I’m at the Norval Outdoor School, on the outskirts of Toronto, ON, on the cusp between seasons.  The days are rich with the hot sun; the nights are chilled with cold, wet dew covering the ground.  The forests here are the rich hardwoods of Southern Ontario, with black walnut, hickories, ashes, boxelders, mixed with 40-year old plantations of red pine and spruces.  We’re in the land in between the Great Lakes – Lake Ontario to the East, Lake Eerie to the South, and Lake Huron far to the West.   A strange landscape for a New Englander like me!

I’m here helping to run an Art of Mentoring (AoM) workshop with the PINE Project of Toronto.  AoM is a week-long intensive program in nature connection and culture mentoring that I’ve been involved with around North America for the past 6 years.  I’ll be helping with another AoM in Brattleboro, VT at the end of September with Vermont Wilderness School.

Curious to learn more about cultural mentoring and building resilient communities, and to get a feel for some of what we’re doing in Toronto and Brattleboro?  Visit the blog of my colleague and mentor Mark Morey: www.markmorey.com.

My colleague Ethan Roland of Appleseed Permaculture has a beautiful new post up. It’s about designing edible forest gardens through “pattern languages”, a concept from the book A Pattern Language by the legendary heterodox architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues.

When applied to design, pattern languages support the emergence of rapid, iterative, unique, beautiful design results that trust in the collective intelligence of the generations of learning that have come before.  It’s an artist’s-mind, archetypal approach to design, rather than a left-brain, arrive-at-the-correct-result one.

I played a small role in the development of this process as applied to forest gardening, as you’ll see when you read Ethan’s post here.  Read carefully.  Consider in light of your home habitat.  What would be possible in your relationship with your place, if all the design intelligence of the ancestors were on your side?

Here’s my 2010 list so far for Hampshire and Franklin counties (seen and heard combined):

Black-Capped Chickadee

Tufted Titmouse

Northern Cardinal

Song Sparrow

Dark-Eyed Junco

Red-Breasted Nuthatch

White-Breasted Nuthatch

Downy Woodpecker

Hairy Woodpecker

Pileated Woodpecker

Blue Jay

American Crow

Raven

Red-Tailed Hawk

Red-Shouldered Hawk

Cooper’s Hawk

Barred Owl

Northern Saw-Whet Owl

Mourning Dove

Turkey Vulture

American Robin

Carolina Wren

House Finch

Purple Finch

White-Throated Sparrow

Brown Creeper

Red-Winged Blackbird

European Starling

American Woodcock

Ruffed Grouse

Wild Turkey

(Possible) Northern Flicker

(Possible) Northern Goshawk

(Possible) Peregrine Falcon

I know I’m missing some things here.  I haven’t seen Broad-Winged Hawks, but I know others have.  I also haven’t paid close attention to the ducks yet. I’m expecting phoebes any day now. Spring behavior everywhere – song, courtship, male-male aggression.

We’ll be exploring birding and bird language in depth in the spring session of Eyes of the Forest.   More stories to come!

I just got the 2nd Edition of Coyote’s Guide to Connecting With Nature in the mail.

It’s HOT.   It’s 500 beautiful pages of mentoring gold.  Like a field guide to the 8 Shields approach to nature connection.  Well worth the wait.

You can get it here.  Let me know what you think.

Last week, myself, Benneth Phelps, and Ethan Roland attended Young Farmers Conference 2009 at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in White Plains, NY.  There were HUNDREDS of inspiring young farmers and action-oriented food/agriculture folks there – an incredible collection of bright minds.

I want to pass on several great nuggets from this conference.

1. I presented on Tree Crops and Agroforestry to a full room of folks Thursday afternoon.  This was a high-energy presentation with lots of storytelling and nature connection elements.  Stone Barns recorded the audio, which will be up on the web sometime in the future; for now, here’s my slideshow (from SlideShare):

2. Ethan Roland gave a powerful presentation on Ecosystem Investing.  What could happen if we apply systems thinking and permaculture design principles to our financial ecosystems?  Lots of cutting-edge thinking here.  View Ecosystem Investing and other conference materials here,including Benneth and Ethan’s GREAT presentation “Permaculture for Farmers.”

3. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute gave the keynote address.  His mission is to perennialize grain agriculture.  Annual grain crops represent one of the greatest threats to the planet, owing to massive soil erosion, water pollution, carbon emissions, and replacement of local ecosystems, economies, and culture with export-crop monocultures.  Annual grains are also, of course, the primary means by which most people in the world eat.

This is a problem!  And Wes Jackson has identified a very promising leverage point, and laid out a possible pathway for large scale soil-repairing, watershed-repairing, carbon-negative agriculture in the US.

1. I saw this short but pretty incredible article about “Forest Kindergarten”, a nature education practice form Europe starting to gain some headway in the US.  What’s incredible is not so much the content, which is what the nature-based education and Art of Mentoring movements have been doing with consistently amazing results for 25+ years, but that it’s in the New York Times!

2. Later this week I’m presenting on tree crops and agroforestry at the Young Farmers Conference north of New York City.  Should be an incredible event, with a keynote from Wes Jackson of the Land Institute!  I’ll post my slideshow as well as observations and key learnings from the conference as a whole afterwards.

Photos from the last two weeks of Eyes of the Forest.  Enjoy!

A beautiful track photo by Chris Landry.  Who made this track?  Front or hind foot?  How about left or right?

Joshua under a very unusual tree to find in the pine barrens.  What is this tree?  What does its presence indicate?

And, finally, it must be Santa.  What is that on Chris’s face?  What conditions does it indicate?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

This is my mentor Jon Young speaking about bird language:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxzlap9FLIQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The spring session of Eyes of the Forest will be an intensive study in bird language.  We are also in the early stages of planning a 3- or 4-day advanced bird language course in the Northeast US for spring 2010.

A lot happening on the bird language front these days!