Illinois Natural History Survey Reports

              1
ILLINOIS
NATURAL
HISTORY
SURVEY R e p o r t s
Summer 2005
No. 384
I N S I D E
Possible Displacement
Mechanisms in Non-native
Crayfishes
2
Nutrients in Illinois
Streams
3
How Does
Suburbanization
Influence Pest
Problems?
4
Are Small, Isolated
Prairie Preserves
Sustainable?
5
Species Spotlight:
Black and Yellow
Garden Spider
6
The Naturalist’s
Apprentice: Capture a
Garden Spider’s Web
7
Continued on back page
“Communicating Nature” participants pose outside Dixon
Mounds Museum. Photo courtesy of Cindy McGrew
The Art and Science of Communicating
Nature
It can take years to refine one’s
photography, drawing, and writ-ing
skills. In a semester’s time I
was able to confidently learn the
basics of each skill so that I can
now go and explore and practice
these skills further on my own.
—Peter Frank, NRES 499 stu-dent
The term “interdisciplinary”
appeared in the halls of higher
education some years ago, but is
still in some circles regarded as a
departure from serious study, as
if the world were naturally com-partmentalized.
What is often
forgotten is that most disciplines
we regard as discrete entities
today once were not. The most
striking example is that of art
and science. Leonardo Da Vinci,
Lewis and Clark, and Darwin all
documented their discoveries
using sketches and written obser-vation,
often with what we might
now consider an “artistic” eye.
A new course at the University of
Illinois this spring was created
with the intention of bridging that
modern art/science gap and
teaching science students to de-pict
their findings artistically for
a lay audience.
NRES 499, “Communicating
Nature,” was a collaborative ef-fort
by three Illinois Natural His-tory
Survey scientists: Dr. Mich-ael
Jeffords, Susan Post, and
Carolyn Nixon. The course pro-posed
that empirical methods are
not always sufficient to describe
the natural world, and can in fact
be somewhat myopic. The lofty
goal was to encourage students to
“analyze with the mind of a sci-entist,
see with the eyes of an
artist, and speak with the words
of a poet.”
The first step in communicat-ing
nature is truly to pay atten-tion
to it. Though the course was
divided into the three disciplines
of photography, writing, and
drawing, all of the instructors
focused on the fundamental skill
of observation. Post, the writing
instructor, insisted that students
have a 3" x 5" notebook on hand
at all times. They were to take
weekly notes on anything that
struck them, as well as the cir-cumstances
of the encounter: the
date, season, weather, and loca-tion.
These notes can provide
the raw material for a completed
piece, as shown by Post’s own
book, “Hiking Illinois,” which
began as two shoeboxes filled
with these little notebooks.
U of I students John Marlin and Emma O'Brien collaborate in a
drawing exercise of the NRES 499, “Communicating Nature”
course. Photo by Michael Jeffords, INHS Office of the Chief