Field Notes on Science & Nature

Edited by:
  • Michael R. Canfield
Edited by Harvard University Press: 2011. 320 pp. $27.95 9780674057579 | ISBN: 978-0-6740-5757-9

Field biology: the very words conjure up romance, danger, excitement. There is a thrill to fieldwork that makes lab-based scientists ask “How was your holiday?” when one returns from a stint outside. Many books have been written about the explorers of the past, transcribing their logs and journals, or fictionalizing their adventures. This volume is refreshingly different. Biologist Michael Canfield has compiled a set of essays not on researchers' travels, but on how they capture their experiences in their notes.

Field Notes on Science & Nature is an eclectic collection that crosses many disciplines, from geology, botany and zoology to art and anthropology. The variety of styles and records described are fascinating — field notes are very personal. Some of the contributors take notes entirely electronically, others in red pen in cheap notebooks. Others use pictures more than words.

Few of us have the artistic skills of Jonathan Kingdon or Jenny Keller, scientist-illustrators whose drawings alone make this book worth buying. But even the sketchiest sketch can call to mind a place or organism in a way no words can. I remember the field books of a friend with whom I worked in the tropical forests of Central America: an incredible mixture of description, sketches and taped-in leaves. Today, his seemingly chaotic collections evoke those places far better than my own lists. I learned from this, and started to sketch the plants I collected — flower and leaf shapes, plant forms and outlines appeared in my pages.

The tradition has a long pedigree, encompassing notebook sketches by the great Victorian naturalists. My favourites are those of Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce, early evolutionists who mused on the page about why, as well as what and where. Keller's advocacy of standardized colour palettes in her essay harks back to the methods of eighteenth-century illustrator Sydney Parkinson, who accompanied Joseph Banks on Captain James Cook's voyage on HMS Endeavour, or the Austrian Bauer brothers, one of whom accompanied Captain Matthew Flinders on HMS Investigator a few decades later.

A mushroom coral and one of its polyps drawn in the field by science illustrator Jenny Keller. Credit: J. KELLER

Parkinson drew and painted all of the plants that were collected, but for efficiency only coloured part of each (a practice recommended by Keller). He died on the voyage, but his work was enough to enable the publication of the entire collection two centuries later as a series of coloured plates. Ferdinand Bauer's sketches of plants and animals of Australia were intricately labelled with numbers indicating colours; it was only in the twentieth century that the key to the colours was discovered, deep in the collections in Madrid. His brother, Franz, used the same key in botanical paintings he made at Kew, near London.

Accuracy and speed of capture of the image are just as important now. But digital photography has not obviated the need for field sketches. As many contributors point out, a sketch can be labelled on the spot and does not require printers, cameras and other electronic hardware to be carried to remote places.

Whether notes are telegraphic or detailed, a key to abbreviations is a must. Making field notes directly on the computer can solve the transcription problem, as one only has to enter information once and typed text is easy to read, say entomologist Piotr Naskrecki and plant biologist Jim Reveal. But, Reveal adds, computerized notes lack the personality so apparent in handwritten accounts.

Illustrated field notes can provide the basis for public conversations on science. For example, anthropologist Karen Kramer's sketch maps of Mayan villages aided her research into how the villages functioned because local people were happy to talk about her interpretations of their space. And ornithologist Kenn Kaufman describes the species lists made through the eBird project, which records birders' observations via a website. This crowd-sourcing method of taking field notes is an extension of the 'bioblitz' concept, in which members of the public list all the species they encounter over a short period.

It is disturbing to observe, as ecologist Erick Greene does in his essay on best practice, that today's generation of field biologists do not keep notes as diligently as their laboratory-based counterparts. Lab books are retained as permanent records (sometimes drawn upon in cases of scientific misconduct), whereas field notebooks are rarely archived. Yet they record observations that might seem trivial at the time, but on reflection become the basis for new insight. As ecologist Bernd Heinrich rightly says, notes from the field often represent a search for problems, not solutions. Who knows whose field notebooks now contain observations that will change the world?

I will alter my own note-taking after reading this set of essays. All scientists, whether based in the field or the lab, could benefit from the advice given here so eloquently.