] You can even, if you’re brave enough, taste a little bit. Trevor is usually the one that will take a tiny little bite, nibble away, and then spit it out and see kind of what he notices in terms of taste. But even just smelling mushrooms, that will help give a context clue. And all those things can go in the notes once you upload the photos to iNaturalist.

[00:31:43] And mushrooms are notoriously difficult to get a pretty confident ID. So you have to lower your expectations sometimes. You may never find out exactly what it was you observed, but just getting somewhere is great because the mushrooms are super awesome and so colorful.

[00:32:02] Michael Hawk: And they could just sprout up like overnight.

[00:32:04] You could walk on a trail and the next day, suddenly same trail. There’s now some mushroom species that’s there that wasn’t there the day before.

[00:32:12] Chloe Van Loon: Absolutely.

[00:32:13] Michael Hawk: And I, just on the tasting front, I would just really exercise a lot of caution in that regard. And it’s probably not something that an amateur should do on day one.

[00:32:25] But you also said slime molds. And so slime molds take so many different shapes and sizes, and I’m just an absolute novice when it comes to slime molds. So I’d love to hear more about that. What your approach would be, like, first of all, like, can you tell me about what some of the slime molds you found even look like just to plant a mental image?

[00:32:46] Chloe Van Loon: Yeah, so slime molds can be total, like, globs of goop, like dog vomit slime mold, which is one of my favorite and probably one of the most recognizable and common ones, which is like this big, like, Vibrant yellow, greeny color, and it totally looks like someone just splatted like oobleck down on the ground.

[00:33:06] But then you have also really tiny ones that look like small little trees. They’ve got a little stalk and then this like globe on top. And they can be wet, they could be dry. If they’re dry, then they could be releasing spores. And these can be like millimeters tall or like half a millimeter. We don’t quite have the most intense setup for photographing some of the tiny little guys that come in all different colors, like pinks and purples and browns and yellows and oranges.

[00:33:34] The shapes are endless when it comes to slime molds, but some people with some insane macro capabilities and focus stacking capabilities, you can get these amazing shots of things that you would never realize exist right next to you. But even with a macro lens that you can clip onto your phone, you can get Really decent photos that are sometimes enough for an ID and having a note of the scale also helps because again, scale can be deceiving for sure, but slime walls are definitely underappreciated, but there are some diehard slime people like Marin Mushrooms on Instagram.

[00:34:11] She has some incredible photos.

[00:34:13] Michael Hawk: And these are also generally found in moist areas?

[00:34:16] Chloe Van Loon: Yeah, that’s my experience the best possible, but so for us Californians, if you have rain already you can definitely go looking for them in Northern California, but I’m actually awaiting rain here in Central California today.

[00:34:29] So you can finally go start seeing some slime molds out there and you definitely have to stop and look and really pay attention because it’s not one of those things that you’ll be walking along a trail and it will jump out at you. I think the trained eye, once you start realizing it, where to look, you can see like, okay, here’s an old rotting log.

[00:34:47] I’m going to look closer. And then you finally see the slime molds, but slime molds like dog vomit are like, Wow, you can see them from 10 feet away for sure.

[00:34:55] Michael Hawk: And I think that Trevor, you ran through a bunch of different aspects to look at on a flower, for example. I don’t know if there’s anything else that you want to highlight.

[00:35:05] I’ll just give one example of a novice mistake I made. Maybe that can be something you could elaborate on. So in California, we have the California poppy, which is the iconic flower of the state. And there’s a very similar species that I, I want to say, is it the tufted poppy? And it can look almost identical.

[00:35:24] And one of the ways you tell the difference is by looking at how the flower attaches. And that’s an example that I had to learn through experience that, you know what, if I had gotten a profile photo of that flower, then I could have identified it. But without that, you can’t say for sure. So, do you have any other tips when it comes to flowers and making good observations?

[00:35:45] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, that’s a great one, right. The receptacle is a part of the plant that is often used for identification, and that’s key on the poppy, right. The California poppy has a receptacle. A lot of other poppies don’t, or at least is very small. I think one of the trickiest groups is Asteraceae, which is the flower.

[00:36:00] The asters and the dandelions belong to that. The daisies belong to that. It’s really, really diverse group, but often people don’t get the photos you need to identify them. So maybe a couple of tips on that group and then general tips about plants. For asteraceae in particular, they’re composite flowers.

[00:36:17] They’re composed of multiple flowers into one flower. So there’s multiple aggregated flowers in one head. So it looks like one flower head, but it’s actually composed of ray and disc flowers. I remember last year we dove into straces and really tried to learn them. And one thing that we realized when we went and got photos.

[00:36:35] of a close up of the disc flowers was that they can actually be bisexual. So you can have stamen and pistil disc flowers on the same head. And that’s actually a feature that can help differentiate between different kinds of asterases. So getting good photos of the actual flower parts, getting a distant photo that’s really zoomed out, you’re not going to be able to see those features.

[00:36:56] Additionally, there’s getting photos of the side of a flower head is something that people often don’t do, but it’s really important. The side of the flower head has Really useful characters for ID, that’s where the sepals will be, or in the case of Asteraceae, that’s where the fileries are. Looking for gland like appendages or structures where the flower exudes glands, that’s going to be key for identification.

[00:37:16] Is it sticky? Feeling it, taking those notes, etc. The shape of the fileries, whether they’re in two series, those kinds of things, or more obscure characters you can glean from a photo of the side of the flower head. So those are a couple tips, but also just that same pattern applies throughout the entire plant.

[00:37:32] Sometimes the petiole, the stalk of the leaves, has a particular hairiness, like a glandular hairiness. Sometimes you need to look for more minute surface characteristics on the leaves themselves. So I would encourage, if you’re more interested and want to go that extra level of depth, getting close up photos, getting yourself a little bit of a macro lens, and trying to look for some of those hair like structures.

[00:37:53] In mustard family, there’s a lot of weird hair structures like trichomes that, that branch out into nine different rays on the leaf surfaces that you need a really good macro to get a hold of. But once you get into that world, it’s a whole nother world unto itself. So I really encourage people to challenge themselves and just go there and get a hand lens or a macro lens and look closely at the side of the flower head, the leaves, the hairiness, try to understand what’s going on and then get home and check out a key and try to.

[00:38:20] Learn some of these features yourself. It’s very daunting at first. It took us a long time to get to where we are, but I think it’s really exciting once you start to appreciate all those nuances and it opens up a whole new world.

[00:38:30] Michael Hawk: On that macro front, I wanted to point out because I was just having a conversation with somebody out in the field here last week about my macro setup and It doesn’t have to be that expensive.

[00:38:41] Like I have a moderately expensive macro setup, but I think you pointed out that if you have a phone, you can buy attachable macro lenses that are pretty good and some of those definitely you can find them under a hundred dollars. Some even cheaper. And then back to the hand lens, you can get pretty good hand lens for 20 bucks.

[00:38:58] And of course you’re not taking a photo at that point, but you’re still getting to observe these structures that you’re talking about and you can make notes of it in your observation.

[00:39:08] Trevor Van Loon: Totally. It can get very expensive, so don’t be overwhelmed by that, but. There’s so many accessible tools available out there.

[00:39:15] Chloe Van Loon: When we first started getting into plants, we did bring out our big textbooks like the Jepson manual out into the field. Um, but now we have it on our phones as like a ebook. Now, if we’re out in the field and we’re unsure of a plant, we can bring up the key, the dichotomous key on our phones and check and work through it.

[00:39:36] Take down the notes that we know. Okay, so it says it’s saying we got to check the leaf length, or the leaf width, or how the leaves are attaching to the stem. And those are the kind of things we pay attention to. And then maybe go back home, and when uploading actually go through the full length of the key.

[00:39:52] But other times we do it in the field. So it’s like what other Level or method is your preference. That’s totally like awesome. The fact that when we actually started using keys, that’s when we started to appreciate and understand like the diversity and the details of one species versus another and how, where the species are.

[00:40:14] And it is, as Trevor said, like, extremely daunting at first, like the Jepson manual, I remember opening that thing up and thinking, this is a whole nother language. Like, I’m never going to be able to understand this, even though I’ve taken botany classes in university, but it’s just slowly working through it.

[00:40:28] And eventually you start to know what features to look for in the field.

[00:40:31] Michael Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. It takes time. I think every dichotomous key I’ve looked at has introduced an additional layer of complexity. terminology that I didn’t know existed. So you mentioned the Jepson manual on your phone and there’s so many ways you can use your phone with supplementary materials.

[00:40:45] I have field guides of different types on my phone and I was just going to mention that in the case of plants like there’s such a close tie to soil types and I found this really cool app that I haven’t found a lot of people actually using called ROCKT. R O C K T. Have either of you heard of this one?

[00:41:04] Trevor Van Loon: No.

[00:41:05] Michael Hawk: So it has, uh, geologic maps and you can see exactly where you’re at, what the geology is. Wow. So are you on serpentine soils? Are you on some other extruded, you know, soil? And uh, yeah, it’s pretty cool. It’s a good, it’s a good way to go explore if you’re looking for a specific soil type that is correlated with a rare plant or something like that, it can be a very helpful tool.

[00:41:28] And I’ll make sure to link to that.

[00:41:29] Chloe Van Loon: That sounds amazing. It’s so helpful.

[00:41:33] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and they also have a little bit of a gamification. You can check in to different, you know, geologic types. So I’ve detected a theme that at this stage of your naturalist development, you’re really often trying to go out and find underexplored areas.

[00:41:49] And I think there’s a whole range of underexplored parameters that might exist at time of year in a specific area or certain maybe subsets of a region. So I’d love to get into that a little bit and hear about some of the unique places that you’ve learned to look to find things that are perhaps undersampled.

[00:42:06] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, I can. You know, talk on a couple of those. Last summer we started to really pivot towards, you know, we’d seen most of the common stuff and we wanted to try to dive a bit deeper into what unique sort of regions have we undersampled. And one of them we happened upon by accident. We were out there in the field in quite a remote part of British Columbia.

[00:42:25] Hiking up a 9, 000 foot mountain and we were crossing a snowfield to get up there and we looked down and we saw all kinds of lady beetles crawling around in the snow and we’re like, that’s weird, what the heck are they doing up here way at the top of a mountain? And as we walked we saw a whole bunch of other bugs like robber flies and beetles and a huge variety of bugs beneath our feet on the snow walking around and, you Looking a little bit lost, to be honest.

[00:42:49] When we got home, we realized that this is actually a phenomenon that we stumbled upon called nivolaeolian fallout, where bugs get deposited on snowfields through wind and high temperature vents. And so, we actually went and we made trips out to remote snowfields in the backcountry, just specifically to look for bugs that summer, and we actually did that a lot this summer.

[00:43:10] We catalogued an enormous variety of arthropods on snowfields. So we probably saw three or 400 species of arthropods on SnowPak. And a lot of them really undersampled, really rare, really unusual stuff. I think there’s a couple there that could even be new to science. We still have to work through that.

[00:43:26] We sent a lot of them to scientists. So that’s really exciting. There’s really a great deal of unique places to look and Snowfields was one of them for us. Another one I want to shout out is a year ago, as we started delving into the world of insects, we started to look For bugs on beaches, you typically don’t think of a beach as being host to a multitude of bugs, but when you start at the ocean’s edge and you work your way up, you come upon beach rock, which is kind of all the kelp and seaweed that’s been dumped onto the beach.

[00:43:51] When you look underneath that rock, you see enormous insects feeding upon beach flea larvae. So there’s a whole ecosystem unto itself, oriented around this very nutrient rich system of beach rock. So we’ve probably catalogued 30, 40 species of beetles and different arthropods in the beach rock throughout our time in the last year or so in coastal California.

[00:44:13] And as you move further up the beach you get into driftwood and once you flip the driftwood you see wafer lid trapdoor spiders and scorpions and a lot of Tenebrionidae darkling beetles that are adapted to this sandy habitat. Like an enormous diversity of bugs with very, very narrow bands of niches, right?

[00:44:29] The ones closer to the water can be submerged for like multiple hours on end. The ones further up the beach maybe come down and eat the bugs that are feeding on the rock, critters. And so there’s this really unique interaction of species going on on the beach that we found fascinating and we’ve been challenging ourselves to keep getting out there and looking for new things.

[00:44:47] There’s still more for us to discover. So those are just two that I wanted to highlight, but there’s really an infinite amount.

[00:44:53] Chloe Van Loon: Just to add about, like, looking on beaches, you know, it does look weird. Like, we look weird looking, staring our faces right into a bunch of eelgrass or kelp or whatever it is that has washed up.

[00:45:04] Or, um, so I think being a naturalist is like, a lot of times, they’re like, Hey, what are you looking at? Or when we have our sweep net out and our sheet on the ground with a bunch of leaves and stuff on the ground, people are like, what are you looking at? And we’re like, well, look, we’re gonna get insects.

[00:45:20] It’s super awesome. And then you can share with them.

[00:45:29] Places to look going off of beaches, like tide pooling is amazing. I listened to your podcast with Cricket about Dock Valley, and that was a great description about looking for creatures along docks, but you can also go out at night, night tide pooling is definitely, uh, fun and exhilarating. thing. It can be a bit cold, but basically wherever you are, there’s habitats to look for that might not be the most obvious.

[00:45:55] Going up to the mountains, mountaintops have really unique plants that if you think, wow, this plant can survive up here with these winds, these cold conditions, and also the sun exposure, but then you also get insects like butterflies that will do hill topping. So right at the top of the mountain, you’ll find bugs and flying insects that you never thought you’d see.

[00:46:16] So it’s like thinking about extremes, thinking about kind of odd situations in nature and that’s where you’ll find like really interesting subspecies.

[00:46:25] Michael Hawk: I had an interesting hilltopping experience actually last spring when I thought it was way too cold for the insects to be out. And it was a sunny day though and I went out and there was a lot of hilltopping going on.

[00:46:35] It wasn’t just the butterflies. And what I came to realize in that was that the surface temperature was much, much warmer than the ambient temperature. So even though it was only like in the fifties, the temperature of the rocks of the soil was much warmer and it was plenty enough to get the insects moving around and active and out and about.

[00:46:55] So I guess challenge your assumptions is the lesson that I took from that.

[00:47:00] Chloe Van Loon: Totally. Yeah.

[00:47:02] Michael Hawk: So cool. So yeah, think about these extreme environments. And, uh, I know that Charlie Eisman does a winter insects webinar as well that he talked about on the show. And that, that too is just highlighting the fact that there’s a lot more when you challenge your preconceived notions and you go out and look, there’s a lot more to find.

[00:47:19] How about some of the techniques? You know, there’s a lot of unique techniques when you start to get into the next layer of searching for things, trying to find things. And I’m thinking about one that I think a lot of people know about, but maybe the casual observer doesn’t, is UV light trapping, for example.

[00:47:34] Can you tell me a little bit about some of the techniques that you use?

[00:47:37] Trevor Van Loon: We’ve been using an increasingly sophisticated set of techniques or maybe not sophisticated, but we’ve expanded our tools, toolbox to include more and more things that has really helped us. Leaps and bounds to find more species and you mentioned UV lights.

[00:47:50] That’s a big one for us. We have a really cool DIY backpacking setup that I think it was Damon that inspired us basically to Look for a UV blacklight. There’s a 15 blacklights you can buy that are USB pluggable on Amazon. And we just grabbed a couple of those and they work super well. They’re really simple.

[00:48:09] You plug them into your battery pack. You, we take them backpacking and then we bring a sheet and we throw it on top of our tent. So we can be blacklighting and attracting moths and really remote, uh, backcountry. Or just if you’re out car camping or something, throw it on the side of your car and see what you find.

[00:48:23] It’s really cool. Cause. There’s really so much moth diversity and other insects come to UV light, so we really enjoy that. Pretty much running that thing as much as we can.

[00:48:32] Michael Hawk: I’ve heard different people say that different wavelengths of UV light can attract different species. Have you experimented with that?

[00:48:39] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, it’s an interesting thought, yeah. We had the 410 nanometers wavelength, I think, which is the standard. I could be mistaken in what I recall, but we just got a light that’s the gold standard light. It’s funny, it’s interesting timing. We just ordered a light that has all the different wavelengths in one light.

[00:48:57] So, scientists have designed this light. It’s called LEP LED. And it’s really light and portable. It’s on the pricey side, but it’s been designed explicitly to attract a large variety of insects. So there definitely is something to the theory that different frequencies attract different bugs. That’s been borne out through science.

[00:49:16] I don’t know exactly the research behind it, but from our experience, you don’t need to get too fancy. Our 15 light worked extremely well. Honestly, that’s going to get you 90 percent or 80 percent of the bugs. It’s not really worth investing in a really serious setup unless you’ve been doing this for a while, like us.

[00:49:31] Michael Hawk: Well, I’d love if you have the time, if you could drop me a note of what the model numbers are of the, both the 15 one and that gold standard. And I can include it in the show notes, but I’m also personally curious because I’d like to up my game a little bit.

[00:49:43] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, definitely.

[00:49:44] Chloe Van Loon: And I’ll just add to that, but I don’t think we’ve really mentioned it, but since COVID hit, we became nomads.

[00:49:50] And so we’ve kind of been moving between California and B. C. and within California, we move every month or 2 and we take our UV set up everywhere. So it’s up at every single Airbnb or Verbo. And it’s always an interesting question to pose to our hosts and they’ve never said no, but this has allowed us to, you know, capture a wide array of moth and insect diversity that come to the light.

[00:50:14] But it also shows that it’s like a setup that you can set up anywhere. We had it in our all the way backpacking in the road. Places of BC, but also in the middle of San Jose or the middle of Humboldt County. It is an easy setup to manipulate to whatever you’ve got going on in your backyard or front yard or side yard, whatever.

[00:50:34] Michael Hawk: Absolutely. And I’ve even resorted to using UV flashlights at times, which is also helpful for hiking when you’re looking for some things that fluoresce under UV. So you talked a bit about some of the techniques that you use on the beach as well. What else? Like what other interesting techniques have you found?

[00:50:52] I think I, maybe I cut you off earlier, Trevor, when you were about to go into the,

[00:50:56] Trevor Van Loon: yeah, I was, I was going to mention a couple more. One of them is we recently got into using sweep nets. So sweep nets are basically just bug nets that have a more robust net structure. So they’re not quite butterfly nets.

[00:51:08] They’re used to sweep vegetation to get arthropods that fall into them, that you can then go and dump out that catch and check out what you got. I think it’s important to stress that when you do this, be very, very gentle and You want to do like a love tap to the bush when you go and sweep it. You don’t want to be bashing the daylight out of the bush that you’re sweeping.

[00:51:29] But sweeping is a really effective way to get a lot of arthropod diversity, in particular because there’s a lot of host specificity with insects. So if you sweep a wide variety of plants, you’re going to get a really wide variety of bugs. So we’ve actually taken a liking to this technique because we can go and sweep asteraceae or cyanothis bushes or manzanitas or oaks, and we get an enormous variety of jumping spiders and beetles and.

[00:51:52] Leaf beetles a lot of the time because they often host specific bugs, so it’s a really powerful technique. Again, it has to be Use with caution, with care, but I certainly recommend that technique. As well as, yeah, having your butterfly nets to catch dragonflies and things like that, like we would struggle to photograph dragonflies, I think netting them and being gentle with them, netting them is perfectly safe for them if you do it the right way.

[00:52:17] Just grabbing them by the wings and getting some pictures close up, particularly the reproductive structures, and then releasing them can be a really effective way to get up and close and personal with a bug. And that’s been something we’ve been using.

[00:52:29] Chloe Van Loon: I’ll quickly add that, like, I first saw MRAV on a BioBlitz tapping or sweeping, which can just mean grabbing a small stick and, like, any sort of tray or plate or pillow sheet we’ve seen people use.

[00:52:42] So it doesn’t have to be fancy. And

[00:52:44] Michael Hawk: I was going to fill in the blanks for people who haven’t seen this before, and you started to do so. So you basically shake or tap the plant. It could be a tree. It could be whatever. And then some bugs, just their natural sort of defense mechanism. I mean, I say bugs loosely, spiders or insects or true bugs or whatever, will let go and fall.

[00:53:04] And that’s just sort of their response to that interruption of their day. So when you capture these, you take a look at them, you take some photos. What do you do next? Do you go like, set them back into that plant so that they have a chance to, to get back on with their day?

[00:53:19] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, we pretty much, we sweep all within the same habitat, right?

[00:53:23] So if we’re sweeping coastal scrub, we’ll basically sweep for five minutes and then we’ll stop and we’ll check out what we got and we’ll take the net and we’ll throw it to the side and the bugs land back on the bushes. They’re quite, Adaptable, right? Most of these bugs can fly around, so they can get back to the host plants.

[00:53:40] Certainly there is an impact in the sense that you’re taking them away from a host plant that they may be happy at. That’s something to bear in mind, and that’s why using the direct approach of sweeping them, taking a look right away at what you got, and then putting them back on the plant is the more etiquette oriented approach to do this, but I think just be mindful that these are creatures trying to make their own living, and doing it within moderation is an important thing to keep in mind, but I think at the same time, bugs are very adaptable, and so As long as it’s done with You’re not displacing them like across to a totally different habitat type.

[00:54:12] That would be unfortunate. Keeping them within the same habitat type, that’s going to be the best way to make sure they don’t get too disturbed by what you’re doing.

[00:54:18] Chloe Van Loon: Whenever we capture weeds, spread out a sheet on the ground and look right there and then. And the, a lot of spiders will go out crawling.

[00:54:28] Other bugs will hang around, sit, and that’s where we do most of the photographing. So it’s not, Capturing them for later photographs, it’s mostly capturing photos of them right there and then, and then we can put them off to the side or put them back on the branch once we’re done with them. And it’s a great opportunity to get up close and personal with insects and have them crawl on your hand or whatever, and then put them back on the bush and actually get up and observe their colors and patterns and shapes.

[00:54:56] And I think that helps a lot. later in ID’ing, but also just appreciating their beauty and interesting shapes and structures and adaptations.

[00:55:04] Michael Hawk: It is a good technique. It really is eye opening to get a bigger picture of the ecosystem that you’re in.

[00:55:11] Chloe Van Loon: We also learned how to use like an aspirator or pooter, which is like to suck up an insect.

[00:55:17] into a container and look at it closer. And that was inspired by the Whistler Bioblitz, which we were invited to participate in, which is a group of scientists that all go in Bioblitz, a Whistler area up in British Columbia. And that was like such an inspiring and humbling experience. And we’ve mentioned a lot of techniques here, but just going out with other people will help you inspire different ideas to have ways to find nature.

[00:55:42] Michael Hawk: We’ve covered. a lot of different topics today. I know there’s so much more that we could cover, but I wanted to circle back a little bit on the ethics and etiquette when it comes to nature observation. And this is a good topic. I think we’ve talked about it in a number of different episodes, but when you’re out on a trail or in remote wilderness, what are some of the things that you keep in mind to make as minimal an impact as you can?

[00:56:04] Chloe Van Loon: Definitely leave no trace principles are always forefront of mind, treading lightly, having as minimal impact as possible, whether we’re on a trail or the remote wilderness of BC looks a little different to us because in BC, we’re often off trail. So there is going to be some damage to nearby plants, but in any scenario, and it’s like.

[00:56:25] You have to just understand and recognize that you’re stepping into whatever species habitat, that’s where they live, that’s their home. And humans have done enough damage across the earth. So I think leaving natural places as best as possible is like absolutely necessary and essential. So it’s all about just observing, interacting without destroying things, but lifting up logs, yes, some people might not agree with that, but you’re also going to find things that.

[00:56:54] underneath that log, like an insect or a salamander that might not have been documented for that place. And you never know where those observations lead to with potentially like protecting an area. So it’s a balance you have to strike, but as long as you’re respectful and recognize you’re in another species home and habitat, and that’s how they make their living, then I think that’s like a good guiding principle to go on.

[00:57:17] Michael Hawk: So one little rule that I have when it comes to lifting things, whether it be a log or a rock. is think about whether I could set it down gently or not. If it’s too heavy to set down gently, then I don’t lift it because you’re going to end up smashing whatever was under there. Since so much of what we talked about is in the context of ultimately documenting what you saw in iNaturalist, do you have any other suggestions, pitfalls, tips, tricks with respect to getting the most out of iNat?

[00:57:42] Chloe Van Loon: I would say, like, in terms of getting your stuff notice identified, the higher the quality, the better. And I think we definitely realized this when interacting with scientists that they recognized, well, you guys have some really high quality stuff. And that way I can actually use this data to inform whatever question they’re looking at.

[00:58:01] So just focusing on whatever you can do individually now, or potentially invest in whatever equipment you think will get you a better, closer up photo, or more in focus, or more information is like everyone should be striving for because if your objective is to get things identified up on iNaturalist, if, but if you love just going out and observing and saying, I saw a tree, and that’s great, that you might.

[00:58:29] fall down a, an absolute rabbit hole into trees one day, you might not, that’s totally fine. But I think stressing quality is extremely important for us, at least.

[00:58:39] Michael Hawk: It’s super exhilarating to have a researcher, scientist, or other expert reach out to you about an observation. I really enjoy that. So yeah, that’s a, I think that’s a good point as well.

[00:58:50] I have a few questions that I’d like to ask most of my guests as we start to wrap up. Maybe start with Chloe. Do you have a top of head event, maybe a wildlife encounter, or Uh, encounter with a mentor or something like that, that really stands out as escalating your interest in nature.

[00:59:07] Chloe Van Loon: Absolutely. The one that always comes to mind and it actually is a extremely emotional event was being in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

[00:59:17] We were at a wildlife lodge and we were Coming back from our last day, we were going along this little creek. Some people in our group were actually asleep because it was end of day, long day. We’ve been seeing so many incredible nature already, but we turned this bend and there’s some sticks out along the creek and a male jaguar was standing over the creek, just calmly standing there looking at us.

[00:59:43] And it was just the most incredible observation and it totally changed my perspective from there on out about the nature. The importance of just having one interaction with a creature that makes you realize, wow, this thing is so magnificent, so beautiful, but also part of this whole ecosystem and connected to everything else because we got to sit there in our boat and also stand in the boat and have a really meaningful moment with this animal that then didn’t care that we were there and he just leisurely went back into the bushes and actually laid down and started licking his paws because he had a recent kill there.

[01:00:20] It was an experience that everyone in that boat, including our two guides who hadn’t seen like a jaguar there, and they’ve been working at this lodge for 10 years, we all took away that this was just a once in a lifetime experience, that something that will stay with us forever and always make us understand how important the Ecuadorian Amazon is, but also the greater jungle, the whole continent, the world is.

[01:00:44] It was just like one of those life changing moments.

[01:00:48] Michael Hawk: Wow. I can just imagine so many layers of emotion in an encounter like that.

[01:00:54] Chloe Van Loon: Yeah. I made sure to take a selfie photo because I was crying so much. I was like, I’m never going to forget this moment. I kind of want to capture what a mess I look like, but we also captured amazing photos of the Jaguar too, because he was only like 20 feet away from us.

[01:01:10] Michael Hawk: And Trevor, how about for yourself?

[01:01:12] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, for myself, it’s hard to pick one, but I think one of them that really was an inflection point for me was returning back to my home in British Columbia that I had always enjoyed and loved going back to. But returning there with a botanical Passion and walking those trails.

[01:01:29] I grew up spending so much time in, in the Alpine and British Columbia, but walking them with seeing things through a completely new lens, we took a whole day to walk a trail that used to take me two hours because we were so enthralled by the botany all around me that I’d walked by so many times and never appreciated it was like walking into a new planet.

[01:01:49] It was so exciting and exhilarating to be in your own home. And to be shocked and just gobsmacked by the amount of diversity around you. It was such a formative event for me, really, to go back and say, wow, I want to be able to walk into my environment like this and have an awareness and a knowledge and an appreciation for everything around me.

[01:02:10] And that gave me a perspective that I hadn’t ever appreciated. I think a couple we met in the Ecuadorian Amazon on the same trip Chloe mentioned actually said it really well. Describe this notion of seeing with color. As soon as they started to appreciate nature and they felt like they had revealed a colorful world that they had never seen before.

[01:02:32] So I really liked that phrase because it captured exactly that feeling I had that day. I felt like I was seeing with color in a way that I’d never seen before. And so for me, that has given me that motivation. And just to expand on that a little bit, circling back to this, why are we so obsessed with iNat and why do we do this so much?

[01:02:49] Also the notion of I’ve been inspired by the indigenous people in our travels in Belize as well as in my own home. I grew up interacting with Indigenous people there as well. Their knowledge strikes me as exactly that. Their awareness and their appreciation and immersion in their environments is so inspiring to me.

[01:03:07] So I want to get to a point where I can walk into a forest and have that same level of immersion and appreciation for the nature that inhabits it and respect and it’s almost like a spiritual connection. That’s what I felt that day, and it hasn’t left me. I feel that spiritual connection to nature wherever I go, and it’s really, really inspiring, and frankly, gives me so much passion and motivation to continue building that connection with nature.

[01:03:30] It’s, it’s really powerful, and I’m really happy I had that experience.

[01:03:34] Michael Hawk: I’m really happy that you’re sharing that experience with us here today, so thank you for that. Chloe, if you could magically impart one ecological concept to maybe help people. move up a rung in the, I call it the ladder of environmental awareness.

[01:03:49] What would that concept be and how would you do that?

[01:03:51] Chloe Van Loon: I would say the best technique that we’ve found is just getting people outside and that is really just in their own backyard, you know, their little backyard or the forest down the street and showing people the tiny things and the weird things, the tiny weird things, having people personally see, look at this snail, look at this bug, show them marine invertebrates in a creek, or something like that, that they probably didn’t realize exists and are actually so beautiful and have so much ecological importance in this.

[01:04:24] Habitat that they’re in and in the world, it’s just really getting people out there themselves to appreciate those little things they don’t realize exist. I think definitely helps people up their environmental awareness game.

[01:04:37] Michael Hawk: Absolutely. And I’ll have to tell you, maybe after the show’s over about an idea that I’m scheming up for next year to do something in this area.

[01:04:47] And anyway, so yeah, teaser. Trevor, do you have anything you want to add to that?

[01:04:50] Trevor Van Loon: Yeah, for me, I have a quick anecdote and then just to touch on that point. I remember we found last year in a red cedar forest exploring our backyard, just as I described, in British Columbia. We found a nematostomid harvest man in a red cedar tree that had rotted on the forest floor.

[01:05:08] And I just remember being fascinated and wowed by this alien like creature with these dagger like projections of the front of its face and thinking, This is such a precious creature in and of itself that has intrinsic worth to me that I cannot put a price on. And so, if I could impart anything to anybody, it would be appreciating that fact.

[01:05:27] That nature is in and of itself beautiful, and we should appreciate it and uplift it because it’s worth so much, it’s precious. It might not be able to be monetized or commercialized, but that’s okay. It’s been here for millions of years. It’s evolved. It’s got all these adaptations and it’s so timeless and beautiful in so many ways.

[01:05:46] So I’d really like to impart that upon everybody. I think it would really transform the way we think about our environment and protection of the environment. And just to expand on that anecdotally, I remember being asked by a co worker one time at Google, They said, why are you doing all this iNaturalist?

[01:06:00] What’s the end goal? Are you going to monetize this thing? Like, are you going to make money off all this work you’re doing? You’re putting all your personal life into this. And I remember saying to him, it’s really just about the whimsical beauty of it all. It doesn’t have to have a purpose. We do try to look at it like it is purposeful.

[01:06:16] We want to improve science and stuff, but it doesn’t have to be purposeful. Appreciating nature in and of itself and for its own beauty is okay. It’s okay to go out there and look at a weird creepy spider in a rotting log and appreciate that for its intrinsic beauty and to want to protect it. So that’s what I would suggest is that if we can all see the world through a slightly different perspective, maybe appreciate some of the small weird things out there.

[01:06:40] It would really help us all become better stewards of it.

[01:06:43] Michael Hawk: Everything you just said there is all so deep and meaningful to me. I don’t think there’s anything I can add to it, so I won’t even try. So if, uh, if people listening want to follow what you’re up to, follow your work, follow your photography, anything else, where can people go?

[01:07:00] Chloe Van Loon: The best place to go find us is iNaturalist. So our handle is Chloe and Trevor with underscores in between. But if you want more deep dive into the things that we’ve been observing, I write about those things on my blog. So that’s also including like backpacking trip blogs. I just wrote a book review on the Cougar conundrum.

[01:07:22] There’s like a whole smattering of nature things there, but a more digestible daily thing would be my Instagram, which is ChloeVanLoon with periods in between the words. I’d love to connect with anyone on any of those platforms.

[01:07:36] Michael Hawk: And those links will be in the show notes, of course, as always. And yeah, I’ve read.

[01:07:42] I can’t say I’ve read every blog entry you’ve had, but I’ve read a few of them. And Instagram, I’ve been following you for a long time and I really find your style super engaging and the photography is great. And I always learn something. So it’s something that I personally enjoy. So thank you for taking all the time that you do to post.

[01:07:59] Chloe Van Loon: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

[01:08:01] Michael Hawk: So I really appreciate all the time you spent today on this immensely broad topic. And I hope you had a good time. I know I certainly did. It was really enjoyable.

[01:08:11] Trevor Van Loon: It was great. It was such an honor to be on and we really enjoyed discussing all this stuff. It was really fun.

[01:08:18] Chloe Van Loon: There’s so much more we could discuss too. I feel like we could talk for a couple more hours and then a couple more. Let’s

[01:08:23] Michael Hawk: just have a shout out to people listening. If anyone has any questions or suggestions for followups, you know, let me know. And all my contact information is in the outro. So you’ll know exactly how to contact me and maybe we can do a part two.

[01:08:37] Chloe Van Loon: That’d be awesome.

[01:08:38] Michael Hawk: All right. Thank you again.

[01:08:39] Chloe Van Loon: Thank you so much. Thank you.