Reading the Bosque

Background: When we read, we interpret many symbols (letters) that make up the words. The words make up sentences that express ideas. Reading is a process of understanding others' thoughts by making sense of many smaller symbols. We use reading or decoding skills in other areas as well. For example, musical notes on a scale are symbols we translate into melodies and songs.

Naturalists are adept at "reading" the landscape. That means that they can infer what is happened, or might happen in the future, by looking at the clues and translating them into a larger understanding of the ecosystem. Reading the landscape requires building an understanding about what your observations mean. For example, a person looking at tracks in a trail might say, "Look, an animal walked here." A more experienced observer might be able to identify the animal based on the shape of the track. An expert might add when the animal came by, what other animals it was with, and maybe even what it was doing. Like any other kind of reading, the more you read the landscape, the better you can interpret what you see. Unlike reading words, landscape reading is not an exact science. People often interpret ecosystem "stories" in different ways.

As you go through this activity with students, they will develop knowledge and a better understanding of how to "read the bosque," or how to interpret the riparian area to tell a story about the past and the present.

Adapting to younger students: Some of the items are fairly simple. You could take the theme of looking for stumps as a focus for a trip, and at each stump you think about what happened for that tree to fall. Looking for antlion pit, stumps, harvester ant hills, pocket gopher mounds, seasonal signs, bark beetles, jetty jacks, lacy leaves and isopods, tracks and scat would be within the realm of younger students. You will need to summarize the information for their level.