Stephen Heard

Photo of about a third of a large, round, yellow lichen growing flat on reddish/purplish rock. The right half of the photo is lichen, the left half is bare rock. The lichen consists of a middle with a sugared, grainy appearance…hundreds of tightly packed branches radiate outward from the centre.

Polycaulinia sp lichen. #Newfoundland, Canada. Photo covers about 6cm top to bottom. #lichen #fungi #fungifriends

This was way more interesting than I expected (and any shade perceived thrown there is definitely at Patterson, not @vauhinivara.bsky.social)

Lets put a spotlight on Maria Sibylla Merian, a German naturalist and artist. She was famous for her detailed illustrations of insects and plants, and her pioneering work in entomology. 

👁️ https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/10-things/story/maria-sibylla-merian-en

I could try and say something relevant, topical, profound even on the general state of everything. However what I feel I need is a small, purple, Sea Lavender Weevil. So here it is. #Nature

I've tasted syrup from Norway maple (very similar) but not the others. Anyone want to give flavour notes? But all other trees have much less sweetness to the sap - so you need to boil much more sap to make syrup. #BackYardSugarBush2026 will stick to sugar maple!

No sign of sap today, as expected. Meanwhile, a note on the trees. I'm tapping sugar maple (Acer saccharum), which is the canonical tree for syrup. You can tap other species, though: pretty much any maple (Acer), birch, walnut, and I'm told hickory, butternut, and pecan.

Yes, absolutely - it's a public talk, the whole idea is that everyone is welcome and it should be accessible!

Poster for the Bryan Priestman Lecture Series. Talk: The Origin of Modern Species", presented by Dr. Dolph Schulter. Monday March 16th, 7 p.m., Head Hall C13 with reception to follow in the McCain Commons. Featuring an introduction by Backyard History's Andrew MacLean.

Fredericton folks: mark your calendars for a public science talk by Dr. Dolph Schluter - a Canadian ecologist/evolutionary biologist and winner of the 2023 Crafoord Prize. That's a big deal - it's basically the Nobel Prize for fields that don't have a Nobel!

Online Courses | Atomic Ecology Online training in the application of stable isotopes to ecological and environmental research

Most isotope users were never formally trained in isotope ecology.

They learned just enough to get by.

That gap shows up later — usually during interpretation.

That’s exactly what my course is designed to fix.

God help me, I've just started a Word file headed "edits for 4th edition". (Because I'm noticing things I can't really change in proof).

Let's hope this file sits quietly on my hard drive for at least 5 years...

Tiny elephant or really big farmer?

Little bit of everything towards the end of the season, but flies and moths by far the most!

A 2 litre plastic pop bottle (Dr Pepper Zero, if you must know) full of clear sap, held in my hand against a snowy back yard

A low snowbank running along the back of a porch. Two pop bottles are half-buried in the snow.

Just four litres of sap, collected and nestled into my SASSS (Snowbank-Assisted Sap Storage System - I'm a scientist, I have to sound very fancy). Probably won't run again until the weekend, as temps are low today and tomorrow.

A white 4-gallon pail sitting in the snow. It hold four 2 litre plastic pop bottles, and there's a blue plastic funnel in one of them.

Big sugarbushes use tubing and vacuum pumps to bring sap back to be boiled. For #BackYardSugarbush2026, I have a bucket of pop bottles. Very sophisticated!

Yes, I want to hear about the birch!!

There's nothing flying/crawling yet (we're a bit too far from the river for winter stoneflies). But later in the season, yes - some flies and small moths visit and often get trapped in the sap. They're filtered out before I boil. (Modern closed-tubing systems don't have this issue).

Best moment of the spring!

A sap bucket with a few cm of sap in the bottom

Not much accumulated today - a couple of cm in each bucket. And it will be cold tomorrow. But it's a start, and the weekend looks promising! #BackYardSugarBush2026

FIRST SAP!!!

The piece of writing that just won’t die This week, I’ve been deep into proofreading.* Checking proofs is an annoying bit of drudgery at the best of times, but it’s especially awful when the proofs go on and on and on – for 374 pages, in …

Checking proofs for the 3rd edition of 'The Scientist's Guide to Writing', and I'm thinking about the weirdness of having a piece of writing that Just Won't Die. scientistseessquirre... 🧪

I'm guessing the season is briefer where you are. Now you can anticipate next year!

View of a back yard, with snow-covered ground. The bare maple trees are at left; in front of them, a row of small hemlocks and spruces lightly covered with fresh white snow.

Too early today to know if the sap will run - but a light dusting of snow overnight has the sugar bush looking lovely!

But: not a single drop of sap today. The last couple of days have been very cold; perhaps it will take more than a single day above freezing to wake up the trees! Tonight, -3 C; tomorrow +7. Promising! #BackYardSugarBush2026

a view of the line of 4 maples. You can see two buckets on the first tree, and spot several more on more distant ones. There's hemlock foliage at left, and a thicket of saplings around the large trees.

All buckets in place. I have 8 taps total - how many can you spot? Three on the nearest tree (one is out of sight behind the trunk); one on the next tree, which is small; and two each on the two in the background.

Same tree, same spile, but now a white plastic bucket hangs from the hook, with a blue plastic lid hinged to the spile above it.

First bucket in place. But no sap dripping! At least, not yet - time to tap the rest.

A good spot is at convenient height, but not underneath anything like a damaged spot, a split or crook in the tree, or a dead limb.

Closeup view of the grey, scaly bark of a maple tree. At upper left is a freshly drilled hole. At centre left is last year's hole, still quite distinct. At bottom is an older hole, visible only as a roundish feature in the middle of a bark crack.

Same hole, now with the spile hammered in, so there is a metal spout protruding from the tree. A hook dangles from the spout, but there's no bucket on it yet. There is no sap dripping from the hole. Out of frame there are, however, tears dripping from my face because of that. Only temporarily, though!

First hole drilled! The new hole is the one at upper right. At centre left is last year's hole, still looking pretty fresh. Bottom is an older hole, hard to spot now.

We move the tapping spot around from year to year, so we aren't trying to pull sap from recently repaired tissue.

Here goes.

Endorse! I always proofread on paper.

Plastic buckets stacked in a rough pyramid on a back porch, with maples and hemlocks in the snow-covered yard beyond.

A spile: a funnel-shaped piece of metal about 3 inches long. At the narrow end there's a small hole where sap enters; at the wide end, a drip spout. From the funnel hangs a hook to mount the bucket.

I'm not sure if it will run today - it's been cold (-20 at night, -10 during the day) the last couple of days. It may take more than one warmer day to get things going. Only one way to find out...

The gear is ready. Eight buckets, and a spile for each. Time to go drill some holes!
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