With parents who are involved in land stewardship and foster a keen appreciation for working and playing outside, it’s no wonder that Siler Russ is growing up with a strong understanding of the natural world. At age 8, he can list – and identify – more than a dozen invasive plant species without pause, name all the amphibians known to live in Vermont, and explain the difference between the sting of a bee and that of a wasp. He loves to ride his bike through the trails near his house in Sharon, Vermont, is planning to learn how to telemark ski this winter, and is a pro at finding crayfish – native and invasive – in the White River. For the past two years, Siler has been homeschooling, and when he – or his parents, Mary and Greg – can’t find the answer to a question, he turns to one of the experts he knows, from a watershed scientist colleague of his folks to the teenaged birder friend who lives in Montpelier.
I’m 8 and 1/2. I’m in third grade. I want to be a herpetologist and a paleontologist and a botanist. I’ve been homeschooling last year and this year. I like that the things I like to do outside are now part of school. Exploring in nature, going on long walks in the woods, exploring new areas, going to the river.
We’ve been studying trees this fall. I’m actually making a tree guide. We’re collecting leaves and we’re putting them between sheets of waxed paper. And I’m learning how to identify them, and about different leaf shapes. I really love oaks. Their leaves are pretty interesting, and every oak species has a different shaped leaf. We mostly have red oaks, but sometimes we’ll see pin oaks planted in people’s yards. There’s a beech tree in our woods that I like to climb. It’s the only good climbing beech tree that I’ve ever found. It just has low branches, and they’re pretty thick and big. I like to climb it, but I have a pretty hard time getting down. I also like to climb apple trees. That’s easier.
We have four vernal pools around. We have one on our property. Go over a few feet, and there’s another vernal pool. Go farther up in the field above our house and there’s a huge vernal pool. Go down from that and there’s a pretty small vernal pool. Mostly I find water bugs and amphibians, some reptiles. I really like hunting for amphibians and reptiles – they’re kind of my favorites. Amphibians and reptiles are a challenge to catch, and they’re pretty cool animals. Sometimes you have to go looking for them, so when you do find them it’s a bit of a surprise and a bit of a treat.
I’ve learned about salamanders from the Vermont Herp Atlas. It’s a website that shows every reptile and amphibian in the state. I’ve basically memorized the list. For salamanders, we have Jefferson salamanders, spotted salamanders, dusky salamanders, two-lined salamanders, spring salamanders, red-backed salamanders. We have to go pretty far to find the spring salamanders. Red-backed salamanders you can just find by flipping any old log. Most salamanders live in the vernal pool, but the streams are where we find the two-lined and duskys.
Someday we’re hoping to see a mud puppy, the largest salamander in all of Vermont. They can grow to be one and a half feet long, and they have gills. They’re kind of brownish, and they have these bright red gills – like when a salamander larva hatches, those kind of gills. We’re really hoping to see one. They’re mostly in the Connecticut River Valley, but some are in the White River. We thought we saw a young one once, but it was just a young two-lined salamander.
I like snakes. But I’m a little bit afraid of them, because sometimes they bite me. My trick is wearing gloves. If you want to get rid of your snake fear, start with red-bellied snakes. They’re the smallest snakes in Vermont, and they can’t even bite you. They’re brown. They look like worms. And they have red bellies. I’ve only ever seen red-bellied snakes and garter snakes. I really want to see milk snakes. I’ve tried looking as hard as I can, but for some reason I can’t find them. All of our neighbors have seen them. My parents have seen them. But I haven’t.
We have a game camera at our vernal pool, and we’ve caught a lot of animals on that. We’ve probably seen every single animal around here. Deer, turkey, coyote, bobcat, squirrels, chipmunks, bear, snowshoe hares, porcupines, raccoons, owls and hawks. We’ve seen foxes in our yard. We’ve seen woodcock and grouse in our yard. We’ve seen opossums just at the bottom of our yard. I’ve seen long-tailed weasels scurry up a tree or run across the road chasing a chipmunk. This year I saw a fisher in person, in the wild. I was at our vernal pool. I spend like an hour at a time looking for animals. And I saw a fisher bounding down our trail. It put its front paws up onto a log and just looked at me.
I have a bone collection with a mink skull. I also have a thorn collection, which has native and invasive thorns from both plants and trees. I know every single one that I have. There’s only one or two thorns that grow around here that I don’t have. I did collect an autumn olive thorn, which is an invasive, but that one’s still in my mom’s coat. I have a hawthorn thorn that’s about 2 ½ inches long. There’s also fatter thorns like this one from a black locust. Black locusts are very large invasive trees. We see them a lot along the river. They’re huge trees. They get as big as huge maples and oaks, very tall. They have compound leaves, which means there’s one stalk that has a bunch of leaves on it. There’s another locust that’s around, also invasive, called a honey locust. I’ve never seen a honey locust, but they’re terrifying. The adult honey locusts have thorns on the trunk of the tree, huge thorns – bigger than the hawthorn tree thorns. So many thorns.
We have a dog named Caddis. He was named after a caddisfly. He’s a German shorthaired pointer. He also likes to be in the woods, because German shorthaired pointers are hunting dogs. They specialize in hunting grouse and woodcock. He’s 15, which is like 104, but he’s really active.
Snorkeling in the river is awesome. At Broad Brook we’ve seen suckers and even huge bass. My favorite fish are tessellated darters and slimy sculpins. The best part about sculpins is you never know what color you’re going to find. They could be white, they could be brown, they could be red, orange. I’ve even seen them orange with green and blue spots, and checkerboard patterns. You wouldn’t see sculpins unless you were snorkeling. They’re not very big, and you have to look pretty hard to find them. They’re maybe 4 inches. They like to live under rocks and in very clean water.
For school, I’m writing a book about prehistoric animals. My big project that I’ve been working on is researching every single prehistoric shark. There’s this website that lists all these sharks, and I’m researching them and trying to find pictures of them. If there is a picture, then I draw the picture, color the picture, and cut the picture out and label the size and the name of the shark. I’m probably going to have 490 pictures when I’m done. For Halloween I was my favorite shark, which is a falcatus. Some sharks are really weird looking – falcatus was a one-foot shark that had a horn.
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