Hello, my name is David Jakim. For the past few years I have been a professional naturalist, going out every day to study the flora and fauna of various regions and their habitats, bringing home samples of plants to analyze under the microscope and all the time trying to get a sense of the bigger ecological picture of each place and community I have explored. Ultimately my aim is to use this information to inform land use planners as to how to best manage the land for biodiversity, human use and ecosystem stability.
Identifying species and gathering tidbits of knowledge about the surrounding environment is much like compiling a collection; each form is laid down for view, observed, and sheltered in the mind. One begins to observe patterns, likenesses, and associations, such as those which indicate that dandelions belong with lawns and violets belong with damp forests. I think everyone has a desire to collect things, whether it be languages, stories, dance postures or coins. My collecting extends back to childhood, with sea shells; it stemmed from a fascination with the vast variety of shell forms; there were no names, yet each one followed its own logic with its form of symmetry and spirals extending from the deep unknown. As you start observing the natural environment, wherever you are, you will notice different nuances and forms that are themselves rewarding. You don’t need to know names; the forms speak for themselves. As a graduate student in environmental geosciences and ecology, I have been walking around Queens College the past year and observing the wild, weird and wonderful. The creation of this blog has inspired me to take another look at once common sites and to find new treasures in our Queens environment. Half the beauty is in sharing these things with other people who would otherwise pass by unaware.
One day last spring, someone scattered dozens of sea shells and starfish along the Queens College academic quad. Aside from being a hazard for playing barefoot Frisbee, the way people were affected by this curiosity was marvelous. Another day I found a small beautiful fake-diamond called a cubic zirconium on the sidewalk. I thought that somebody planted it and lo and behold, I looked for more treasure and found a silver gem-encrusted brooch twenty feet away under a bench. This reminds me of the recent story about the man who introduced a penny, worth a million dollars, back into circulation. He did this to encourage people to look at their change and start collecting coins. Whether intended or not, these secret treasures make people happy. As my soil teacher once said, “those who study nature are like children who never left the sandbox.”
Between the horticulture and gardens, the lawns and fallow fields and the little corners of life in forgotten back-alleys, you never know what treasures you may discover walking around campus: spring blossoms with dandelions, June bursts with strawberries, and in July through August, blueberries ripening from green to blue. Grapes on the vine become sweet in fall after the first frost and ferment on the vine through winter. Digging under the snow behind the library in late winter, one can find small, delicate, prostrate herbs called chickweeds (Stellaria media), ready to be eaten in salads.
The campus is also a haven for fauna. Breeding red-tailed hawks share a nest on the campus in the fire escape atop the Goldstein theatre. Sometimes starlings and other small birds will drive these predatory hawks out of their territory, overwhelming them with sharp fast dives and pecks that the bulky hawk can’t escape (this behavior is called ‘mobbing.) Mockingbirds and robins feed their young in nests made in the thickly covered hidden center of the crowns of ornamental apple trees. Squirrels and chipmunks, snails and lizards, star-shaped mushrooms and praying-mantises, these have made their homes in often surprising habitats on campus such as the green area just by the library fountain, rarely trespassed lands behind the gymnasium, hidden dump piles, fallow fields and manicured gardens. Often unbeknownst to us, humans shape the ecology of the campus. Studies of the lawn on the Main Quad have shown changes in density and dispersion of several plant species over the years—broad-leaved plantain (Plantago major) lance-leaved plantain (Plantago lanceolata), and dandelions (Taracaxum), which is perhaps due to changes in mowing regimes, pesticides, foot-trampling and climate. Some squirrels and birds have a surprising tolerance for human proximity and even follow us around, while others are alarmed and take flight at our approach. Our trails flush out certain animals and provide food and habitats for others.
And so the purpose of my blog is to encourage people to develop a fascination and appreciation of the esthetics and the scientific underpinnings of nature and of the role of nature in our everyday lives. Just like the diverse ethnic origins that form the human ecology of Queens College, perhaps the most culturally diverse college in the world, the plants and animals we find on the campus have also come from around the world to make unique associations that have never existed before in natural history. (What I mean—and I will take about this a later blog—is that a lot of the flora and fauna are aliens from other lands.) I invite QC students to explore this ecological world which is our campus and its environments, and try to understand how the human fauna has helped to shape our environment.
On Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 to 4:00 pm, I was holding a field biology walk around campus, but nobody was showing up. Instead, please contact me David.Jakim@gmail.com if you’d like to schedule a nature walk around campus.
