Richard Premack
Appearances
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Phenology just generally means the timing of biological events. So it refers to the migration times of birds, when butterflies start flying in the spring, when plants flower, when trees leaf out. So these are all part of phenology.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And one of the most powerful ways of doing this is finding historical records and matching them with modern observations.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
So ideally, you would want to find a set of records where someone started it 100 or 200 years ago and continued it up to the present time.
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Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
My mother told me, if you ever want to know anything, you just ask everybody you know for information, and eventually someone will tell you what you're looking for.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
We posted notices on listservs, electronic bulletin boards, supermarket bulletin boards and libraries. There are a lot of natural history clubs in Boston. We went to these natural history clubs and we stood up and we told people what we were looking for.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Yeah, except they didn't even know if these records existed. So it's like if they were looking for a hypothetical dog.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And this friend of ours who was an environmental philosopher at one point said, well, why don't you look at Thoreau's records? And we said, like, what records?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Oh. These tables were really unknown to biologists, but they were very well known to Thoreau scholars. But when we saw these unpublished tables, as soon as we saw them, we knew that they were fantastic.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Generally speaking, the trees are leafing out about two weeks earlier now, and the wildflowers are leafing out about eight to 10 days earlier now than in Thoreau's time. And the reason that they're flowering earlier and the trees are leafing out earlier is because it's warmer.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
It's happening across the United States. It's happening across Europe. It's happening across the world. Plants are flowering earlier. Trees are leafing out earlier.