Every trip to the Paint Rock Forest Research Center is a huge step forward, especially since we have John and Kendra Abbott on the team. They brought Bill Bomar this trip who is the Executive Director of the University of Alabama Museums. Dawn Lemke from Alabama A & M is a great and delightful addition. Returning were Rick Condit, Patty Gowaty and Stephen Hubbell to give this plot and project a thorough inspection and GPS marking. Chris Oberholster with Birmingham Audubon was able to make it on Thursday. Steve Northcutt with the Nature Conservancy met Steve Hubbell Friday and see the designation for the plot.

Guarding the tree of paradise

If you visit Paint Rock in deep summer, these are the people you want to have with you.

John and Kendra Abbott are anxious to see the University of Alabama Museum of Natural History take a step up to join the world’s top tier of research facilities and museums. Don’t underestimate them. They are a powerhouse, a dynamic duo, expert entomologists, natural historians, researchers, teachers, photographers. And one of them is a really good cook.

They’ll go anywhere with their cameras, even down a steep and treacherous limestone bluff, to the yawning mouth of Saltpeter Cave, rising out of the stone cliff like an airplane hanger. And they never hesitated when the great cathedral of the opening turned down a narrow black hall carved by an invisible stream. Their cameras  helped us see a sightless world, teeming with giant cave crickets, translucent cave crawfish and (crawling on my shirt) a cave endemic millipede.

Bruce Sorrie is my mentor in the plant world. Bruce is legendary in the Carolinas for cataloguing that state’s natural diversity, and describing many new species in the process. He’s still naming. Bruce came down to Alabama decades ago, looking for plants in the Red Hills and pinewoods and prairies. He steered Beth and I around North Carolina’s longleaf country while we were working on our longleaf book. I could happily spend the rest of my days running around the woods and prairies and savannas with Bruce, arguing about plants.

With this group, you know you’re going to find really good stuff, even if you’re stopping to take a rest propped up against a tree. All of us had walked round the tree a dozen times before John shouted. And then we all saw it, Paint Rock’s most insouciant inhabitant, the timber rattler. It never rattled, never struck, never moved, in spite of our constant traffic. It tolerated only with great disgust our lingering to take its photo over and over. And of course, snakes always stand guard at the tree of paradise. Above our heads stood a persimmon tree with the biggest wild persimmons I’ve ever seen. We took the fruit thereof, and did eat.

Bruce has seen plenty of the Southeast, and you’d think there’s nothing new for him to see. But Bruce says he’s never ever seen anything like this place. It’s not right, Bruce said, that all these plants are so close together here. It’s going to make the community ecologists really angry, he says.

And that’s why Bruce is coming back.

Bruce Sorrie, great botanist from North Carolina,  is one of Bill’s oldest friends. You add our two newest friends, Kendra and John Abbott and it was a once in a life time experience. See some of Kendra and Johns Nature Photography.

Paint Rock through the lens of the Abbott’s

Diverse ways of seeing diversity

Before you decide the younger generation is disengaged from nature, you better meet Nina Morgan.

Nina Morgan is as old as I still imagine myself to be. She graduated from UAB last year after developing a catalogue of all the trees on campus. She’s now working for the city of Birmingham to help them figure out a way to do their business in a more sustainable way, and just helped them win a nice grant to do it.

And Nina is a whirlwind in the forest, too. Nina looks at things. I mean looks at them. She takes in what’s around her. And she asks more questions and better questions than anyone else I’ve been in the woods with.

Nina’s special. No doubt about it. But maybe more young Americans would develop Nina’s keen eye for nature, and her passion for questions, if they were exposed to places like Paint Rock.

That’s one of the big goals of our project, to train a new generation of scientists who understand the natural world. It may surprise you to learn that natural history, biodiversity and ecological studies, and good old-fashioned field taxonomy have been largely forgotten by major universities. A new generation of students sees the world only through the eyes of an electron microscope, or in a readout from a molecular analysis. That’s not the student’s fault. That’s the fault of the universities training them, and the narrowly focused grants that support them.

E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard evolutionary biologist, wants the Paint Rock Forest Research Center to promote not only great research, but also a new generation of researchers who have one foot in the forest and one foot in the laboratory. Paint Rock, with its emphasis on field sampling, its relationship with Alabama universities, and its association with the country’s top field biologists and ecologists, is a perfect place to do this training.

The center’s close ties to Alabama A&M has also added another dimension of diversity to the program. As the result of a special USDA grant, the Paint Rock Forest Research Center will be able to promote the training and advancement of minority students.

The goal is to open up new opportunities for teens and college students  who usually don’t get much exposure to this kind of scientific research, and provide them a stairway to the best research programs in the country.

That kind of opportunity development is how Francesca Gross, who works with The Nature Conservancy’s urban outreach program in Birmingham, met Nina. Francesca’s genius is figuring out how to re-engage people with the natural world they almost forgot. Nina, while a student at UAB, interned with Francesca. And Nina and Francesca have been working together to introduce inner city kids to the mysteries of the forest environment.

I expect we’ve got some things to talk about.

E.O. Wilson, Pulitzer-prize winning author and Harvard’s pre-eminent evolutionary biologist, sees Alabama in a way that few other people can.

Like so many Alabamians, Ed is proud of his alma mater, the University of Alabama. And he’s proud to recount “his people” and their long history in the state, going back to the dusty streets of Holly Pond in the hills of Cullman County and the ghost town of Blakeley overlooking the swamps and marshes of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.

But Alabama is more than a football team and a family heritage for Ed. It’s a place, with a very special and unusually rich landscape and one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity in North America.

So there’s nothing that gets Ed’s mind churning quicker than the possibilities of a research center focused on Alabama’s unique biodiversity.

For a week, we hosted a meeting of the titans of ecological research at Paint Rock. Ed, along with UCLA’s Steve Hubbell and Patty Gowaty, began hammering out a vision for the Research Center in Paint Rock, challenging themselves and each other to develop a concept and program that gives us new insight into the way the world works. Kathleen Horton, who has worked for decades to get Ed’s prodigious research and writings into publication, eyed the proceedings knowingly.

Steve brings to the effort the Smithsonian protocol that he was instrumental in developing in the tropics. That massive and intensive forest monitoring program has transformed our understanding of tropical forests. It will be the baseline of our work in Paint Rock, and we expect the data from this site will provide groundbreaking information from the temperate forest.

Patty brings her own love of Alabama, having growing up wandering the banks of the Coosa River, and acute insight into that key passageway of evolution — sex and reproduction in the natural world.

Ed brings an intense appreciation for biodiversity in all its forms, the trees, the ants, the butterflies, the snails, the salamanders, even the primitive microscopic protists that live in the soil. Ed speculates that we know, at best, 20 percent of the species that make up our world. And the 80 percent we don’t know may well impact the future of humans more than the 20 percent we do know.

Merging those scientific visions – and getting good and useful scientific results in the process — is what the Paint Rock Forest Research Center is charged with doing.

Every morning, Ed rose early with his butterfly net in hand to tackle the Alabama countryside. Then we’d sit for hours, trying to figure out how to know more about all the things we don’t know. We spend our early evenings talking about the merits of fried okra and the herd instincts of our pack of border collies, then jump back on the research again – about what’s here, and why it’s here, and whether it will be here for another generation.

And so Ed warns us: You’re making a mistake if you think too small. This research center needs to be as rich and diverse as the forest it operates in. It needs to do for forest research what Woods Hole and Scripps do for marine life. It needs to put Alabama on the international map of forest, conservation and biodiversity research.

And if you don’t mind me inserting myself, he said, I’d like to be on your board.

Yes sir.