The Adventures of a Hubbard Brook Kid

On the face of it, it wasn’t much. I would wake up, drink some strong tea, dowse myself in insect repellent, put on the hiking boots and head into the forest. Each day we would follow a different line, or “transect,” through the woods, and I would walk from tree to tree. At each one I would wrap measuring tape around the trunk and call out the diameter and species to my partner, who would record it by hand in a little yellow journal. After a while we would switch, and I would become the writer. At the end of the day we came home, minus two sandwiches, having collected another several hundred data points. After about two months we had hugged around 26,000 trees. I regained feeling in my toes a few weeks later.

The work wasn’t especially glamorous, and I had come by it honestly – the graduate student leading a section of my Environmental Science class needed research assistants, and I applied for the job. It was interesting; we were gathering data to help figure out how bird populations change when new residential neighborhoods and houses are built. The fact that I was the very first third-generation researcher to work at the Brook was a nifty little afterthought. I would have taken the job even had my grandmother not written a book about it. As it turned out, I learned a lot, met lots of interesting characters, made good friends, and only ran into one bear.

When I was growing up, the Brook’s main influence was on the family lore. There were copies of The Endless Chain on nearly every bookshelf. Papa Frank was the man to go to for identification of birdcalls. When we visited the grandparents, we would usually end up going on a hike. But my family’s involvement with Hubbard Brook also informed the way we learned about the environment and the world around us. Ecology was a familiar household word for us (and it meant something other than “ecosystem”!) My sister and I knew that the natural environment is a vast web of interacting parts, and it seemed obvious to us that an event that impacted one part – the population of caterpillars, for example – would be felt somewhere else down the line. It always comes as a surprise to me when I meet someone who doesn’t share that intuition.

Still, working at the Brook during the summer of my sophomore year of college was eye-opening. Surely, I had thought, my experience would be different from that of my grandfather decades before. Technology had advanced – we had computers, satellites, better chemical sensors. But I had failed to consider the unique features of ecology. How do you get a complete picture of what happens in the natural environment? You can’t bring a tiny specimen into the lab to examine it. The specimen and the lab are one and the same – you have put yourself into it. And then you watch, measure, and observe. And do it some more. 50 years later, that is still what we are doing. In 2007, the techniques I used were exactly the same as they had been in the 1960’s. Hike into the woods. Measure a tree by hand and identify a bird by its sound. Write that down in a little notebook. By gathering these data I was both tapping into and bolstering the tradition established by my grandfather and his colleagues – contributing new information to the body of work that has been compiled by generations of scientists. We know more than we did then only because they were willing to do the work of hiking into the forest, scattering minerals into the soil, and then watching for months and sometimes years to see what happened.

Many of the researchers I met at the Brook were only there for one season. I was one of them. But others, like Gene Likens, were there every summer, always ready for a visit when we returned to the Brook for the annual meeting. The Brook is small enough to be in every sense a community. Communities are strengthened by their traditions, and the new online version of this book is an attempt to assist the community in getting in touch with its own. In addition to being an introduction to the field of ecology for young people and a retrospective for us, I hope that it will become a place to ask questions, explore ideas, and tell stories. Like I did, younger researchers may gain from realizing the connections we share with those who came before – and those who are still there. More experienced colleagues may find a willing audience for their narratives of work, fun, and life at the Brook. And new readers and those who have never even heard of the Brook will get a glimpse into the ways of a discipline that is both human in scale and huge in implication. Perhaps it will even pique their interest, and they will find their own way to a small forest ecosystem in New Hampshire.

Where else could you claim to be a professional tree-hugger?

David Deull

Son of Sheryl Sturges

Grandson of Pat and Frank Sturges