Life Traces of the Georgia Coast: Revealing the Unseen Lives of Plants and Animals

11 Future Studies, Future Traces

569 LOOKING FOR TRACES IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES A self-deprecating realization struck me in the middle of the fall of 2008, as startling as looking in a mirror and suddenly noticing a large, unsightly growth projecting from the side of my head. I had been spending too much time inside lately, devoted largely to teaching classes; grading exams (or, more likely, putting off their grading); committee meetings; reading, writing , and sending e-mails; and, once in a great while, in between all of these activities, reading about traces, trace fossils, and ichnology in general. In contrast, too little had been devoted to fieldwork, especially tracking. Tracking and neoichnology in general are similar to the use of another language, where skills atrophy with disuse, become tattered around the edges, and otherwise become traces themselves of knowledge and wisdom once held so keenly. Yes, some of that previous experience can be put in the bank, so to speak, but if left alone, it does not gain any interest. So it was that my daily scanning of the ground, often engaged wherever I went, faded into a past version of itself. A walk across campus normally yielded a bounty of noticed animal sign, much of it done by eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis): small, shallow, circular dig marks in pine 11 FUTURE STUDIES, FUTURE TRACES 570 Life Traces of the Georgia Coast straw; broken pecans and acorns with distinctive tooth marks; branches with leaves still green and fresh, diagnostic 45° angle shear marks on their ends; four-by-four bounding trackway patterns across piles of oak leaves; subtle trails leading up tree trunks from habitual wear on the bark, caused by up-and-down travel; leafy dreys secured high up in the trees; and so on. Occasionally these everyday squirrel traces were accompanied by something a little more unusual, such as small piles of songbird feathers—either leftbyaferalcatonthegroundorahawkinatree—aswellasthedistinctive five-toed tracks of raccoons (Procyon lotor) or opossums (Didelphis virginiana ), denoting a midnight amble across the campus. I would also smile whenever I saw a perfectly round and meticulously maintained hole in a flowerbed,asIknewachipmunkburrowwasnotsowelcometoauniversity employee who might be tending to that tiny patch of earth. Human traces sometimes amused, too, like the parallel trails left on a campus sidewalk by a student’s skateboard, preserved by thin, orange residues of Georgia clay, imparted as the student hurried to class after it rained the previous day. Instead of noticing any or all of these, though, inner reflections that were so often prompted by the question “What traces did you see?” were summarized by “Oops, forgot to look!” In tracking, what is also analogous to learning a foreign language is the tenet of immersion. My best and most significant leaps of learning in tracking and neoichnology happen during uninterrupted spans of field time, whether over days or weeks. Sadly, this sort of raptness had been replaced with distraction. Consequently, traces went unnoticed, and my attitude suffered. Hence my receiving approval for a proposal on a book about ichnology wasaneededtonic,havingarrivedviae-mailinthemiddleofthatsemester. AfurtheranticipatoryboostcamefromplanningfieldworkforDecember– January, between semesters filled with teaching in classrooms and committee meetings: the former personally rewarding, the latter something other than that. Now I had incentive to leave behind artificial classroom andofficeenvironments,withtheirconstantattachmenttoelectroniccommunication methods and attendant responsibilities, for the environments oftheGeorgiacoastandthemyriadoftracesbeingproducedtheredaily,all ripe for study. My wife Ruth and I made plans to visit five islands—Cumberland , Jekyll, Ossabaw, St. Catherines, and Sapelo—all of which were composite islands, made of Pleistocene and Holocene sediments (Chapter 2). Each island was idiosyncratic in its own way, holding similar traces Future Studies, Future Traces 571 but with different accents or preservational modes. We experienced these islands and their traces in a glorious, whirlwind trip that took just under three weeks, with both of us wishing it could have lasted longer. Photographs , field notes, and friendships remain, though, and as is typical for any of my visits to the Georgia coast, I saw traces that were either new to me or otherwise previously unnoticed, a continual learning that fed into curiosity and made us want to go back again. Indeed, nearly one year later, when the same melancholy caused by a dearth of nonichnological activities (both physical and cerebral) intruded again during the fall of 2009, I knew the cure was to go to the coast again. This time it was with undergraduate students in tow, intended mainly to prepare them for...