Reading and Riding the Landscape: A Guide for Naturalists

One of my most interesting moments on a bicycle is what I’ll call the “blackbird waterfall.” I was pedaling a forest road in the Appalachian foothills. I had ridden it several times before, and this time it was fall. As I finished a small climb, I heard the sound of a waterfall. There are many waterfalls in the area, and I had visited most. How had I missed this one, so close to this road? Had it rained recently and turned a usual trickle into a cascade? But I was at the top of a ridge, and there was no way that much water could accumulate here. Maybe the sound was funneling up the hillside in some unique way to make it seem bigger and closer than it was.

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I laid my bike in the ditch and climbed an embankment. The sound was so loud—like the waterfall should be right under my nose. But there was no water. Only a flock of hundreds, maybe thousands, of blackbirds picking through crispy, freshly fallen leaves. Every little beak tossed aside a leaf, the sound of each blending into a near-perfect mimic of the sound of a waterfall.

I love moments like these when I’m on my bike. The bike is not a necessary ingredient. There are plenty of ways to get out and see the world. But I love riding bicycles, and I love the oddities of nature, and I love when they converge, like the sound of all those leaves.

While there’s always some serendipity to these moments, intentionality can help us be ready to receive them. Headphones would have prevented me from hearing the noise to begin with. Riding the same road again, in a new season, led to a new experience. Knowing where waterfalls usually are (and usually are not) made the noise that much more curious.

If you’re like me, and you want to use your bicycle to explore the wilder edges of our world—to experience “nature,” as I’ll call it with a bit of hesitation, for the sake of a simple term for this article—I offer here some tips for the bicycling naturalist.

What is a Naturalist?

A naturalist is someone who is “learning to read the landscape,” a phrase I borrowed from the Clemson University Extension Master Naturalist Program. I love this definition because of its breadth. It encompasses the whole of it; the landscape is made over geological eons and by rapid human incursions. It is the plants and animals and fungus, minerals and fluids, heat and pressure, topography and climate. It is continental collisions and particles of soil, rivers and rivulets.

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To read the landscape is to engage in something deeply human. The landscape shapes us and is shaped by us; to read it is to try to understand how we fit. Yet, I’ve found the more reading I’ve done (figuratively and literally), the more questions I have. Why did those blackbirds pick that spot? What were they looking for in the leaves? Being a naturalist means paying attention enough to find more questions at the end of answers. When questions and answers meet in such a way, it produces awe, which for me is precisely the point.

I have to admit that pre-industrialization humans all over the world might find these ideas a bit silly. For most of human history, reading the landscape was necessary for survival. That’s not to say it was trivial. Indeed, most cultures’ spiritual practices are connected to it. But it’s 2025, and here we are. Learning to read the landscape is less than necessary, though no less fulfilling.

I cringe a bit when I call myself a naturalist, because it sounds a little pretentious (or possibly because of imposter syndrome). But just like we can all be readers, we can all be naturalists. There is a library outside with an infinite number of books. To be a naturalist is to go out and find a book, and start reading it.

Tips to Get Started

In November 2023, South Carolina mourned the loss of a legend, the naturalist and TV and radio host Rudy Mancke. He had a beloved SC Public Radio spot called Nature Notes, where he spoke briefly and poetically about natural phenomena, often answering listener questions and identifying plants and animals from submitted photos. Beyond the identification, he always had an interesting anecdote, some odd piece of trivia about the species, or some wisdom it communicated to us humans.

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Many of the observations he discussed were found in someone’s backyard. The backyard is the best place to start because being a naturalist is as much a mindset as anything. It’s a posture toward the world and all its strange details, one that has all the senses tuned to notice, and it can be applied anywhere at any time. Observation is primary; information is secondary.

So, all your senses are on and you’re tuned into what’s around you, and you want to dive into the knowledge. Begin with something you already find interesting. It could be trees, birds, snakes, flowers, geology, weather, or any other thing. Since all of these things are connected, you can get to a broader understanding of the landscape from the point that interests you the most.

Here are some ideas to get started in your backyard:

• Find out what plants are growing in your yard, your park, or a patch of undeveloped land near you. Are they native species or introduced? When do they bloom? Does it change over the years?
• What birds are around your community? Which ones are migratory, and when are they present? Can you find out what they like to eat or where they like to hang out? What kinds of calls or songs do they make?
• When it rains at your house, where does the water go? Can you trace its path to an ocean on a map?

Even as you’ve come up with your questions, where do you find the answers? Field guides! There are field guides to most angles of the landscape. Identification guides for plants and animals can be found at most bookstores and libraries. These are often regional or continental in scope, so it sometimes helps to find more local or detailed guides, which might require searching more local sources. Look for state or local societies or clubs, which sometimes publish their own guides or content online. State departments of natural resources, wildlife, or environment usually have tons of great information that’s more locally focused. If geology is your interest, check out your state geological survey for local geologic maps and field trip guides.

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The goal of these field guides is usually to help you identify things, so you know what you’re seeing (or hearing, or touching, or smelling). This can be very rewarding, especially when what you’ve taken from the guide becomes your knowledge, and you make the identification on your own. There are folks who are very skilled at identifying things and have the markers of massive lists of species committed to memory.

The purpose of learning the name of something is to participate in a shared language and knowledge about it. It allows us to communicate, count, track, and learn about a species. With a species name (or type of rock or name of a cloud), I can find out more about it and how it relates to other things. While learning the name of something is a worthy goal, the main thing is what you observe and understand in the moment. The name is just a helpful identifier. Don’t let the pursuit of the name take away from the experience of the observation.

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While I love the feeling of knowing what a specific something is, I get most excited at learning about how multiple components make up a landscape. To say it is all connected would be an understatement. The connections between creatures and plants and physical forces and humans are so complex that we’ll probably never get to the bottom of it all. That’s what makes it interesting.

Whole guides are organized around categories, such as ecological communities or physiographic regions, and they are usually helpful for putting together a bigger picture. For example, a wildflower guide that is organized around the physical environment in which they’re found helps you know what to expect to see together, say in an alpine meadow or a bottomland hardwood floodplain. It might explain why those plants are there and how that environment provides what they need.

Just like ecology can be applied at any scale, a naturalist can learn to read the big and the small. You can contemplate the formation of a mountain range over 100,000,000 years of geologic history or the presence of a lone wildflower no larger than a fingernail. In fact, the big is usually made up of many of the small, so pay attention to the small things. It’s the collection of small observations—all the tiny mysteries and wonders—that add up to a robust naturalist knowledge.

In short, start paying attention to what’s around you. Start from your interests and see how things are connected. Don’t worry about knowing it all, which is as impossible as reading every book ever written. But don’t let that stop you from picking up a book and seeing what’s in there.

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A Bicycle-Based Naturalist

I have barely mentioned bicycles yet, and that’s because a bike is just one way to get out in the landscape. But as you all know, it’s a unique way. So, what might it look like to be a naturalist from the seat of a bicycle—to ride and read the landscape?

First, don’t be afraid to stop. I know some rides are for going fast, and others have time constraints because we have to get home for dinner with the family. But save some rides for observation, and be intentional about looking at the natural stuff around you. Let your curiosities pull you off the bike, even if it feels inconvenient. Inspect these things, and you will usually find something worth the stop. A naturalist mindset clashes with hurry. If you have a personality that doesn’t like to leave things open-ended, plan a stop on your route for a certain amount of time to explore (or sit and watch).

Leave the headphones at home. You’ll miss a lot if the ears aren’t in play. The bob white quail calling from the roadside ditch, the shriek of a squirrel just captured by a red-tailed hawk, and the gentle rustling of the grass as the snake slithers away. All these moments were tipped off audibly.

Revisit your favorite routes, with the intention of keeping an eye out for new things. Pay attention to the places you already love on those routes. Maybe stop there and take a closer look each time. Get to know those spots and the little details that make them up. Dig in to what you love about it.

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Ride in all seasons. I know this is harder in some places, but to my southern friends who ride on trainers in the winter, get yourself a pair of gloves and a jacket and at least get some outdoors riding in. See how your favorite routes change through the seasons. Views change, the light changes, plants and animals change. Modern humans can almost ignore seasons because we’ve built machines and systems to make them less relevant in our lives. Go out on your bike in all seasons and be attuned to them.

Consider the natural history of your favorite routes or new routes you are mapping. Study the map. What creeks do they cross, and where do those creeks go? If there are hills, what made those hills? If there are flat sections, why is it flat there? How have people used the land around the routes historically and pre-historically? Where are there scars of human mistreatment of the land? Are there remnants of “natural” landscapes?

Pulling from your interests, begin to learn about those things along your route. What plant communities are native along your route? What trees should you expect to see? What birds might you see in this season? Routes that have become stale can take on a new shape with new meaning when you’re looking with fresh eyes.

For bikepacking trips, the same ideas apply. Take some time to view your route through a natural history lens before you go. Bring some kind of guide with you or make some notes before you begin. Plan some time to stop and observe. Have some things in mind you’d like to consider along the way.

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We usually have some kind of bicycle goals in mind for the trip, such as a certain number of miles or days or feet of elevation. Add some other goals to engage the naturalist in you. You could:

• Have a list of tree or bird species you want to identify along the route.
• Make a meal with foraged ingredients.
• Sketch a scene from the landscape each day.
• Keep a log of the weather.

If you’re planning your own bikepacking route, you could do so around some kind of natural theme. For example, you could:

• Plan a geology tour, visiting prominent geologic features.
• Plan a wildflower tour to known wildflower hot spots.
• Plan a route that crosses through different biomes or environments and look for those transitions along the route.
• Make your own “divide” route, tracing a watershed divide as closely as possible, and keep track of which watershed you’re in while you ride. Or trace the path of water from the top of the watershed to some point downstream.

The theme running through all of these ideas is curiosity. With the senses tuned in and a curious mind open, a bicycle really becomes that platform of exploration we talk about so much. And you don’t have to go very far, either. Any length of ride can be exploratory when you’re learning new things about the world as you go.

Just the other day, I saw a new bird (for me). It’s not a rare bird, but I’m not really a birder. It caught my attention as I rode a short trail in my neighborhood because the early morning light made the red cap on its head pop, and it fluttered around in the winter brush with an uncommon frenetic energy. I learned it was a ruby-crowned kinglet, and now I know what kind of habitat they like, how they act in the morning while they are eating, and what a male and a female look like. I know they have a home at the edge of the nature trail when they winter in South Carolina, nestled in the scrubby stuff along the fence line. And now I have another piece of my neighborhood’s puzzle. It’s one small splendid part of a great splendid universe.

Some Resources for Naturalists

There are all kinds of places to find good naturalist-related information. Here is a (not nearly exhaustive) list of common places to get some information for your area:

• Guidebooks for common species are usually available from bookstores and outdoor stores. These are sometimes as broad as “Trees of North America,” but may be more regional. Make sure you get a guide for the region where you live (or will be visiting).
• Check your local university press for guides and books with local details written by local experts. These are usually detailed and sometimes academic but can be really interesting.
• If plants and animals are your thing, look for your state’s natural heritage program. These programs and the experts who staff them collect and manage the data that inform conservation decisions related to rare, threatened, and endangered species. They also usually have educational resources. Keep up with their news and events, and you’ll learn some interesting things about your area.
• State departments of wildlife, natural resources, or environment usually have helpful resources, and staff experts who study particular species or natural processes. Many natural heritage programs are associated with these agencies.
• State geologic surveys are great places to find information on all things earth science. They usually have helpful educational resources, and geologic maps are a delight to look at, even if you don’t know what they mean.
• Local land trusts, watershed groups, and conservation organizations love to let people know what they are protecting and why. Look them up!
• Find a local chapter of some kind of organization, like a bird organization or a native plant society. They do field trips and have meetings. If that’s getting a little too deep, they might have some good info on their websites.
• And if you ever get to feeling a little self-conscious as a cyclist hanging around naturalists, get yourself a Da Brim, and you’ll start to fit in!

Some Notes About Using Apps

Until now, I’ve talked about using field guides, but I haven’t mentioned the apps that make an ID based on photos or sound recordings. That’s because I generally like to remove digital distractions when I’m outside. And I love books. I also think it’s a valuable exercise to use the clues given in guidebooks to identify a species.

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However, I have made extensive use of some apps to help me identify species, especially plants. Honestly, they amaze me, and I have learned a lot using Seek from iNaturalist and Merlin from Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Here’s the catch: It can be easy to let the app do the work, check off a species, and move on. It becomes a shortcut and defeats the purpose. The app saw the plant or heard the bird, but did you see the plant? Did you hear the bird? When using these apps, don’t forget to make the observation yourself. See the plant. Know what makes it what it is. Feel the leaves, notice their shape, count the petals. Hear the birdsong. Know what makes it unique from other songs. The goal should be that in the future, you won’t need the app for that species, or you’ll at least have some clues and some guesses. If needed, you can use the app to verify. The point is less that you’ve found out a species name for something and more that you’ve noticed something beautiful and have taken the time to engage it.

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Don’t assume the app is always right, as amazing as they are. Nature is often subtle, and the algorithms behind these apps are designed to give an answer, not communicate subtlety. Some things are simply not possible for an app to ID anyhow, because one photo won’t give you an answer. There are many oak species that a single photo of a leaf won’t get you to. A study of bark and branches and buds and acorns might be required.

Further Reading

Make sure to dig into these related articles for more info...