Upper Valley Naturalist Questline
... the final form of this Big thing we're just starting to build ...
The Salamander Team is trying to build a thing that members of our community (we started with mainly Hartford volunteers, but neighbors from towns nearby are invited too) can use to help us all learn and hang out and grow together as well-rounded Naturalists. The ultimate goal is a system that can help move everyone in the direction of an almighty “Upper Valley Naturalist” achievement that we’ll be designing some sort of prize for. Like a special Salamander Team cape when you’ve completed all of the checkboxes and hurdles and challenges (that we are only now starting to build…). Maybe a coffee mug. Maybe some local coffee? Don’t know yet.
Salamander Team Learning paths (Local "Courses")
... The pieces of the big thing we're trying to build ...
2022 was the fist year the Salamander Team started doing the in-person last-Sunday-of-the-monthly meetups, 2023 is the first year we’re basically going to try to host freestanding university courses that anyone in the community can join in. The “courses” will be 10ish weeks designed to get the group out in nature as much as possible.
The Salamander Team community is home to people of many ages and backgrounds, and so designing one syllabus to serve the diverse bunch is mega hard. That’s in part why we use “quotation marks” and air quotes when calling the things “courses” – what we’re building is a broad framework for approaching learning about the target topics, with a hefty provision of well-vetted resources (books and articles and teachers and authors and youtube channels etc), and a community that meets often in our beautiful local public natural spaces. Check out the “Toolkit” page (which hopefully exists by the time you’re reading this) for a broader bank of resources to support your learning. That toolkit is crowdsourced, so if there’s something missing that you might recommend be added for a specific topic please email HartfordSalamanderTeam@gmail.com
Upper Valley Plants Course, held spring and early summer of 2023 as the first experiment in organizing a way for Upper Valley neighbors to learn more in-depth on a single broad topic. Salamander Team programs like this one (“Upper Valley Plants”) aim to bring the group into local natural spots as much as possible, to learn while spending time exploring the different habitats we have available on public lands.
We do have an outline written up for this first “course!” The outline describes a 10-week course that meets once every two weeks (probably on a Saturday morning) at the different local public natural spaces. We’ll be doing some sort of sign-ups, and we’ll likely have a variety of options laid out describing different ways you could potentially engage. The key example of what that’ll mean is that we want to organize worthwhile homework and reading (book-club) components, but we also want to invite folks who don’t have bandwidth at present to over-commit as much as some of us. We hope to have solid resources laid out for those learners when their schedules do free up. And hopefully once we finish running a “course” like this plant thing, there’s a solid trail blazed for later neighbors to follow in their own independent learning.
… email the team for the Upper Valley Plants outline or to join in on the project … or standby until we figure out how to embed PDFs onto wordpress pages. We’ve gotten this far…
Members of the Salamander Team community have been trying to organize a foray for the region for a while now under another team banner. Fungi might represent our next learning adventure, but there’s some competition for the next choice!
Amphibians (or herps more broadly) of the Upper Valley is another of the contenders for topics we want to explore in more depth. “Explore in depth” basically means we want to schedule more guided hikes to sites with exemplary habitats and species to observe.