I want to pass on several great nuggets from this conference.

1. I presented on Tree Crops and Agroforestry to a full room of folks Thursday afternoon.  This was a high-energy presentation with lots of storytelling and nature connection elements.  Stone Barns recorded the audio, which will be up on the web sometime in the future; for now, here’s my slideshow (from SlideShare):

2. Ethan Roland gave a powerful presentation on Ecosystem Investing.  What could happen if we apply systems thinking and permaculture design principles to our financial ecosystems?  Lots of cutting-edge thinking here.  View Ecosystem Investing and other conference materials here,including Benneth and Ethan’s GREAT presentation “Permaculture for Farmers.”

3. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute gave the keynote address.  His mission is to perennialize grain agriculture.  Annual grain crops represent one of the greatest threats to the planet, owing to massive soil erosion, water pollution, carbon emissions, and replacement of local ecosystems, economies, and culture with export-crop monocultures.  Annual grains are also, of course, the primary means by which most people in the world eat.

This is a problem!  And Wes Jackson has identified a very promising leverage point, and laid out a possible pathway for large scale soil-repairing, watershed-repairing, carbon-negative agriculture in the US.

4.  A lot more.  Stay tuned for more paradigm-shifting insights from this conference.  In fact, leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to read more about!

2. Later this week I’m presenting on tree crops and agroforestry at the Young Farmers Conference north of New York City.  Should be an incredible event, with a keynote from Wes Jackson of the Land Institute!  I’ll post my slideshow as well as observations and key learnings from the conference as a whole afterwards.

A beautiful track photo by Chris Landry.  Who made this track?  Front or hind foot?  How about left or right?

Joshua under a very unusual tree to find in the pine barrens.  What is this tree?  What does its presence indicate?

And, finally, it must be Santa.  What is that on Chris’s face?  What conditions does it indicate?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The spring session of Eyes of the Forest will be an intensive study in bird language.  We are also in the early stages of planning a 3- or 4-day advanced bird language course in the Northeast US for spring 2010.

A lot happening on the bird language front these days!

I’m on a really slow internet connection right now, so photos will have to wait. But a quick summary:

–We learned San Bushman trailing form, through Adriaan Louw’s work as a Cybertracker trailing evaluator. We trailed deer, coyote, and human.

–We got a lot of really cool comparisons between coyote and domestic dog, both in scat and tracks.  There are a LOT of domestic dogs in the Plains during pheasant season, so when we picked up a pretty fresh coyote trail it was easy to compare.  We even saw the 4-print “squat signature” right around our coyote scat – first time any of us have seen this in non-snow conditions!

–We had an intro to bird language session and did our first bird sit.  A winter flock of chickadees spent some time in our area, reacting to our presence with mild agitation/curiosity but mostly feeding with flock calls, and then dispersing.

–We found some individuals of a very surprising mystery tree species, which I’ll post a photo of when I have a faster connection.

All in all a wonderful session!

Eyes of the Forest is now enrolling for our winter season, beginning in late January.  Email me for dates and further information.

Bottom line: local banks invest in local businesses and the needs of local communities.  Large national and international banks invest in proportionally larger projects, including many with hugely damaging consequences for the planet and for communities.  Your deposits are leveraged up to 10x their dollar amount in lending power because of basic federal regulations on how banks make loans.  Watch the movie and switch if you can to a local bank!

I also gave an intro talk on forest gardening, in between outdoor sessions. The slideshow I used is embedded below – enjoy!

I’ll be sharing a lot of nature connection this weekend – core practices of observation and reading the landscape, intro’s to tracking and bird language, and a lecture/slideshow on forest gardening.  I’ll put some juicy tidbits from the weekend on the blog early next week, including my slideshow and hopefully some photos.

I highly recommend this event to anyone who can make it.  Reading the Forested Landscape propelled my naturalist journey forward like very few other books ever have.  Wessels is like a “landscape forensics” specialist, tracking the land use and disturbance history of ecosystems, especially forests, through reading subtle clues laid out in the landscape like those left behind on an animal trail.  You will never look at a forest the same way again!

I was particularly interested in some of the plant communities in the marsh.  In certain places, there were abundant patches of currants – Ribes spp. – growing in and among cattail stands!  I’ve never seen Ribes growing in such wet soil before.  We also found large stands of willow (Salix spp.) and Red-Osier Dogwood (Cornus sericea), both of which are very important basketry plants in this region.  I thought about how we could consider coppicing some of these shrubs to encourage more straight, unbranching growth for baskets.  I’ll write more on coppicing in a future post.  In a few cases, the beavers were already doing this for us!

We found a few narrower trails through the plants growing in open water – muskrats?  At one point, there was a flattened mass of wetlands grasses, with several piles of what looked like chewed (or at least mussed-up) grasses lying on top.  In open water about 1 foot deep, no discernible scent (but it was raining pretty hard and our noses may have been a little numb).  Muskrat lodge?  Otter or beaver scent mound or other territorial marker?  Some sort of small mammal feeding or nesting sign?  Time for some more research!

Danny’s company Eprida manufactures charcoal-based soil fertilizers from agricultural waste products.  This process, known as biochar, mimics the “terra pretta” soils of the Amazon rainforest, maintained at high fertility levels by native people for millennia through periodic burning and charcoal application.  Most impressively, this soil fertility enhancing substance also removes carbon from the atmosphere and sequesters it long-term in soil – at a scale of decades or even hundreds of years.

Here’s Wikipedia’s article on biochar. This is a win-win strategy, and a way for local food systems to help address the global climate crisis at many different scales.