Wild About Wildflowers

I had the realization this summer that for someone who spends a lot of time outside, I don’t know a lot about plants. Mammals, yes. Birds, somewhat. Fish and reptiles, a little. But all things green and leafy? Not so much. I can recognize a berry bush when I see one (can you tell where my priorities lie?), but beyond that, I’ve always been sort of… meh about vegetation. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve tended to find plants fairly boring, and have eschewed studying them in favour of the more exciting two- and four-legged organisms that rely on them.

This started to change a little bit when a good chunk of my job became helping one of my supervisor’s grad students with sampling vegetation associated with flying squirrel captures. While I’m still fairly clueless, terms like DBH and decay class are now part of my vocabulary. I can distinguish between different species of maple, ash, oak, and pine (at least, most of the time), and I know the difference between herbaceous plants, bryophytes, and lichens. And as I am with most things, once I’ve learned a little, I want to know a lot more.

In an effort to increase my knowledge of the things that grow where I live and work, I bought a guide to wildflowers off the Internet (the ROM Field Guide to Wildflowers of Ontario, to be specific). Why wildflowers? Well, they’re pretty, and probably easier to identify for a beginner than shrubs or mosses, but they also have their more tangible uses for someone interested in herbal remedies and dyeing fibres, like I am. Unfortunately this book doesn’t list the edibility or medicinal uses of the flowers as the authors believe that no plant should be taken from the wild, but the guide’s layout and scientific approach appeal to me, and the information it contains can always be supplemented with the Internet.

So far I’ve taken the guide to Algonquin Park and near to London, ON for work, to a cottage on Silver Lake that my parents were renting, and just around my neighbourhood here in Peterborough. I’ve finally learned the names of many flowers I’ve known by sight since I was young (cow vetch, Philadelphia fleabane, chicory, horned trefoil, bladder campion, to name just a few), discovered some that I’ve heard of but didn’t know grew in the area (eg. St. John’s wort, bearberry, evening-primrose), and stumbled across a few that aren’t so common (eg. wood-poppy, which is endangered in Ontario). Flowers are actually so cool! For example, the Indian-pipe plant, Monotropa uniflora, entirely lacks chlorophyll, and relies on the fungus with which it maintains a mycorrhizal relationship to supply its nutrients.

Taking the field guide with me on a walk in search of flowers forces me to slow down and observe. It’s like a special kind of scavenger hunt with all kinds of surprises along the way that I wouldn’t have seen if I wasn’t kneeling in the dirt with my face at the level of a blossom or leaf. I love the challenge of a particularly tricky identification, the satisfaction of figuring it out, and the awareness that the plants growing around us have so much to offer, physically and aesthetically, if we’d only learn how to recognize and use them (respectfully and sustainably, of course!).

Wood lily near Petroglyphs Provincial Park.

Knapweed in Dutton, near Port Stanley.

Sweet pea at Lac-Notre-Dame, near Wakefield, QC.

Rough-fruited cinquefoil, at Lac-Notre-Dame, near Wakefield, QC.

The flowers in the featured photo are common yarrow, ox-eye daisy, tall buttercup, bladder campion, heal-all, and grass-leaved goldenrod.

Note: It should go without saying, but I thought I should add a disclaimer that I primarily identify plants in situ without disturbing them and take pictures if I don’t have the book on me or need to Google. If I do pick a plant, I make sure that it isn’t rare or at-risk, I only take the part that I’m going to use (i.e. for tea or dye) so that the plant can regenerate itself, I never pick on private property without permission, and I take care not to decimate an area entirely of the plant.

“I’m Not Good Enough to Be Here”: Impostor Syndrome and Me

“I struggle with seeing myself as an impostor a lot of the time – like, who let this girl do science? But you know, I think a lot of us are just faking it until we make it, and that’s okay.”

The first time I heard about impostor syndrome was when a Facebook friend shared this BuzzFeed article entitled “13 Charts That Will Make Total Sense to People with Impostor Syndrome”. After skimming through the figures, my first thought was “But my Facebook friend is so talented and successful and cool! How can she feel like she’s not actually good at anything?”. My second thought: “I totally have this too.”

For those who don’t know, impostor syndrome refers to the inability of high-achieving individuals to internalize their accomplishments along with the persistent feeling of being a fraud. The term was first used by Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes, clinical psychologists, in their 1978 paper that documented the prevalence of the syndrome among high-achieving women. Since Clance and Imes’ initial work, it has been widely studied and is now believed to to occur equally in men, while young scientists of any gender are particularly prone. Neither a mental disorder nor a distinct personality trait, impostor syndrome is instead a reaction to certain events or stimuli- a response that some people, for whatever reason, exhibit more than others.

Impostor syndrome manifests itself in my mind as a little voice that says, “I don’t know enough about this topic”, “Everyone else is smarter than me”, “I tricked them into thinking I’m qualified”, “Soon they’ll find out the truth”, and “I’m not good enough to be here.” It’s am undermining whisper telling tales of inadequacy and cover-ups. I’m a senior undergraduate student grappling with big ecological ideas for my honours thesis, and this doubting voice is only likely to get worse as I head to grad school in the fall.

Having a name to put to these feelings is somehow freeing, as is knowing that I’m not alone. Maybe it’s lingering shock from realizing when I came to McGill that I am just another special snowflake in a blizzard of special snowflakes, maybe it’s related to my perfectionism, but knowing objectively under this sea of emotions that I am good at what I do is made easier. Throughout my degree I have realized some things about being in science: there will always be someone who is smarter than me, there will always be more to learn, and these are in fact good things. When I really think about it, I don’t want to be the most intelligent person in the room, because then who would push me to be better? The day when science, a field built around the pursuit of knowledge, has nothing more to discover would be a sad day indeed.

In the end, maybe it’s not about getting rid of my impostor syndrome. Maybe it’s about recognizing these feelings for what they are and succeeding anyway- faking it until I make it. As Chris Woolston says in this Nature article about impostor syndrome in science, “In a profession where sporadic failure — in grants, in jobs, in publications — is the norm, the real failure is unnecessarily giving up on a promising career.”

 

Photo credit: Matteo Zamaria for the McGill Biology Student Union‘s “Humans of Biology” project.

Notes from the Field: Road Ecology of American Martens

Here are a few snippets and photos from the weeks I spent as a field assistant this summer. I was working on a live-trapping/radiotelemetry project on American martens in the Laurentians north of Quebec City, supervised by Dr. Jochen Jaeger from Concordia. We split our time between Parc National des Grands-Jardins and the Reserve Faunique des Laurentides, and we were focusing on removing the collars from the animals since the project was ending. These are the things I’ll remember…

-First of all, the martens!

(I would not be handling this animal if it were not immobilized, and this photo was taken as I was about to remove it from the vehicle where it was being manipulated. The marten was not being unduly stressed by the handling/picture taking).

 

-It rained for seven days straight at one point. I was pretty much always soggy and cold for that week.

-Beautiful hikes!!!

-Climbing so. many. moose fences in order to get to and from our traps. That’s a real Canadian workout. I was grateful when it was convenient for me to use one of the actual gates.

-Reviving a hypothermic groundhog and getting to see her scurry back to munching on plants.

(Photo creds to Benjamin Larue for this one)

-Spotting moose every couple of days on one particular back road. The best was when we crested one hill and had to stop for a moose, and then crested another and saw two bear cubs running into the forest.

-About two and a half km along the dirt road behind our house at one of the sites was a ghost town (really just a few abandoned buildings and an old salmon run). It was really pretty, especially just after a storm.

-Finding a thrush with an injured leg in the road and nursing it back to health for the day.

-Pickng wild strawberries while walking to and from traps.

-Driving one night to Chicoutimi to relax and wander through a music festival.

-Spotting all kinds of woodland creatures.

-Exploring the Charlevoix, picking the most incredible blueberries, and visiting the emu farm.

 

 

 

Notes from the Field: Small Mammals and Lyme Disease

This summer I had the opportunity to be a field assistant for Dr. Virginie Millien and her research on the role of the white-footed mouse in the spread of Lyme disease in Quebec. For the past two months I have helped her grad students trap small mammals and collect ticks throughout the Monteregie. Through being stuck in thunderstorms, stuck in woods filled with mosquitoes, stuck in muddy cornfields, stuck with the pungent smell of rodent droppings, and stuck doing dissections in a sweltering hot tent, we had an amazing field season. The mice were plentiful (unfortunately, so were the ticks), and there was lots of time for reading and exploring the various places we were staying at. From Saint-Anicet to Saint-Etienne-de-Beauharnois to Saint-Liboire to Longueuil to the Morgan arboretum, it was nice to camp out and practise my French more. Though I’m not sure I’ll ever want to pick a million tiny ticks off of a flannel sheet ever again, I’ve definitely learned some valuable field skills that will be useful in the future.