Lily the Naturalist

As much fun as it can be to watch your kids follow in your footsteps through a shared interest, it may be more fun to see them branch out on their own into something different and unexpected. A case study of this in our family lately has been Lily, the Naturalist.

Looking back over the past few years through the lens of the present, I can see how various interests have flowed together to make this happen: her enthusiasm for The Lion King musical and African wildlife, all of the time she spent watching Planet Earth after her tonsillectomy, and Matt’s wildflower drawings in her lunchbox are just a few. However it came about, though, she is a fervent lover of nature, wildlife, and the planet now—so much so that her teacher’s affectionate nickname for her is “little environmentalist.”

Last week was a big one for our little environmentalist. The week prior, she had seen the first butterflies flying around the school’s butterfly garden at pick-up time. A small group of kids gathered to see, but many of them were trying to catch the butterflies by clapping their hands together and, what was more scandalous to Lily, trampling the flowers in the process. Lily is not confrontational with strangers, so when her gentle remonstrances of “please don’t do that” went unheeded, she resorted to staring around at them all with a highly disapproving look. I offered her a bit of back-up, telling the kids to be careful, but that only resorted to them avoiding the part of the garden where I was standing while Lily continued to glower. She did not want to leave, but she did not have a solution for her frustration.

As we walked to the car, I tried to get her to talk about her frustration and suggested that glowering was not her best option. To help her along, I asked her to think about the summer project she did with me: “Lily’s Book of Awesome Women.” To compile that book, she read through a list of biographies of women from nineteenth-century mathematician Ada Lovelace to modern Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai and answered questions about their character traits, challenges, and accomplishments. Her favorite was biologist and author Rachel Carson, so when I asked her “what would some of those awesome women do?” she brightened up right away: “Rachel Carson wrote a book!”

A book, of course, is a tall order for a second grader, but she could certainly write a letter, and that night, entirely on her own, she wrote a meandering but passionate first draft which featured illustrations of the butterflies she had seen. The next day, her teacher helped her use the class computer to do some butterfly research and make a second draft, and then over the weekend, I taught her a basic version of the persuasive argument I once taught to my CUA college students. She put her problem, her reasons, and her solutions all in her own words and ended up with a three page treatise to give to the school principal the following week.

It took Lily two days to find a time to deliver her letter, and the principal was out of town for three days after receiving it, and during that time, Lily continued to watch the butterflies every day after school. At first, the same group of kids was still around. Lily got more bold about asking them to stop slapping at the butterflies, and so did Corin, and I was amazed at some of the responses they got. When Corin told one little girl that the butterflies should be “living free and in the wild,” a line from the PBS show Wild Kratts, she retorted with a sour look and teenage attitude: “Ugh! That’s what those Kratt guys say! I’m so sick of that!”

When the principal returned after the Columbus Day holiday, though, Lily got a surprise. Every day at her school begins with a school-wide assembly featuring a message from the principal. This message started with a story about teasing, but when that was finished, the principal said that she also wanted to talk about a letter she had received. Lily was asked to stand up while she went through some of the letter’s highlights, including Lily’s outrage at trampled flowers, her research on Monarch migration, and her wish that the butterflies be treated with respect. She also praised the letter’s clarity, saying that Lily was a second grader who ought to be in fourth grade. Lily could not see me watching her from the back of the room, but I could tell from her body language that while she might have been a little bit embarrassed about the notoriety of being the sole student standing in a room of 1,000, she was actually quite pleased with herself. I asked her later if she was more proud of hearing the principal tell the school to respect the butterfly garden or of hearing the principal praise her in front of everyone. She grinned a bit sheepishly and answered: “both.”

Because she also received glowing remarks from her teacher at our fall parent-teacher conference later the same day, she was rewarded with a special dinner out that night, but a better reward came the next day. Up to that time, we had seen only moths and Queen butterflies, which mimic Monarch colors but do not have the same epic migration. On Wednesday, though, as we were finishing up our observations, a giant butterfly came toward us. It was far larger than the others we had seen, but, unfortunately, it was also far less willing to find a flower and stop a while, so Lily was walking all around the garden trying to get a better look while I was spinning in a circle with my iPhone taking pictures whenever I had it in view. After some minutes of patience and eager anticipation, it flew close enough for Lily to declare: “It has to be a Monarch! It has markings no Queen has!” and sure enough, when we sifted through the few dozen photos back at home, we had solid evidence that she was right. Lily had her first encounter with a migrating Monarch butterfly. The posting we made on the app iNaturalist—Lily having entered the Texas Parkes and Wildlife Pollinator BioBlitz—has been confirmed as “research grade.” We have not seen another Monarch since, making that sighting all the more significant.

Never having been much of a naturalist myself, I was surprised at how excited I felt watching Lily’s delight. Sure, I had learned quite a bit from Planet Earth and Wings of Life and helping Lily compile facts for her letter, and those gave me a greater appreciation of the Monarch as a species, but it was Lily’s enthusiasm that made it personal. Whether she continues on from a little environmentalist to fully fledged scientist or whether she eventually moves on to some new passion, the flight of that lone Monarch just when she was fresh from her first attempt at being an awesome woman in a challenging world was a moment I will remember for years to come.