Blogging – Overlooked Nature

Photo 101: Home

When I first moved to North Carolina, I didn’t have a place to live lined up. I figured I’d camp out at a park for a few days until I found one. Lucky for me, NC has approximately a bazillion state parks, and I found one nearby with a campground.

A few days turned into two weeks, during which it rained the ENTIRE TIME and I got more and more frustrated as various possibilities fell through. At one point, I posted this extremely green photo on Instagram and Facebook:

View this post on Instagram

Home sweet home…

A post shared by Bethany Harvey (@bethanyaharvey) on Aug 9, 2012 at 11:17am PDT

My concerned friends back in Florida replied that they hoped this was just a temporary situation. It did turn out to be temporary, and a friend who lived in the area called some of her friends, and they offered me a place to stay for a couple of days. Then I finally managed to find someone with a room to rent who didn’t sound creepy and didn’t think I sounded creepy. And after a year of that, I moved into a little house all by myself, and I still live there.

So, this photo? This is not home. This is just the spot where I was camping this weekend. For fun. And it didn’t even rain!

tent

Please bear with me…

This month, I am trying to meet my graduation requirements so I can finally stop going to school. I’m also participating in NaNoWriMo and Blogging 201. And my workplace is pretty short-handed lately, so I’m working more hours than usual.

Also it’s late fall, and shorter days have never been good for me. North Carolina is not exactly the Arctic, but, I mean, I got depressed in winter in Florida.

Posting might get a little erratic around here, is what I’m saying.

Window

This week’s photo challenge was “Grid,” and it took me all week to find this one in the windows of Patterson Hall at North Carolina State University.

Hey, look, I’m on LGBT STEM!

I am currently on a botany field trip to the mountains, where I am likely out of cell phone range and not answering comments, but hopefully taking lots of pictures to eventually post. But through the miracle of post scheduling, I’m posting this now! A couple of days ago, LGBT STEM posted an interview with me on their site, so go check it out.

Or just look at this lovely parrot pitcher plant. You’ve probably noticed my fondness for carnivorous plants by now. Or maybe it’s not that noticeable, because doesn’t everyone like carnivorous plants?

In Which I Cheat at the Blog Award Game

So, Vibrant at blabberwockying! has nominated me for a Sunshine Blogger award, and both Kathy at PsycheServices and izabolinha at The Turtle Way have nominated me for a Premio Dardos award.

As we say where I live: “Thanks, y’all!”

The way these awards work is like a game. The English translation of Premio Dardos is “Prize Darts” and I think it’s very descriptive. You throw your “darts” in the form of links at other bloggers; then they throw them at more bloggers, and so on. Blog awards are like a chain letter, minus the promises of true love if you forward it on and a gory death if you don’t. I am resistant to threats of gory death from anonymous letter writers. But a compliment from a fellow blogger is another story.

So: Thank you for thinking of me! I appreciate it, but I am going to cheat a little. The problem is, I don’t know enough bloggers who would be receptive to this and who also haven’t already received both awards to write posts for all of these. So, to those who named me for the prizes, I hope you will accept this big combined award post, which gives me an excuse to mention some friendly Blogging 101 classmates who may not write about things that would ordinarily come up on a nature blog. So this is one big, combined, all-purpose award post. I’ll call it the Bethany-Is-Lazy Award, and it’s a one-time thing that nobody is expected to pass on. It also gives me a chance to try out this pagination thing, because this post is gonna be long.

Pages: 123

How I Succeeded and Failed with a B.A. in English

The Bitchy Editor’s post How Your B.A. in English Prepared You for Failure got me thinking about what constitutes failure or success in relation to a degree. I have a B.A. in English. It is my only completed degree so far. I was, by some standards, a success: I actually used it to get a job. It was still a giant mistake.

I was trying to double major in English and wildlife ecology, until I was so burnt-out and broke that I decided to just finish the degree I was closest to and get the hell out. I only needed one more class for English. I was working a string of temp jobs and just beginning what looked like a promising writing career, and I could see myself doing something like writing or editing until I could make a living writing my own stuff. So I took that one class and got out.

I bounced around in temp jobs until I was hired as a copy editor of construction textbooks. I thought, hey, I’m good with words, and I’d like to learn about construction. Perfect!

Not so much. The job killed what little attention span I had, and after staring at a manuscript all day, I found that the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was write. When I did force myself to write, it was not great prose. It was, well, forced. I’ve never been a heavily stylized writer; I aim for an invisible style. But everything I wrote then was as flat as a plumbing manual for vo-tech students. Continue reading How I Succeeded and Failed with a B.A. in English

Who is this for?

Blogging 101’s Day 4 assignment is to consider my intended audience. The easy thing to do is say, “Whoever wants to read what I want to write,” but let’s get a little more specific.

When I write fiction, my ideal audience is me. I start writing something I’d like to read. (When I edit fiction, the readers I have in mind are my college fiction workshop professors, which is both helpful and terrifying. Those folks pulled no punches.)

But for Overlooked Nature, my ideal audience is not me. At least not the real me. It’s some alternate-universe version, a me who studied archeology or illustration instead of ecology. Perhaps a me who stuck with the fiction writing and actually made a living from it, instead of getting sidetracked right when she was starting to sell stories.

I want to present things I know, the same way I like for others to present things they know to me. Factual, but memorable. Detailed enough to be interesting, without being too detailed for the curious adult or teen to grasp. I want this to be a visual version of the podcasts about psychology and physics and history that I listen to in the car. I have never taken a class in any of those subjects, but the narrators break it down so I never have trouble understanding, without sounding like they’re talking to children.

That’s what I want to do. So, my ideal audience is the curious layperson. Maybe a recent arrival to the South who wants to know what’s in the creek in their backyard. Or someone who wonders why they should care that the sandhills are being developed so quickly — it’s just some pine trees on a lot of sand, right? (Spoiler: No, it’s not.) Or someone from far away who wants to see pictures of exotic-to-them creatures. And, of course, anyone who wants to read what I want to write.

Post All The Links!

Conveniently, the WordPress.com community is running a Blogging 101 course just as I’m starting this site, so I’m using it to help me get the blog off the ground. As a result, there will be more posts about the process of blogging in the next few weeks than there would ordinarily be. The assignment for Day 1 was writing an introduction post. Day 2 was selecting a title (and tag line, which I still need to do). And now it’s Day 3, and I’m supposed to follow 5 tags and 5 new blogs.

Of course I have interests other than wildlife photography. I write science fiction. I grow vegetables. I climb (badly) at the local rock gym. I’m always happy to find easy vegetarian recipes. And I’m not too shabby at orienteering.

But, really, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably looking for nature photos, or at least outdoors-related content, right? Okay, here are five blogs you might like:

Living Alongside Wildlife: What kind of snake did you just find? Email a photo to David Steen, and his commenters will happily ID it for you.
Eaten By Bears: How do you enjoy the outdoors when you can’t hike? Brandon blogs about UTV-ing in the wilds of Montana.
Back Yard Biology: Mother and daughter bloggers photograph and write about the species they find in Minnesota.
Nature Has No Boss: full of beautiful wildlife and landscape photography.
Naturally South Australia: Barry Silkstone’s photos and essays from a part of the world I know nothing about.

Or perhaps you’d like funny stories about the mishaps scientists have in the field?

In that case, you need to go over to Twitter and check out #fieldworkfail right now. Here’s my contribution:

ATVs are not supposed to do this. #fieldworkfail pic.twitter.com/4H7Hp2iUW8
— Ethan Harvey (@ByEthanHarvey) August 3, 2015

My blog! It has a name!

As promised by the old tagline, this thing finally has a real name. After writing my introduction post, it was staring me right in the face, and, amazingly, the URL was available. So, henceforth, this site shall be known as Overlooked Nature, and will be located at overlookednature.com.

I almost made it Overlooked Wildlife, but there’s already a book with that title, and “wildlife” usually implies animals. I want to post plants, too. And rocks. And random interesting things that happened to catch my eye. If it’s found outdoors, and I know something about it or can find out something, it’s fair game. I figured “Nature” was a better fit even though it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as nicely.

And because this is primarily a photo blog, above (or below, or somewhere on the page, depending on the theme and device you’re using) is a very easy-to-overlook bit of nature: the eggs of the common nighthawk. You have no idea how many times I almost stepped on one!

Introduction

Several years ago, I was working as a field biologist. I was out in the woods all summer and winter, trapping small amphibians and reptiles. It gave me an appreciation of the sheer diversity of animals hidden in the trees, underwater, underground, in any patch of grass. The places I worked were only a mile or so from suburban housing developments, yet most people I talked to, even the anglers and hunters and hikers, were unaware that many of these species even existed.

And I did talk to a lot of people. It’s the sort of job people are curious about. If I happened to stop by the grocery store while wearing my work T-shirt, some random shopper would ask how to get my job. “Do you have to have a college degree?” I’d tell them that I did have a degree, but it was possible to get a job without one if you had relevant experience. They would begin to look hopeful. Then I would regretfully crush their dreams: I’d tell them how much it paid. They would look at me disbelievingly and tell me their nephew made that holding a STOP/SLOW sign for the road company.

After a while I realized I was never going to pay off my student loans, so I left that job and went back to school to accumulate more. I’m now a graduate student, and I spend a lot less time in the woods these days. But one thing that happens when you walk around in the woods and look at things for a living is that you take a ton of pictures. Some of them even turn out well. A few months ago I was looking for a specific photo to show a friend, and ended up scrolling through the photos I took and thinking, hey, these aren’t bad. I should do something with them.

So this blog is for showing some of the hidden and lesser-known species of the southeast US: the burrowers, the swimmers, the creepers, the camouflaged, and the just plain overlooked.