Like students everywhere right now, Molly and Pearl Aeberhard of Kirby, Vermont, have transitioned from being in a classroom to learning at home. For the 10-year-old twins, remote learning has offered the opportunity to spend more time exploring the beloved landscape surrounding their home. With an Emmy-nominated wildlife cinematographer dad (Matt Aeberhard) and a novelist mom (Melanie Finn), who both grew up in other countries, the girls are well-traveled, and curiosity is a family staple.
Could you describe what it’s like where you live?
Pearl: We have a backyard that we let grow wild. We have a few fields and a lot of woods – 342 acres.
Molly: We own a tiny bit of a pond. We have some fields around our house. Me and Pearl like to ride our bikes around them and make jumps. We also love to go exploring in the woods.
Were you really banding birds this morning with your dad?
Pearl: Yep. My dad has a permit to band. He has a mist net, which is a special net that they fly into, and it has a pocket, and they get tangled up and they can’t fly away. Then you have to get them out of the tangles, and sometimes that’s a little tricky. We caught a blue jay, juncos, and chickadees, but they weren’t the birds we wanted to catch. We were hoping for fox sparrows. The little chickadee was quite stuck, and he got really angry with my dad and started biting. It doesn’t hurt. You do have to watch out for the blue jays – their beaks are just so huge, if you get your finger in them, it’s like, “OK, bye-bye finger.” We caught one of those, and I held him, and that was cool. You hold them in a special way. It’s called the “ringer’s grip.” You put the bird’s head between your pointer finger and your middle finger, and then the other three fingers hold it gently around its body so it can’t fly away.
What else do you like to do outside?
Molly: I love to find caterpillars. I love sphinx moths, they’re my favorite type of moth. They’re just beautiful and big. They’re kind of rare to see. The caterpillars tend to be green with something that looks like a thorn on their back, and they tend to have beautiful stripes down them. They can be blue, they can be dark green, they can be red. We’ve raised quite a few. The moths are rare. But the caterpillars, if you look you can find them quite easily. They eat mainly cherry, sometimes apple. I also like to collect beetles. I’ve got a beetle collection in my room. My favorite beetle is a rainbow scarab. They’re beautiful. I haven’t got a rainbow scarab yet, they’re kind of rare around here. I’ve got a scorpion from Tanzania, and I’ve got a dung beetle from Tanzania. I’ve got a couple beetles from around here. I like to go fishing, swimming. I like to do quite a lot of things outside. It’s just amazing – outside lets you run around and be a kid and explore and do all these cool things.
Pearl: I like helping animals. I like exploring, catching things in the pond, riding my bike, swimming, building snowmen, building forts. We use leaves and sticks and pine needles and little trees. I like catching salamanders, tadpoles, fish. I like trying to catch chipmunks with a fish net. We have really tame ones here. They come to the bird feeder. It’s not really a bird feeder. It’s more like a picnic table with seeds scattered all over it and the ground scattered with seed around it. It has a gate around it so our horse doesn’t get the seeds.
Do you have a favorite place to be outside?
Pearl: I have a few places. I like it down by the pond – just anywhere. Sometimes I swim out to the beaver dam, but that’s really occasional. Sometimes the beavers get annoyed at you, so we don’t do that anymore. I like it down by this little pool on a trail where I sometimes go. I found a new spot that’s also to do with water. It’s where some trees have fallen down and there’s a little bit of water at the bottom of the hill, so that’s nice. I like sitting in the middle of the meadow. I just like anywhere, really, as long as I’m outside.
Molly: I like to go to our horse field. I like to go to our pond – I found two sphinx moth caterpillars there once. I also really like to play around in our yard and band birds with our dad. Today we caught juncos, chickadees, blue jays, purple finches. He’s hoping to catch a fox sparrow, but I don’t think he will. They’re kind of rare. (Note from Dad: we did catch some, we have a small passage of them through our property in April.)
What has it been like not being able to go to school this spring?
Pearl: It’s been hard actually. I’ve been realizing how much I actually miss school. What I miss about school is – at recess, when we go down to the lower field, me and my sister have been building this fort for six years now. It’s more than a foot thick. It’s meant for animals. We have a little garden area [at school], and in the compost, we sometimes find little gourds that are perfectly fine to decorate the fort. Also, we grow pumpkins, so when Halloween comes, we have pumpkins to put around the fort. But it’s actually kind of fun to be home, too. We get more free time and more time outside.
Molly: I don’t really miss school much, because I get to have more time outside. I do miss my friends. The thing I don’t like about being home, it takes a bit more time to do work, because there isn’t really a teacher to explain it. I’ve also gone hiking. I’ve gone exploring in the woods. I’ve been trying to catch wood frogs.
Do you have any pets?
Pearl: We have two horses, four parakeets, one rat, two praying mantises, six fish, two dogs, one cat. The cat is new. We’ve had her for a month. She’s 10 years old, and her name is Tuga. We’re just fostering her now, but we’re going to adopt her. I volunteer at Kingdom Animal Shelter, in Saint Johnsbury, well not now with the coronavirus. I started around the beginning of the school year. The first thing my mom said when we walked into the shelter was, “We are never getting a cat.” And look where we are now – having a cat! Our horse Dreamer is a Harry Houdini. He ducks under gates. He goes through brush. He hops over streams. He goes through really deep mud. One time he went all the way down to the end of the field to get out.
Molly: We’ve had the praying mantises for about a year. They live for quite a long time. The babies like fruit flies, but the adults tend to eat crickets.
Do you have a favorite animal?
Molly: I basically like all animals except squirrels. They eat seed, and they just look so annoying.
Pearl: I like all animals. I don’t have a favorite. Me and Molly are learning about the pileated woodpecker. We’re doing a little thing on how they help other animals. They make homes for brown bats, finches. They eat over 20 different foods. And they’re huge.
What do you think you might like to do for work when you’re an adult?
Pearl: Definitely something with animals. I kind of want to be a vet and a person who helps animals, wild animals.
Molly: I’m definitely going to be an artist. I also want to be a doctor and someone who studies trees. I really like trees. They’re just so interesting. They communicate with their roots. They survive the seasons like other plants don’t. They basically have blood, which is their sap. My favorite is probably the yellow birch; its bark tastes like wintergreen. When I’m not outside, I’m basically inside either reading, playing with Pearl, or drawing. I draw lots of portraits and outdoor things. Drawings are inspiring. They just make me use my imagination, like the outdoors. I like to draw creatures, some imaginary and some real. I also really like to draw landscapes and portraits. I like to experiment with different shapes. My favorite two artists are de Chirico and Van Gogh.
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