Results May Vary By Location

 As they say in real estate, location is everything.

Repeat after me: location, location, LOCATION.

In terms of the study of nature, everything you see will depend on where you are, and also WHEN you are.  Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that what you will see will vary from what I will see.  

I figure I first started picking up rocks and pebbles when I was about four years old, which means I've got roughly a fifty year history of studying nature in my home state of Connecticut.  Despite this, I've lived in several places across the state, and each of them have had variations in the trees and plants from one end of the state to the other.  For example, the northwest corner of the state may take on more of a northern hardwood appearance (sugar maple, beech, hemlock) versus a more oak-dominated forest here at home in the northeast corner (with a variety of oak trees and shagbark hickories).  Having said this, I know I can go right down the road and find some damp gullies loaded with hemlock and white pine that will start to feel like some of my favorite places in northwest Connecticut.  While a wider ecoregion will carry with it its own commonalities, many microclimates in a local region will make for different obervations.  Heck, even the north side of a hill in my home town will look a lot different from a wetland just down the road from here.  This is what makes being a naturalist fun.  There's no shortage of fun places to explore.

Northeastern Coastal Forest near our home

Many of the forthcoming posts in this blog will be from the context of where I live.  The takeaways for you will be methods that you can adopt for yourself, up to and including ways to observe and share your own local observations.  With any luck, our observations together will be of benefit to anyone out there looking to learn more about where each of us lives.  Right there, that's the best part about being a naturalist: someone can always learn from what we are doing.

And for the record, I wasn't entirely sure what an ecoregion was until I sat down to write this post, so yes, I learned something today.  Wikipedia has a great list of North American ecoregions.  Use it to learn more about where you live.  Cheers and happy hunting!  

Ecoregions of North America