And in my own past, the beginning of that ‘while’ was when I really began paying attention to the world around me again. We’re not going to speak of that time in this article (you all know how it was, it involved lots of restrictions to social life. I’m sure I’m not the only one who took it as time to take a step back and breathe).

During my post-secondary years, apart from a few longer hikes in the local trails, I really missed the bygone days of exploring my surroundings and I lost touch with the nature I grew up in. I think that distance, however long it was, had me longing for more time spent between the trees.

I started blogging in 2021, and that’s what first drove my passion for the lives and landscapes around me. But nothing fuelled it more than the journals I did.

First, I discovered a YouTuber from the early days which I somehow missed: John Muir Laws. As I followed the Nature Journaling Educator’s course from his foundation, I learned more about nature journal clubs, an opportunity to create and share inquisition in wild spaces, or even to find the wildness in our built communities.

The nature journaling movement he co-leads, which is growing across the world, inspired me to launch Hemiboreal.com, a website and club meant for creating community in our own little slice of the Earth, built around what nature has to offer to make us happier through journaling and wildlife gardening.

At the junction between boreal and temperate, hemiboreal is a little-used scientific term, which for me merits further recognition and collective appropriation. This narrowish belt of similar climate spans all across the world, and it includes where I live, the Canadian Maritime provinces. It might as well prompt further discoveries on how people live across the same seasons than us, across the world, even though different species and cultures live in each of the concerned regions.

Everyone should be aware of their life-place, and some might even want to deep-dive on its intricacies. It can be more entertaining than we think.

For example, local travel is really underrated in today’s society, and might be even necessary in the near future due to inflation, and more recently, rising cost of fuel.

You might just say “I’ve tread those paths so many times already, why should I care?” and to that I respond with a challenge for you, staycationer of the near future:

Keeping pace with a place: 64 spreads to your heart’s content

Yes, you heard me right. 64 spreads.

That means a double-pager each time I visit a place, armed with a mission of my own, 64 times, in 16 places of my choice in the four seasons.

And that mission can be anything: a moment of mindfulness in nature, a beautiful plein-air drawing, a deep inquiry through ecological investigation or a series of blotches to express the surrounding color palette accompanied by poetry (Sometimes the eye can see more colors than a camera!).

No matter—I am taking the challenge, and you can too.

Anybody, anywhere can do it.

You can just pick a yard, a set of parks, a preserve, be they in your hometown or nearby (I recommend less than an hour’s drive). Pick a few places in each, name them a generic name, and return there four times, one in each season.

Once you fill a spread, check a season off the list. Do this every season over time. No time limit, but I’ll try a year personally.

Once you’re done, pick a name that represents what you’ve seen and put it in your checklist.

To keep track of my checklist, I use a minizine, just a folded piece of paper cut to act like a booklet. This page contains more information on how to fold this kind of document, and an overview of prompts for the challenge.

Zines - Hemiboreal Nature Guild

What do you get out of this? A sketchbook full of adventures. A travel journal from all your staycations. You can then appreciate where you’ve been at very little cost, and reminisce on these adventures.

Make your way over here to find more information on the Four Seasons, Four Times approach I just developed from this.

Four Beats - Hemiboreal Nature Guild

Get started with nature journaling over here:

Wild Wonder - What is Nature Journaling

I’ll start on March 21st in a large hardcover book of blank A4 pages. Will you be joining me?

The story of this bird is so unbelievable, that Errol Fuller begins his book with “The story of the Passenger Pigeon reads like a work of fiction.” Even though it’s not. Let’s dive into The Passenger Pigeon.

If you’ve never heard of this kind of bird, you’re not alone. The Passenger Pigeon has fallen out of memory, outside of ecological and environmental circles. Errol Fuller wishes to dispel many myths about this bird, and does so successfully.

There are three main sections to this book, which has many chapters for quite the short written work. We’ll focus on the first one, the section focused on the bird and the relationship with its environment. The other sections, the appendices and the talk about the birds in captivity, are shorter and more complementary to the main piece. The book can be read in one afternoon, since its 176 pages are full of images, large text and appendices. And it’s what makes this book so great.

But really, have you ever heard of the Passenger Pigeon? Individuals in its flocks were numbering in the thousands, which is impressive for quite large a bird.

The forests that were once covering Eastern North America were in fact prime habitat for this bird, a nomadic tree-dweller which opportunistically fed on mast crops of American chestnuts, as well as agricultural crops whenever they could lay their beaks on them, or anything else really.

Their flocks would blot out the sun with their sheer magnitude, and would descend upon farmers pitilessly eating all they could find. Here is what Errol Fuller imagined a farmer from 1810 in Pennsylvania would have experienced:

In short, the book makes for a fascinating read, because it talks of a reality that no longer exists, and it does so by focusing on the decline of a species incompatible with the European settler lifestyle.

Its population tipping point was reached in the “second half of the 19th century”, where mass killings were routinely occuring.

A strange habit that brought upon its end

Many things are unknown about this bird, including the amount of eggs per nest, where accounts differ. But one habit that made the Passenger Pigeon particularly easy to hunt was its parental instinct. Or lack thereof.

This habit, in fact, worked for pigeons, in an environment where the predators did not know when or where the flocks would come. A few carnivores, or Indigenous hunters, would easily be overwhelmed by such a large amount of meat. But for the new settler predator, their goal wasn’t necessarily eating. Since they had advanced weapons, “dozens of individuals could be brought down with a single shot from a gun simply pointed skyward”.

The settlers also set up complex netting contraptions where they nested, where they would either cut, burn down trees, use smoke or sulphur to bring the birds down, and then simply break their necks once they get a hold of them.

The “nestings”, or massacres, were particularly macabre: after the time of the nesting in Shelby, Michigan in 1874, when one of the largest massacres occurred, people would still talk of the great flocks as though they were common. It is because that pigeon’s flocks would, according to Errol Fuller, possibly “fool” observers into thinking they were as common as they once were a few decades ago. But the tipping point had already been reached, and the species was doomed. That’s what happens when a society meticulously kills millions of birds at once.

Codependent on primary forests

The most impressive fact about this book’s first part, isn’t necessarily the fact that the pigeons were meticulously killed - it’s that the forest they depended on for food and habitat were all destroyed, and it’s one of the leading reasons why they couldn’t survive today.

Many of the forests the birds used, made primarily of American chestnut, are now gone due to the steep decline of that tree. However, the author points out these only started to decline after the introduction of the nursery-introduced Chestnut blight, in 1905, when the flocks of pigeons were long disappeared from the face of the Earth.

It is the strength of the contrast between yesterday and today’s world that makes this book and subject stand out. Our ecology today, in the Eastern Woodland, feels wholly different than what it used to be. And a lot of the pieces—Chestnut, Large Hemlocks, Pigeons—won’t ever come back. The decline and disappearance of the pigeons, for me, marks one of the many tipping points, heralding a new time when humankind controlled the world, rather than the opposite.

And the book’s end, after the pigeons in captivity—poor lonely things who only lasted until 1914—talks about the wonder which pigeons evoked in art.

In this work, Errol Fuller successfully not only evokes wonder in the reader, but also laments the lack of calculated study of the bird’s population before its decline. It was gone before the advent of systematic bird science, and the only accounts of the bird talk about the spectacular nature of its flocks, right up to its decline.

The book stands out as a testament to our power over the natural world, which speaks of the fragility of individual species. Conservation is not only protecting, but also remembering to not repeat the same mistakes as before.

This weekly column, stretching into October, will tell of stories I have around those principles, and the way I see my own involvement in this societal shift. These principles are evidently meant to be lived, not solved with quick answers.

Past Articles Based on Principles

1. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

2. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

3. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

4th principle of the Honourable Harvest : Never take the first. Never take the last.

This principle should be self-evident. Some of nature’s products are so abundant that you just know it won’t mind if you take some of its gifts. Even if you see an entire grove of a berry tree, it’s good practice to not strip the whole thing bare, and to leave some for others.

On the opposite end, if you stumble on one cluster of berries on a singular stalk, wait until you see more before taking. I think that just stands on its own.

In our collective garden, we try to harvest what we planted, especially. But some volunteers have planted themselves, such as a now-sizeable choke cherry we inherited from the house that used to be there. These factors, like the native plants that were there already (Jewelweed, St. John’s Wort, Goldenrod and New York Asters, too), make the garden an oasis of food not just for us, but also for others.

In a downtown area where fruit trees for the birds are few and far between, and groceries are mostly accessible by car only, the space acts as a little damper, at least in my conscience.

I know choke cherries are technically “edible”, but I would describe it politely as “astringent” myself. Starchy even. Not something I would recommend. But the birds seem to love it.

Can you spot the sparrow among the tree’s boughs?

In this case, I find the choke cherry symbolizes for me the birds’ invitation to dine with us at the garden.

In May, they make these lovely flowers, even. What’s not to love? Something for the birds in the summer, and for the pollinators in spring.

This blog entry was a bit shorter than usual, but I am convinced that you, the reader, already thinks the first and last should be left for others.

Have a great week and don’t forget to ask before taking! When foraging, do you sometimes make some space for other things to eat, too?

This weekly column, stretching into October, will tell of stories I have around those principles, and the way I see my own involvement in this societal shift. These principles are evidently meant to be lived, not solved with quick answers.

Past Articles Based on Principles

1. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

2. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

3rd principle of the Honourable Harvest : Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

I don’t know if it’s because we pruned them before they leafed out, but we have a seemingly never ending supply of raspberries in our collective garden this year.

We also have a family of mourning doves. I just learned they sometimes liked them too.

All this stands in a struggling part of town, many people here having to deal with addiction and resulting trauma. Though very tall, the raspberry row acts not as a wall but as a life-giving center to the garden. A thorny statement, but a delicious one.

Asking permission from a plant?

You might have asked yourself, seeing the principle this week : How do I ask permission from a plant?

But the more I read, and think about it, the more I realize there’s more to it than “asking” verbally.

Is that raspberry bush frail, or thriving? (For ours, I’d rather push towards the latter). The answer should be clear enough at a glance. But other things come after careful observation of the surroundings.

Does that dove family have everything it needs? Can it glean enough seeds from its environment?

I have personally made it my case that the choke cherry tree next to it is full of fruit, and they’re ripe at the same time as their neighbours, the berry-bearing prickly brambles. To me, if the birds need berries, they might like the juicier cherries even more. But who am I to know?

Red beacons in an ailing world

The gift given by the berry bushes is a great one. We might as well thank them for it.

All we did was plant some bare canes in the ground, and there go the berries.

As I am pulling weeds, listening to the chapter called “Epiphany in the Beans”, a domestic dispute is heard in the background, threatening to escalate. We’re told by the people around that it’s none of our business.

An ever-patrolling officer eventually comes around the block and tells us all about the unsolvable, the too-late-to-do-anything-about-it situation of homelessness.

The gloomy world of hard drug abuse and resulting violence were likely created by years of neglect by successive systems, but we cannot blame one single factor for its cause. A transient people, especially one which is least fortunate, has trouble settling down and rooting themselves to place.

Thing is, if a person did decide to start picking up the pieces in their life, would they have a supportive environment to let them do it in? I heard from a homeless person once : “They kicked us out of the woods, now they’re kicking us out of the city”. But what if we gave them a place to feel safe? To feel at home?

The berries are going to wither, as every wild plant does every year. But the people are going to keep on living through the winter, if they’re lucky.

I love spring for its renewal and hope, but as the summer draws on, I have trouble bearing the torrid heat myself. Imagine being forced to be out there, with the pouring rain and all. Fall is great when the cool air comes, but the thoughts in my head are also kind of lukewarm. Just to think of all the ones needing to find shelter.

In the meantime, we have the berries to be happy for. Can’t argue with that. A special request to the Raspberry Row : keep on being you, and keep on giving us a red hint of sweetness in the heat of summer.

Have a great week and don’t forget to ask before taking! When observing plants for gathering, do you often take no for an answer?

This weekly column, stretching into October, will tell of stories I have around those principles, and the way I see my own involvement in this societal shift. These principles are evidently meant to be lived, not solved with quick answers.

Second principle of the Honourable Harvest : Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

Yes, about introductions, I’ll start with the berry and end with myself. Blueberry-like in their aspect, Serviceberries were well-known by the Acadian people, my ancestors, as wild pears (poires sauvages). And they do taste like pears.

They were also on the Old (to us) Continent, where they were called “L’arbre aux oiseaux” (The Birds’ Tree) by the monks who would grow them in their cloister gardens. As some would say, the berries bring all the birds to the yard.

My grandfather called them little pears (petites poires). He was the kind of forager that would eat them only during his nature walks, not bring them home. I would definitely say they weren’t wasted, since either the birds ate them or they got to fall on the ground, in the forest’s seed bank.

I was never the kind of forager that would keep what I harvested for later, either. If I could eat it on the spot, I would. I was more of an observer, the kind of person that would sit there and look at things during my walk, and how they interacted together.

This got me thinking about starting a French-language blog called Amelan.ca less than three years ago. And here I am.

At peace with not knowing

I always sought knowledge, but I now realize that not knowing is the best way to be curious. Even the most esteemed authors see themselves as lifelong learners.

Just after school, I started thinking critically about the way I absorb knowledge. I used to seek all the answers, when all I had to do was think of some question and start living it. For example, if you don’t know a good, reliable answer, there are other ways to go about than making up an answer on the fly. Personally, I try to resist that voice in my head and ask more questions! Even simple ones stand to the test, as they make way for more complex ones.

We can also learn from plants, those who can truly “eat” light. We have two radically different ways of living, but that doesn’t mean we can’t think of ourselves as less intelligent than the other.

The serviceberry attracts light by growing in edge habitats, like old fields and forest margins here in Wabanaki. But it doesn’t stop there. Pollinators come to it in the spring, they who allow the fruits to form. Then birds arrive, spreading them all over the woods and fields.

May is truly their showiest time. The flower is so visible that they’re full of insects for the few days in which they bloom. The blooms shine beacon-white in the brown spring of our woodlands.

For us humans, we have to go get things around where we live, and now the whole world. For these plants, it just comes. They get their food (light), reproductive pollen (insects) and far-away dispersal (birds, humans and other things) without moving an inch in their lives. That certainly doesn’t mean we’re smarter than them!

We long had to forage to survive. But our different way of life today still involves having other humans pick things elsewhere for us. And often, we have the plants do our bidding for us anyway.

“I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am.”

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 180

A few pages later, Kimmerer goes on to tell about an engineering student from Europe visiting an Anishinaabe group and learning about their way of harvesting wild rice. When he suggested a way to make it 85% more efficient, as in by getting more rice, these people said they were letting some drop in the water (“Go to waste”, as some would put it) for future generations of people and other living beings.

But it’s not waste when it’s for others, obviously.

A way to ask the plant for more of its gifts would be to be accountable. Seeds are the plant’s main way to disperse life. By asking the plant (It might respond by being almost empty of fruit, or even sick), we can either conclude that it is ready for being foraged, or that it is not. And that is completely normal.

Have a great week and don’t forget to ask before taking! How would you keep yourself accountable to seed-bearing plants, who give so much and ask so few in return?

Lire en français

This weekly column, stretching into October, will tell of stories I have around those principles, and the way I see my own involvement in this societal shift. These principles are evidently meant to be lived, not solved with quick answers.

Here is the first principle.

1. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

I feel knowing how our parents have raised us, knowing our teachers, is just as important as knowing ourselves. It sort of reveals more of our backgrounds, traumas, but especially lived experiences.

But the teachers we often forget are the non-humans, or our more-than-human kin. Animals. Plants. Fungi.

As strawberry season comes to a close…

Everybody has tasted strawberries. Wild ones surprise us, for nobody asked them to be there. They just are.

They feed the bees in the spring, and feed us mammals and birds, in the early summer.

Everybody remembers times in our childhood, when our sight is filled with little red dots under our feet; the June surprise. In the fields and lawns of July, they start to fade away as wildlife eat them, people mow or trample them, or fungi rot them away.

It is also possible to think of them as a gift from nature, to us.

Kimmerer has a whole chapter dedicated to them in her book (p. 25), a section called The Gift of Strawberries.

To help them, she would see the runners, the shoots that strawberries sent out to root new plants, and she would weed the plants around the little rootlets they created.

A lady I know from Nova Scotia, a true native plant lover, gave to me an idea to create a catchphrase that reads « Save the Wild Strawberry » on a t-shirt.

I have it written down on me and wear it around town. With « Ask me how! » written in the back, I gather comments, questions and strawberries. I also mean by these responses I give, to make the space for those discussions in our everyday life.

Because plants are not only the best gifters, they are the best teachers. They take care of us, so we should take care of them.

Have a great week and don’t forget to ask before taking! In your life, how do you express your gratitude for your caretakers?

Note : Do not eat strawberries from strangers’s lawns. We never know what they have been through.

Let’s take the long view here : this was an unprecedented event for North America. Not only for the sheer number of individuals present in the path, but for the amount of people just… caring. Every eclipse is really special for a lot of people, at least since we’ve been able to predict these with the accuracy of a clock. But why, do you say, is this predictive behaviour more special than a grand celestial event? Let’s explore my thoughts on that.

I am no expert on human nature, but the latter is 100% what stood out about the 2024 eclipse.

I think it’s linked to anticipation. It’s linked to how mindful most of us that lived through it become, during that specific totality moment that you know will become a core memory. A thing I’m sure no other animal can do. A lot of us gave ourselves a place in our lives to deeply pay attention to a particular moment.

Let me explain.

A CBS Special Report on the 1970 solar eclipse (click to see video) showed there were few areas in the North unhindered by clouds.

The path of totality would not touch much land again, apart from the Southeast of the U.S. and Mexico.

This made us in the East Coast, living within driving distance of an eclipse, very lucky to have this opportunity.

On April 8, 2024, I spent the totality fully in the moment, and I do not regret it. But I wouldn’t have been too angry if I missed it.

Nothing prepared us for this, apart from our own measuring tools. Not even our evolutionary history as a species; I can’t think of an example where animals adjusts their evolutionary schedules to things that surpass their lives.

For reference, even if evolution took into account eclipses, what would animals benefit from it? Would the family of geese I saw on the lake still float on, unhindered? Probably. It’s no big deal for them, you know, just the moon passing by. The real big deal, this year, are the dual cicada broods having some amazing timing.

Eclipses, Cicadas and Humans, Oh My!

Periodical cicadas, man. These bugs spend 99.9 % of their lives underground. Then, they abruptly emerge, scream, find a mate, and die.

Brood XIII and Brood XIX are going to appear at the same time in 17 states of the USA. These, respectively known as 13- and 17-year cicadas, will emerge as a thousand billion—a trillion—individuals.

This is a whopping year for Turtle Island. Imagine the amount of meat just lying around for all the animals! A real buffet.

This is different than the eclipse, and much rarer. But what’s the most impressive is how the cicadas probably came to evolve that way.

Also, animals cannot evolve to rely on these bugs as a food source. No animal has really filled the ecological niche to eat these insects, as 13 and 17 years is too long for any animal for it to be more than a once-in-a-lifetime, or even rarer, opportunity (specialist wasps definitely do not live more than a decade old).

Basically, animals like ants and crows benefit a lot more from this than the eclipse. We probably would too, if we ate bugs. For us, though, seeing all those cicadas hang around is going to be little more than a hindrance.

All that to say, regarding the eclipse, evolution surely couldn’t prepare us for a several-decades-apart, once-in-a-lifetime event. As a kind of proof, look at the way our eyes take in the light when they’re fully dilated during darkness.

Only our most extreme calculations could prepare us.

But as someone not especially afraid of insects, I’d be somehow more fearful of the eclipse if I was living in the Midwest, where the three phenomena all converge.

Visions of losing vision

Losing eyesight is my biggest fear, and as a person whose passions are art and nature, these things involve a lot of looking.

So when most people are telling me to not look at the at the sun, the very thing I will drive an hour through solid traffic to look at, an eclipse day is not the most restful day to be alive.

But what calmed me wasn’t only mindfulness. It was definitely the feeling that when it got dark, I was at the right place (in nature), at the right time (not driving through car lines at a snail’s pace) and with the right people (two of my close friends). Being surrounded by life, that may or may not care about this moment, is what made me glad to be there.

My fears went away when I started caring deeply, and when I started looking at the eagle that showed up just before totality.

It’ll happen, no matter what we do.

Clearly, I did not know what to expect. Apart from the ring, the photos I saw from the totality weren’t that cool. And after having lived through it, I’m not going to become an eclipse tourist, or whatever flying around to see night at day is called.

These two photos are respectively from before the eclipse, and from last August, when I went to that exact same spot.

Doesn’t it go to show that we live through amazing moments every day, without realizing it?

What I enjoyed the most about Monday wasn’t the feeling that we were so insignificant. Quite the contrary. A total eclipse make us realize that we are truly capable of something greater than ourselves. When we know something is coming, our species shines for its power to care. And that transcends all boundaries we learned to label to distinguish between ourselves, be they political, social or economic. Our true humanity shines through, and to me, that is the power of being aware, and caring about things.

Mindfulness might not be a silver bullet, but radically caring about things sure helps to form core memories and have fun. Drawing sunsets can help. Field recordings, for those musically inclined. Even nature journaling and poetry, why not.

And not only can we protect places with care, we can also protect each other, and our own self.

As for solar eclipses, it will be the only one I’ve lived through, and I’m sure many others will join me in not seeing the ‘night of day’ for the rest of our lives.

Let’s put it that way : what truly counts are the memories we choose to dedicate attention to. Caring is our greatest power. And let’s embrace that fact.

It’s hard to be comprehensive in a review for a book like this. That’s because Bringing Nature Home is most likely the best science-backed, complete handbook on why to turn your garden into a paradise for insects, and subsequently, birds and other animals in our region of the world. I will leave most of the reading to you, the reader, which is why I am going to focus on the parts that hit home the most for me.

Why is this on the shelf

Everyone should eventually read this modern classic, which was first published in 2007 and reedited in 2019 (Link to buy the revised edition). It hands us a key that might just unlock the solution to the biodiversity crisis, a plea to reconvert the places that were once natural—our home yards—into wildlife paradises.

This transformative approach, based on native plants, empowers the average gardener, or gardener-to-be, to take action for the environment at the closest level possible : in our home yards.

As an entomologist, he knows about which insects eat which plants, a component of biodiversity we should definitely take into account while thinking of which things to incorporate in our gardens. In his work, he speaks volumes about how foreign plants can offer way less nutrients to insects, and a lot of them are inedible to most of our insects, compared to native ones.

There are even keystone species, like the stone at the center of a roman arch, or even the last block holding together a Jenga tower, that feed a disproportionate amount of animals. His research is well-known for mentioning this and has given way to a guide by the National Wildlife Federation on keystone plants by ecoregion, focused around native bees and butterflies.

His sections on native insects and plants explain how they interact together and reads like an easy-to-follow encyclopedia. This hybrid approach, with a central set of messages introducing a list of keystone plants and essential insects, works exceptionally well in this case. The color photographs just add to the mix and make this a work of art and science that stimulates true environmental awareness.

Author and Editor profile

Tallamy is a very well-known, even trendy scientist among wildlife gardeners, yet too many people do not know him yet. I also have read Nature’s Best Hope, his latest work that also has a Young Reader’s Edition, that is more of an introduction to the benefits that our yards can give to us, in a similar vein as Bringing Nature Home. There, he introduces his concept of the “Homegrown National Park”, which has become a transcontinental movement among gardeners coast to coast. The Living Landscape, which is an illustrated coffee-table-book-style overview to native plant gardening, and The Nature of Oaks which speaks volumes about our best insect-feeders (oak trees) are his other works.

Timber Press is one of my favourite US editors; they publish lots of books, not only on nature, but on gardening and other related fields.

Fieldnotes

We’re often presented with how to garden for wildlife, especially with the lists of native plants growing in popularity. But what are the deep, true reasons why we should care? In his essays, Doug Tallamy not only asks basic questions, but answers them with solid research that he and his team conducted. He also achieves, ultimately, the feat of having us care about the sake of wildlife through a very practical action, gardening.

Insisting that nature doesn’t have anywhere to flee from modern development and lawn overuse (“No Place to Hide” is in fact the name of a whole chapter in the book), he goes back to his childhood and examines the reasons why he became an entomologist.

This triggered a realization in my head that we all have this visceral link to nature from our childhood and that our yards present an opportunity to design as part of nature, instead of against it.

Some of us know about “Shifting Baselines”, a term often transposed to ecology where we don’t remember the nature that was here before us, a kind of wildlife amnesia. Many of us think the scant birds we see nowadays compared to a few decades ago, and the insects that no longer splatter on our windshields, are part of a normal state of affairs. But it’s not.

Let’s take our yards, make them nature havens and shift the baseline back to abundance by following the science-backed advice that Bringing Nature Home gives us.

For thousands of years, the Mi’kmaq have depended upon the moons to determine their place in time. This calendar, which is in sync with the new moon, usually has twelve months which span twenty-nine days, each having the full moon at their midst. And each month is named after the corresponding full moon, which each have unique names based on a natural phenomenon of that season. At the arrival of Toqwa’q, or Autumn, let’s dive into the Mi’kmaw Moons of Mi’kmaki.

Why is this on the shelf

The Mi’kmaq population calls home the unceded lands today known as Mi’kma’ki, which cover a big part of the Atlantic provinces of Canada.

They have long lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle according to the seasons, before European expansion across the landscape. That way of life is now radically changed, but some customs are kept. Language is a way to live with a whole unique way of seeing the world, and naming the months as the Mi’kmaq have done for generations until the arrival of the European calendar carries the meaning into the future.

Mi’kmaw Moons serves as a great introduction to the Mi’kmaq language, for children and adults alike. Its stories, and beautiful illustrations, act as ways to transmit a new-to-some, but very much ancient way of seeing the seasons in our corner of Turtle Island, the Dawn Land.

Authors & Editor profile

This book, illustrated by Loretta Gould of Whycobah First Nation, is the product of an alliance between a member of the Acadia First Nation (Cathy LeBlanc) and an astronomer (Dave Chapman).

The two authors’ realities come together in this work, which is in line with Etuaptmumk, the “Two-Eyed Seeing” approach useful for approaching complex systems. The science (astronomy) of the modern world melds with the stories of day-to-day life and the traditional knowledge of the Mi’kmaq, which makes for a very interesting read.

Dave and Cathy appropriately met at Kejimkujik National Park to establish an International Dark Sky Preserve.

« One thing led to another, and soon Dave and Cathy were sharing with each other their knowledge of the night sky and Mi’kmaw ways. Each had much to learn from the other, and the Mi’kmaw moons project began slowly, through long, patient, respectful conversations. » (Leblanc, Chapman, p. 4)

Since then, they have maintained a Facebook page to help teach about the seasons in real-time.

The publisher, Formac, is specialized in books about the Maritimes. It is well-known for its local field books on the nature of the region.

The Layout

In the beginning is an introduction to the Mi’kmaq and the role of stories in their life. In fact, these oral stories are central to cultural transmission, as with most Indigenous cultures.

We are introduced to Holly, a young Mi’kmaq girl, and her Auntie, who is like a mother to her in the way she transmits her knowledge.

As the book goes on, Auntie tells her stories about each month, a great read for young and old alike.

We are treated not only with a captivating tale each month, but also a series of facts related to the months, and a beautiful illustration like the one on the cover, each made by Loretta Gould.

Image : Monica Alexander, Mi’kmaw Moons p. 8

The Calendar

In fact, the months are each named after a natural phenomenon corresponding to the time of year.

As of writing (Mid-September), we are just entering Wikumkewiku’s, the Mate-Calling Time of the moose. We are transitioning from the “extra” thirteenth moon of 2023, A’qatiku’s, added after three years, since each month has approximately 29 days between the moons.

“But how could people forget”? asked Holly. Her auntie replied, “After the Europeans came, the Mi’kmaq started using the European calendar and eventually forgot some of the old ways. There may be Elders out there who remembers, but we have not found them yet.” Holly thought about this. “Well, I hope someone remembers, sometime.” “I hope so too, Holly,” her auntie replied. (Leblanc, Chapman, p. 45)

Fieldnotes

The book can be read all in one go, but the best way to read it, I find, is to absorb it monthly. It can be done to reflect, at each new moon, on the changes in the land brought by the seasons.

We live in a fast-paced time where we sometimes lose track of the impact of nature on ourselves. However, as we integrate natural phenomena in our life, we learn to live at a more human pace, in touch with our natural heritage and the way it affects our own beings.

Toqwa’q - Autumn : “Imagine being surrounded by the darkness of night. All is quiet. Your grandmother tells you to listen for the chirp of the crickets, as this is Mother Earth’s way of telling us that it is now safe to dry our meat for nourishment during winter, when resources will not be as plentiful. Grandmother shares with you that there cannot be too much moisture in the air when the meat is dried. If moisture is present, and you try to dry the meat too soon, it will rot. This time of year is called the Song of the Crickets. You imagine the crickets dancing in the cool air of nightfall.” (Leblanc, Chapman, p. 12)

With the start of Toqwa’q, let’s reflect on how important it is to remember how this land came to us, and let’s be grateful for what life and the Earth give us.

Mi’kmaw Moons can be purchased by clicking on this Linktree link.

Being out of print, this book can be found secondhand if you look far enough, or if you’re lucky, maybe even in your local library!

“Trees are apolitical characters — they do not recognize international boundaries. They grow where they are comfortable, where the climate and soils suit them.” (Blouin, p. 8)

Why this is on the shelf

Having somewhat fallen through the cracks of time as many great books sadly do, this one sits on my shelf since the day I found it on an online used book reseller. I find that the histories of trees and shrubs in it are very much timeless and relevant, even in our timeliness-obsessed era. Showing us that the natural world is always current affairs.

It doubles not only as a field guide, but especially as a place to learn about the many fascinating histories, uses and perks of just about every large tree we have here in the Wabanaki-Acadian forest region.

Author & Editor profile

I discovered this author through his other book, Weeds of the Woods, which speaks of the various shrubs of New Brunswick. Glen Blouin’s knowledge of our local flora, particularly of the woody-stemmed species, shows through the pages which makes both his books great reads.

However, Blouin sadly passed away in 2021, leaving his two books as sorts of “monuments” to our biodiversity of woody species.

He lived for a long while in Saint-Paul, New Brunswick, next to where I was raised (Kent County). Blouin worked as an environmental journalist, but spent a large part of his life writing about the plants of this region. He interviewed Indigenous elders as part of his work on the uses and value of our native plants and visibly took a lot of time to sink in this knowledge when writing his two books. He won two awards in journalism from the Canadian Forest Service, in 2003 and 2004 (Source).

The Canadian editor, Boston Mills Press, went out of business in the early 2000s and got absorbed by Firefly Books much later. However, the book is not sold new anymore.

The Layout

The first pages are arranged as an identification guide. The many names are well-put together and constitute a good way to recognize the trees from memory and to learn new ways of speaking. We see the English, scientific and French names (alternate idioms included), with various Indigenous languages’ words added depending on the tree.

Photos are descriptive and depict various aspect of the trees in many seasons. The text in the following pages, however, is the book’s greatest strength. Herein lies vivid, colourful language, with a bit of humour sprinkled in, explaining the various usages and benefits to nature and humans. Sometimes there are six pages of this additional information with photos!

“Willows are subject to a motley crew of insects (…) Perhaps the most curious is a gall-forming midge that lays its eggs on new growth in the spring; its larvae develop a golf ball-sized gall at the end of the twig. In summer the gall looks like a miniature green cabbage, but by winter it takes on the appearance of a woody jack pine cone. Yes, only conifers bear real cones.” (Blouin, p. 241)

Fieldnotes

Though the scope might seem broad, being East of the Rockies, this book was written by a New Brunswick resident and seems specific to Canada, or at least the Northern US. For us Wabanaki-Acadian forest residents, the book has a great selection of big and small woody plants native to our region and has often four to six pages per feature, which is rare for a field guide.

I find more conventional, (shall we say non-eclectic?) field guides do not have backstory, keeping themselves to the essentials of identifying plants. And they’re there for good reason. But for this one, I have to say the identification stays a bit descriptive; that part is more destined for the advanced botany enthusiast, as there are no drawings. But for the tree-lore alone, this is a worthwhile read.

“What does one get for the child who has everything? A young living tree, and a little help in planting it, is a gift that will be remembered for generations. Since the life expectancy of white pine is 200 to 400 years, that translates into quite a number of generations.” (Blouin, p. 177)

Our trees have always existed here since the melting of the glaciers, and everyone deserves to know their story. That is why Glen Blouin’s book stands out as part of our history and as a way to preserve knowledge that might just be lost if we don’t pay close attention to where we’re going. Thus, I do think that every region needs its Eclectic Guide to Trees!