Baltimore orioles began to alight on the white clouds of Callery pear trees blossoms lining our driveway on April 26th, more than a week earlier than they have in the past. How do I know, especially since my memory sucks? Because when I’m not too lazy, I submit the data to eBird, the online database for bird observations. Why did these bold orange and black spring migrants come earlier this year? Was it because the pears blossomed early as well? And is that a result of climate change? Frankly, I have no idea.
But imagine if some responsible citizen scientist had tracked and stored this data starting not in 2010, when I began, but going all the way back to 1826 — around the time that we believe our house was built. And not just about the orioles’ arrival but also when robins were first seen, when the apple trees bloomed, strawberries ripened and the first killing frost came.
Turns out someone has. Conrad Vispo, an ecologist with the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, had found references in old books about a trove of meteorological data. “It’s not like he found the records on his shelf,” explained Anna Duhon, a colleague of Vispo’s at Hawthorne Valley and one of the authors, alongside Vispo and several others of a 2023 paper in the Journal of Ecology, that shared what citizen scientists across two centuries revealed about the climate in the Northeastern US. Duhon added, “He found the references and found the records.”
Those overlooked records — a trove of hand-written data sheets — were stored on microfilm at the New York State archives in Albany. At some point in the mid-19th century over one hundred academies — precursors to today’s pubic and private high schools — from Hudson in Columbia County, to Flatbush in Brooklyn, as well as Utica, Ithaca and Onondaga were submitting monthly reports. It took Vispo, Duhon and their colleagues two months just to photograph them. And then there’s the added challenge of deciphering the handwriting, even if penmanship was taken more seriously in those days.
“We have all these handwritten sheets which would be a bear to read even with A.I.,” Vispo conceded when I suggested that the chore sounded like a perfect assignment for artificial intelligence. The hope is that transcribing all this data becomes a crowd-sourced project. Anyone who’s interested in helping can contact Vispo at conrad@hawthornevalleyfarm.org
Anton Seimon, a climate scientist with the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy celebrated the discovery. “We have an enormous trove of lost data of scientific value that has been sitting under our noses for years,” he said. “The fact that we all managed to miss this for so many years… it’s breathtaking.”
The authorities behind collecting the original data in the 1800’s included Simeon DeWitt, the head of the New York State Board of Regents and a geographer who turned down President George Washington’s nomination to become Surveyor General of the United States; and Joseph Henry a physicist born in Albany who would go on to become the first secretary of the Smithsonian.
But in a very early example of citizen science the true heroes behind the data may have been the anonymous students and teachers that religiously collected it. “The care and attention these scientists gave to their accuracy is an impressive piece of the story,” Anna Duhon noted as we sat on a bench at Hawthorne Valley, pollinators dutifully buzzing all around us.
Conrad Vispo added, “Today if you want to get mean temperature you can sit in your office.” Back in the early 1800’s, he noted, people had to bundle up and go out and measure it around the clock.
The ecologists shared some of their conclusions not just in that journal paper but also at a well-attended discussion sponsored by the Ghent, NY Climate Smart Committee in early May. For the sake of full disclosure, the low-waste event ( I hadn’t previously realized that was a thing) was organized by, among others, my daughter Lucy Gardner who, while it might not be strictly relevant, just received her masters degree in conservation biology while full-time moming (is that a verb, if not it ought to be) her twin two-years olds.
The data, presented by Vispo, in the guise of a 19th century time traveler; Duhon; Anton Seimon; and Kerissa Fuccillo Battle, an ecologist and community science activist adds a critical slice to the research on climate change. It’s remarkable that this is likely the most complete climate data set for its time known worldwide. Henry David Thoreau kept records of his sojourn at Walden Pond but that lasted only a couple of years. And the Japanese were documenting the arrival of cherry blossoms a thousand years ago. But it’s unlikely there’s anything that quite parallels the breath of what Conrad Vispo rediscovered.
So what does the comparison between 19th century pre-industrialization and contemporary data show? In short, to quote that journal paper, “a strong signal of phenological change in response to climate change across a large geographic region.”
I know what you’re thinking. What’s phenological? Did I sleep through that semester in high school? I hadn’t heard of it either until I attended the discussion. It’s the study of seasonal natural phenomenon, such as when trees blossom, migrating birds arrive and frogs start croaking. For the record, that’s happening almost two weeks earlier than it did a century or more ago. They even had more auroras back then. But Conrad Vispo told me that’s because the magnetic North Pole moved, not anything that humanity deserves credit or blame for.
The discussion was supposed to be followed by a nature walk to teach participants how to create a phenology trail. Alas, it was rained out. Whether the precipitation was affected by global warming is something people a hundred years from now may well be able to determine based on the efforts of backyard citizen scientists from the 1820’s through the present moment and into the future. Though my intermittent contributions to eBird don’t really qualify me to be included in their distinguished ranks.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
