Month: July 2020

Dusk. A cold fitful breeze. Quiet except for our footfalls on dry leaves. Far above, a hawk glides, dark against the twilight sky.

“Cooper’s,” says Theo after a swift glance.

Theo is leading our group along the Rivanna Trail in search of woodcocks. It’s sunset in spring—courting time.

Theo picks a spot on the border between a large cut hayfield and the woods. We hunker down, breathing on our cold hands, and wait.

“Peent! Peent!”

It’s the male woodcock’s call, a prelude to a remarkable display. The bird flies upwards in a spiral, his wings making a twittering sound, and then descends with a gentle chirping. He will do this over and over, charming whatever female woodcock he can lure out.

We wait, trying not to stir.

“Peent! Peent!”

A swift blur in the twilight. “See him?” whispers Theo, gesturing up and right. Some of us are quick enough, others miss the elusive target. We wait again. The cold settles into toes and ears; no more calls. Dark sets in. We head back along the trail, using our flashlights sparingly, stopping at intervals while Theo plays owl calls on his phone. Faintly, a screech owl replies. It’s like many other bird walks—except that most of our group is still in grade school, and Theo, our intrepid and knowledgeable leader, is 14. This is the Blue Ridge Young Birders Club.

Theo’s brother Ezra, 16, is also along tonight, and says the club started in 2012 with four young birders who liked both birding together and teaching others. As the original members “aged out,” others got involved. Joanne Salidis, the boys’ mother and an avid naturalist herself, signed on as coordinating adult. New members have connected through the club’s website, through the Wild Birds Unlimited store, or word of mouth.

BRYBC is designed for young people ages 7-18, and monthly meetings are held at Ivy Creek Natural Area. The club runs at least one field trip a month, seeking a specific bird (like woodcocks, or golden eagles in Highland County) or visiting a special habitat (like the Great Dismal Swamp). The group also monitors the bluebird trail at Piedmont Virginia Community College from March through August, collecting data for the Virginia Bluebird Society. The weekly monitoring is open to anyone, says Salidis, “and kids can be younger than 7, with a parent’s full cooperation, of course, so it’s really a family project.”

Ezra started going on club outings in elementary school, when he got interested in peregrine falcons—“how fast they could fly, and the whole DDT story.” (The peregrine was pushed almost to extinction by the now-banned DDT insecticide.) He enjoyed both the sharing and the competition, spotting the most birds or the most unusual species. Ezra’s interest sparked Theo’s curiosity, and now both are avid birders and knowledgeable naturalists.

“When kids get interested in something, that naturally leads to more interests—from birds to habitats, seasonal changes, photography,” their mother says.

The other young birders on our woodcock trip represent a range of knowledge and interests. Isabella, 11, says, “I just really like animals.” At the school she used to attend, in England, they were lucky enough to host visits from both Jane Goodall and Sir David Attenborough. Isa, 10, credits her grandmother: “She sent me out on nature walks all the time.” Cyrus, 9, is mostly all eyes and ears. But he’s learning, even if it’s just how to walk and observe in the woods.

Art and business aren’t the most compatible concepts—some might even consider them diametrically opposed. Connections exist, however, and Patti Pan is seeking to find and expand upon them with her startup RevArt, a “global platform connecting artists” with commercial brands and with each other.

Pan, a 2020 graduate of UVA’s Darden School of Business, was thinking about RevArt even before attending grad school. Prior to moving to Charlottesville, she worked in Hong Kong, where she helped develop plans for a large shopping mall. The team installed an art gallery within the space, so that “people could shop and enjoy the artwork together.” When Pan saw the enormous success of the mall, which she says brought in 120,000 customers daily, she started thinking about the common threads between art and commercialism.

Pan wants to give a home to the creatives who need it most, she says, and who might not know much about the business aspect of the industry. “I want to disrupt the industry and make the art world more like democracy,” Pan says. To serve this mission, RevArt’s clients tend to be emerging, rather than established artists.

“Business is a pain for [artists],” she says. “They like creation…but they also want to make a living.” That’s where RevArt comes in. The startup handles IP licensing for its clients and helps them make commercial connections. Really, Pan says, the goal is to expose inexperienced artists to a profitability they might not otherwise reach. “The whole IP licensing market grows 10 percent every year. People don’t know that.”

The business is still young enough that something as drastic as the pandemic could potentially cripple it—but Pan says that hasn’t been the case. In her words, COVID-19 creates “the perfect artist lifestyle. I don’t mean that COVID-19 is a good thing, but it’s just super comfortable for artists…they can focus on creation.”

While her clients might be producing at a greater rate than usual, Pan concedes that the pandemic has certainly slowed the growth of RevArt and made communication more difficult. Artists based both in Charlottesville and in Hong Kong (where the startup’s two office spaces are located) have asked Pan to come to their studios in person as opposed to virtual visits. “People hate Zoom!” she says.

She uses the necessary shift to technology to focus more on RevArt’s potential “digital assets. People…are social animals. We still want to see the artwork. How to leverage technology to accomplish that—that’s the new challenge for me.”

Pan hopes that making artwork more available online will also have the effect of broadening its audience, a goal that returns her to the idea of “democracy.” The art industry, she says, is “very far away” from day-to-day life. “It’s being controlled by a few groups of very wealthy people. We want to make it more accessible to ordinary people.”

All of these plans are for further down the line. For now, RevArt’s main goal is that of any small business during difficult times: “to survive.”

It’s hard enough for a startup to make it in a “normal” economy, Pan says. She mentions her Darden peers taking Wall Street or consulting jobs rather than striking out on their own, but stresses that the security isn’t worth it to her. “I’m spending my savings to do this. But I want to do this, and I see value.”

“Phenology” might not be a word you use in everyday conversation, but it’s one of the keys to tracking climate change. The term refers to the study of timing in the natural world—the dates when plants flower, leaves emerge, seeds drop, and animals migrate. The USA National Phenology Network is building a stable of citizen scientists to track events like those across the country. I joined up this spring, and the observations I’ve gathered have become part of a database used by scientists worldwide.

“Phenology is a really great indicator of climate change impacts, but we don’t have a good way to do standardized monitoring across the country,” says Erin Posthumus with USANPN. Her agency—which is based at the University of Arizona—was created in 2007 and launched the citizen scientist program, Nature’s Notebook, two years later. Since that time, 18,000 people nationwide have taken part by keeping a close eye on certain plants and animals and reporting their observations.

Among those are many groups at schools and nature centers, but also “backyard observers”—individuals, like me. When I signed up with Nature’s Notebook, I chose four plant species that grow on my property, so I could keep up with regular observations without having to get in the car. These included two trees (poplar and sassafras), one shrub (spicebush), and one wildflower (bloodroot).

As I began observing in March, everything still looked wintry, but soon things started to happen. Bloodroot leaves emerged. Poplar buds appeared. It all felt surprisingly dramatic when I had data sheets in my hand (I marked it all down on paper and entered the data manually, but another option is to use the program’s mobile app).

Posthumus says that the data collected around the country is a real resource for science. “All the data submitted are freely available,” she says. “You can filter for specific data sets, species, life cycle
events. We’re up to 82 peer-reviewed publications by scientists that have used the data.”

I found that having a reason to check on these plants every few days got me to walk in the woods more often, putting me in closer touch with the progress of the season, and acquainting me with the plants themselves. Next year, I plan to add more species to my list, and I’ll make sure some of those are part of Nature’s Notebook’s special campaigns. The Nectar Connectors campaign, for one, aims to collect data specifically on plants that monarch butterflies and other pollinators use for food. Knowing when milkweed blooms, for example, can help scientists predict whether the timing of monarch migrations will continue to align with when their food is available.

All this can help with future adaptation, Posthumus says. “National parks and national wildlife refuges are using the data to help them answer their own questions about how the onset of spring has changed in parks and refuges,” she says. “It can help them think about what’s going to happen in the future.”