Not every botanist becomes famous. Claude Canfield never lodged botanical specimens in the Smithsonian or any other herbarium. He never held an academic position and didn’t publish any scientific papers. To be honest, he never really became a true botanist. His only scientific claim to fame is that he was my great grandfather, which, admittedly, isn’t really such a claim. However, Claude’s botanical studies and his documentation of them are incredibly valuable to me as I make sense of how I came to study nature, and provide a personal example of the true value of field notes.
I have to believe that Claude’s interest in natural history had something to do with the fact that his son Bailey, my grandfather, set up his family on a wooded gentleman’s farm in southwestern Michigan. And I’m certain that my experiences on that farm affected my desire to become a naturalist and scientist, as we spent many long vacations and holidays there, hiking and exploring among the sassafras and sumac, and watching satyr butterflies wafting through its wetlands.
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I never met my great granddad Claude, but he wrote some notes in 1891 that have helped me understand where I came from as a naturalist. These notes came in the form of a small “Botany Notebook” that my grandfather gave me on Christmas Day in 1998. This botany notebook is full of observations on shapes of leaves and contains many sketches that are presented as labeled figures. Granted, these notes are not revolutionary science, but instead are documents that help me understand my family and the tradition of natural history we have.
Direct descendents are only one group of ancestors from which we might derive inspiration, and there is a much larger set of academic antecedents who inform our work. They too have written us volumes of notes and letters -- not necessarily individually addressed, but more generally directed to us -- in their field notebooks. I know I’m not alone in counting Edward O. Wilson as one of my personal heroes. I can even trace my academic lineage back to him as a sort of great uncle. I recently had the chance to look into his notebooks from his historic trip to the Caribbean in the 1950s and was transported to the field with him, looking over his shoulder as he laid down primary observations of ant behavior. Since, I have worked to bring a set of perspectives on field notes from other eminent naturalists – such as Bernd Heinrich, Kenn Kaufman, and the Smithsonian’s own Anna K. Behrensmeyer – into print as Field Notes on Science and Nature (Harvard University Press) in the hopes that this may allow all of us to consider how we keep notes and to be inspired by other field scientists.
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Field Notes on Science and Nature is only a sampling of field notes and perspectives on how they may be kept. There are shelves and shelves of unexplored notebooks from historical figures in field science that are only now being revealed to us more generally by the Field Book Project. These documents provide countless examples of adventures, trials, and actual scientific data that have been sent to us through time in the form of field notes. Thankfully, we will now be able to sort through these and better understand our museum collections, add new information to the stories we tell about the plants and animals we study, and also consider why we head to the field and who we are in the context of our naturalist ancestors.
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