Building connections with nature
While most of us engage with the world through our five senses, centuries of living in increasingly urban settings have dimmed our sense perceptions. For forest-dwelling humans, not being fully alive with all their senses could cost them their lives; staying alert is a way of life for them. City dwellers though have no such need, except while crossing a road on foot or when driving a car. Whenever we find ourselves in the natural world, the sights and sounds there awaken these dormant senses to engage with the world differently. It is only an invitation and it is up to us to take it.
There is also this curious factor of how knowledge shapes our observation. Our minds seem to notice those things that they know about already but fail to register things we don’t know about even if they are right under our noses! For years, I had been puzzled by things that were not part of my life during my early years spent in villages. For a person who is now obsessed with birdwatching, I have no memory of seeing birds as a child. How could I have not registered the presence of such colourful, vibrant, sweet-sounding creatures? That’s how I realized that when one has no knowledge of something, one often fails to perceive it.
Humans have always had their own special connections with nature. A favourite tree, a curve in the stream with its particular set of trees, a sacred rock, a cave, a grove, a pasture for livestock, and so on. As we move further away from nature, we lose these connections. We simultaneously lose our nature vocabulary—a fact noticed by the nature writer Robert Macfarlane. He has recorded many such losses in his book The Lost Words. Thus, when city children are taken to a place which is still partly wild, they experience fear and even revulsion. A beetle or insect, instead of igniting their curiosity, just produces fear. What kind of world will they perceive and live in? As educators, it is most concerning that children are growing up without such any connection to nature. However, this can be easily addressed when they are still young.
Strengthening connections and building layers
The best age is when children are in Kindergarten. Between three-and-a half to four years, their connections with nature are alive. Their eagerness to play with soil, and to see, smell, touch and hear everything is delightful to see. And of course they love to put different things in their mouth to taste them too! At this age, they are so curious. Every little stone, twig, or fallen leaf on the path—objects which adults pay no attention to—is examined and felt and experienced with a sense of wonder. Walking and climbing in different terrains builds their motor skills. Very soon, they are more agile, which then gradually leads to a greater ability to handle challenging situations. We regularly see children who have not had this exposure in early childhood, who are awkward in their movements and not as comfortable in their own bodies.
At the age of eight or nine, children begin to pay more attention to living creatures, to recognise patterns and colours and identify specific birds and butterflies. When they draw these and colour the drawings, the details become clearer to them. They start noticing their finer features, and soon this quality of observation becomes second nature to them. This is the easiest way to initiate a deeper journey into nature. This ability to identify specific butterflies and birds opens up the possibility of teaching them about ecology. What specific plant(s) do the Blue Tiger butterflies feed on? Which plants do they lay their eggs on—is it always the same kind of plant, or a different one each time? What would the choice be based on? As the children gradually build their knowledge base, new insights arise and understanding comes alive. Suddenly, they see connections they have not noticed previously, as for instance, the connection between the Lime Swallowtail butterfly and plants of the Rutaceae (Lime) family. This emerged from my students’ observations and not from a book.
Possible issues that may emerge here is learning the names of each species and understanding the limitations of naming. Often, when a bird or tree is recognised and named, a child is satisfied and moves on; observation seems to stop at that point. As teachers, we can help the student not get caught in mere naming but to use the name they now know to build further understanding. Learning especially takes on a new flavour and holds greater possibilities when students realise that they need not depend only on secondary sources or books alone, and that each one can generate our own information base which can be a learning source for others too. Of course we can use other reliable sources to validate our findings.
Contributions to Citizen Science
With Citizen Science growing in importance, students of any age can make and record observations online helped by a teacher. Season Watch provides quizzes, clues and so on to help nature-lovers notice the seasonal changes in trees that are commonly found in their neighbourhoods. eBird encourages them to notice birds and record their observations. They also hold worldwide bird watching days, like the Great Backyard Bird Count. Millions from across the world participate providing critical data on wild bird numbers. When students participate in the eBird census, they contribute valuable data for scientific and conservation purposes and this is very empowering for them. For observations on flora and fauna and for learning, iNaturalist is a great forum. The students, teachers and other members of The Forest Way Trust, to which I belong, observe and record every bird we find in our region on eBird. We have also made a record of the trees and shrubs and a fair number of plants we have identified in iNaturalist, and students have played an important part in the process. This is an ongoing activity in which every new species that we come across is added. We also record phenological changes like flowering, fruiting, seeding, the sprouting of new leaves and leaf fall, through the year. If this sort of data is collected over years, it helps botanists to identify natural cycles as well as changes caused by climate change.
Our Western Ghats tree learning project
For students at Marudam Farm School, years of practicing observation and building observational skills come to the fore in their last few years in school, during our annual trip to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary (GBS). Accompanied by our senior-most students, we teachers head to the sanctuary for a three-week period. We have been going to the GBS since our school’s inception in 2009. Over the years, different batches of students have been able to observe and engage with birds, butterflies, various other insects, reptiles and amphibians.
In the beginning, we always felt a bit intimidated by the rainforest trees. While we loved being in the forest, we realized we were quite ‘tree-blind’. We didn’t really know much about the forest. Then, during the field trip we took five years ago, Saji and Suresh who are members of the Green Phoenix team (an initiative of the GBS), generously invited us to go on a learning journey with them to get to know the trees of the region. They knew all about the trees, but they knew only the Malayalam, Paniya or Kurchia (regional languages) names—not the scientific ones—which we learnt. And they also gave us some new ‘lenses’ with which to look at the trees in the sanctuary.
Our first new lens—tree bark
The first obstacle to learning had been our inability to identify features that were easily recognizable. The leaves, fruit, and flowers of the trees in GBS are over a hundred feet above ground level. All we could see in front of us were towering tree-trunks! Saji and Suresh told us that many species could be recognised by closely observing the patterns on their bark. We were rather incredulous, but also quite intrigued. But . As we were totally unused to it, it took a bit of effort for us to imbibe this new learning tool. Gradually, we all began to notice patterns. Surprised and amused, we observed that the bark of certain trees peeled from above while some peeled from below. We realised that these were distinct features of specific species. Students also noticed for the first time that many trunks had lenticels through which they breathed, and when the lenticels were prominent, they too had distinct patterns.
Slowly, the magic of the forest unfolded for us. This was truly thrilling! In that first week, we learnt to identify at least ten distinct patterns. We now had the names of several trees in Malayalam, and we could identify an adult tree from its trunk though we often had no clue what the leaves, fruit or flowers of the trees were like! Our next challenge was to find the scientific name of the trees. We fell back on age-old resources— British botanical guides that were over a century old by J.S. Gamble and T.F. Bourdillon. And then we also used more recent Indian publications by S. G. Neginhal. None of these guides had photographs, but they did have descriptions and the local names of the trees or plants in different South Indian languages and dialects. Once we identified the local name of a tree, we matched it with its scientific name from these books. We also checked the Internet to see if the descriptions found in websites matched what little observations we had made. If it did, we noted down all the information that we could gather on the species. And so our own compendium on the trees of the Western Ghat tree compendium tentatively began to take shape.
A second new ‘lens’: branching patterns
The next aspect that we began to pay attention to were the branching patterns. For many trees, branches grow in distinct geometric patterns: species like Knema, Myristica and Garcinia have branches which grow at ninety degrees to the main trunk; others like Palaquim, Phoebe and some Elaeocarpus have a unique curved pattern of branching. As we began to internalise the bark and branch patterns, we realised that we were getting to know the forest better. What were hitherto just tall columns to us began to have identities. This knowledge facilitated our relationship with trees. By this stage, we could identify around twenty species of trees.
Thinking back, I recall a particular incident took place then that became a tipping point. We had found a lone flower lying on the forest floor. It had a beautiful distinct pattern. Our local teachers provided us with its local name—eralam—but we did not find such a name in any of the reference books we had. We were keen to find the scientific name of the flower. All of us, teachers and students, sat together poring over all the information we could lay our hands on in the library. For a whole day and into the night, our search took different paths. Finally in the book Flowers of Sahyadri by Shrikant Inghalkar, we found an illustration of the flower and discovered that the tree it came from was Lophopetalum Wightianum. This hundred-foot-tall tree grew near streams, and its seeds were light enough to be dispersed by wind. This single-minded search convinced our students that our tree identification journey was a truly enjoyable pastime. We ended that first year by recording nearly forty trees. We collated all we knew on each of these species through drawings, photos, notes and references,
Another new ‘lens’: identifying leaf venation patterns The following year began with us looking at leaves of saplings, which were at eye level. We began to pay attention to aspects of each leaf—something we had never done. The length of each leaf petiole, its appearance, and leaf margins were studied. So was the arrangement of leaves on branches to see whether it was opposite or alternate, simple or compound. We then looked at the underside of the leaf to study its venation patterns. Soon, totally new features that we had never noticed began to emerge— the presence (or sometimes the absence) of glands on the leaves or on the petiole. This step of in our learning journey was the most challenging one so far, as there were so many similar patterns and so many fine differences in venation to look for.
One very interesting outcome of this exercise was the level playing field that it created. Students and teachers were all learning something new here and prior knowledge did not count for much. Some students made phenomenal advances, leaving the rest of the group including the teachers far behind. This gave those students a lot of confidence. Among the students too, it brought out interesting variations. Amongst our students, there were some who were intellectually able but struggled with observational learning —grasping concepts easily but finding it difficult to pick out specific features and identifying specimens. Another fascinating aspect of being in a forest is to have a sense of direction. Some seemed gifted with a natural sense of direction and orientation while others were totally lost. Still others began to gradually build this skill. Often our guides would stop and ask us to point out some known landmark. The responses were sometimes hilarious and completely wrong! Incidentally, the girls left most of the boys far behind while learning field botany.
Other learnings
The following year brought the best possible gift for us in our learning exercise—time with India’s number one botanist, the young and brilliant Dr. Navendu Page. We had never met anyone like him before. He seemed to recognise almost every tree, shrub or plant or had the tools to help identify them. Most importantly, he was more than ready to share his knowledge with us and very patiently at that. Our forest walks then changed: Saji and Suresh first helped us to identify trees, as before, and provided us with their local names. We would then photograph those trees and send the images to Navendu. By the time we returned to our camp, he would have sent their scientific names to us! We now knew the local name and scientific names of local trees and could begin our field observations.
All this happened at a furious pace, and we were unable to process the information that fast. We needed to take repeated walks down the same routes and record all the new observations. This was what consolidated our learning. We began to club our observations into sections. If it was a trifoliate leaf, we knew it had to be either from a Melicope lunu-ankenda or a Bischofia. If the leaf had a light green petiole, it was either of a Mastixia or a Persea. If it was a compound leaf, it had to be one of ten species. If compound leaves were oppositely arranged, then the specimen could only be from one of two species. This sort of clubbing helped us narrow down our choices.
Further, we also learnt that trees produce the most fascinating chemicals in the world, many of which we have still not identified. While some that we have identified have great medicinal properties, some can cause severe allergic reactions. Thus, plants from the Anacardiaceae family produce a chemical called urushiol, which causes blisters such as those we get around our mouth from eating mango. So, we knew mango trees belong to this family, as do cashew trees. In the Western Ghats, there are several other trees from this family, and some like two species of Holigarna and a Nothopegia can cause severe allergies. We learnt that it is important to not touch any part of an unidentified plant or tree casually, for this can have serious consequences. Of course, students or teachers who had an allergic response to a particular tree learnt to identify that tree very quickly!
At 130 species and counting, our tree identification journey is still running. We have covered most of the trees in GBS and many of the shrubs as well, and are now looking to learn about lianas. Our students and some of our teachers have together created a consolidated record of these, including details and many photographs, and some drawings and sketches too. The students with whom this journey began have now graduated, and the subsequent batches are on their learning journeys now. Most of us teachers have advanced in our learning, and our students therefore have many more resource persons whose different styles of teaching can help them approach this learning in different ways.
In this project, we have come across a small number of students who were not ready to take the plunge with tree identification and preferred to observe birds instead. Of course, they have been given this freedom to do so, but their projects brought alive the joy in learning to them as well. The energy generated during these three weeks of our field trip every year spills over to the rest of the year. There have been some heartbreaking discoveries too. Once during a forest walk, we came across giant pits that had been used during the period of the British empire to trap wild elephants. They were a chilling reminder of the past for us all. Also, we discovered that although some of the forest patches look untouched, much of the original forest was at one time chopped for the growing the Ironwood tree—Mesua ferrea. It is no wonder that so many of those trees still grow here. We further found out that what looks like an innocent trail through the forest now, was once a regular route taken by armies that marched down it dragging their cannons. Today though, the forest has recovered its former grandeur, and those unpleasant memories are a part of history. This invited us to put those events behind us too.
Conclusion
Our present chapter of tree learning and our earlier chapters of pursuing birds, butterflies and other life forms have truly awakened our senses. When we are in Wayanad, we feel a heightened sense of being alive. Each minute of each day seems so vibrant. As we lie in our cozy beds in our forest camp, we can hear the call of the different species of owls—the fish owl, the wood owl and even the elusive Sri Lankan frogmouth. Most of us are awake early to hear the dawn chorus which is one of the sweetest sounds in any healthy forest. Amidst all this excitement, there is no talk of boredom, or of missing TV serials and sports. None of the students carries a phone. Life is so rich and we cannot wait to experience it to the fullest. We feel this energy is carried through the year, even if not to the same extent. We feel privileged and truly blessed for this great opportunity. As a teacher, I wish that all young people had such opportunities.
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If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
— Rachel Carson, in A Sense of Wonder