Librarian Without Walls

The volume of Ask a Librarian questions has fallen in the last couple of weeks, but that's OK - we have some good ones this week! From the blog, an unknown reader asked, "What part of the human face is your favorite?"  It all depends on which face we're talking about. Consider the following famous faces: The "Mona Lisa," a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, has easily the most famous smile in art history: Granted, the smile involves pretty much the whole face. But I'm sticking with Mona as my favorite smile. We could certainly consider noses. For my favorite nose, I turn to Cyrano de Bergerac, the hero of a French play by the same name. Cyrano was a terrific guy: witty, generous, good with a sword and he spoke French fluently. The play about him even introduced the word "panache" into English, just to give us a word to describe extravagant confidence. But his confidence evaporated whenever he tried to talk to women, especially the beautiful Roxanne

Fifth graders are readin g My Side of the Mountain  now, as they do every spring. and Mrs. Bestor  invited some other teachers to read various c hapters out loud and to provide some links to other videos, web pages, and so on that would connect to the chapter that the teacher read. Mrs. Bestor suggested I film a bird walk in the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, which I did. It was fun and easy: walk around a bit, videoing whatever caught my eye, and talking about it. We got to see an owlet and its mom. Easy as you please. Then Mrs. Bestor suggested, in an "It's-no-big-deal-it-won't-take-long" kind of way, that I do a video about Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a famous book about some time he spent in the woods. Thoreau, the name a lost English professor calls Sam. Thoreau's book, Walden , is famous and very much worth reading, but it is also a big, dense, sometimes slow moving book about nature, philosophy, and the nature of reality. Although Thoreau

Some questions fell through the digital cracks and I am just now getting around to answering them. Sorry, folks - too much screen time for this librarian! Let's begin with James, who asked, " What is the weirdest place you've ever been? If you could would you go back?" For the longest time I thought that Columbus, Ohio was the strangest place I had ever been. No mountains, no Great Plains, and so much humidity that some summers I never felt completely dry. People there crazy about a football team, Ohio State, whose mascot is a buckeye, which is the name of a poisonous nut from the buckeye tree. On football Saturdays, many of the crazies in attendance wore necklaces made of buckeye candy, a lethal combination of milk chocolate and peanut butter that left people well on their way to a sugar crash. Now that I think of it, the whole Midwest is just weird. Consider the Big 10 Conference, which has 14 schools. Really. Universities  that apparently can't count. And the m

The "Ask a Librarian" questions were certainly fun for me to answer, and I will continue to respond to those questions from time to time. However, while working on a recent blog post ( Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature ), it occurred to me that I could fill a need that all hikers have at some point. I am, of course, referring to how convenient it would be to have a botanist with me whenever I'm hiking. That way, I could ask him or her about the plants along the trail. I do have a couple of botanist friends, but they don't always answer right away when I send them texts with photos of some plant or another. I won't answer your questions right away, either - but like "Ask a Librarian," the answers to your questions to the natural world will not be ones you can find with any kind of Google search, or any other reputable database, for that matter. So, without further ado, here are the first questions. The first question comes from Eowyn, who ask

After my last blog post (Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature), Ms. Bestor asked me to make a bird lesson video for 5th grade. I agreed, since at this point I am saying "yes" even to things I haven't done before. The resulting video is more of a tour of the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge than it is any sort of lesson. But Ms. Bestor said that would be OK, and that I could do a lesson on a specific bird. That Ms. Bestor is a sneaky one; she knows how to get two videos for the price of one. Of course, the videos are all free, so all of you can get as many videos as you want for the price of one. Here is my latest video; I hope you like it. Pandemic Library, Episode 7: Refuge .

A couple of years ago, I took a week-long Master Naturalist's class at the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula. We immersed ourselves in the plants, birds, insects, fungi, mammals, and geology of western Montana. It was too much information, but I did learn about a couple of free apps that make it much easier to identify plants, butterflies, and pretty much anything else in the natural world that will sit still long enough to for me to take a photo. My favorite app is "Seek." It's produced by the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. The app is free and it's amazing. You can use it like a camera to focus on a flower or other plant and watch it work to identify it. Success is not guaranteed, of course - sometimes the app can figure out just the order or family. But with even what look to me like fuzzy photos, Seek provides a quick ID, as with this California Tortoiseshell butterfly: "Seek" works best with things that do