Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World

by Sharman Apt Russell

Overview

A critically acclaimed nature writer explores the citizen scientist movement through the lens of entomological field research in the American Southwest.

Award-winning nature writer Sharman Apt Russell felt pressed by the current environmental crisis to pick up her pen yet again. Encouraged by the phenomenon of citizen science, she decided to turn her attention to the Western red-bellied tiger beetle, an insect found widely around the world and near her home in the Gila River Valley of New Mexico.

In a lyrical, often humorous voice, Russell shares her journey across a wild, rural landscape tracking this little-known species, an insect she calls “charismatic,” “elegant,” and “fierce.” What she finds is renewed optimism in mysteries still left to be explored, that despite the challenges of climate change, there is a growing diversity of ways ordinary people can contribute to the research needs of scientists today in the name of environmental activism.

Offering readers a glimpse into the pioneering field of citizen science, Diary of a Citizen Scientist documents one woman’s transformation from a feeling of powerlessness to engaged hopefulness.

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal and the WILLA Literary Award for Best Creative Nonfiction

Named one of the top ten best nature books of 2014 by GrrlScientist in The Guardian

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504083003
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Sharman Apt Russell was awarded the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, whose other recipients include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Roger Tory Peterson. Her works include the award-winning young adult historical fantasy Teresa of the New World, set in the dreamscape of the sixteenth-century American Southwest, and Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which takes place in a science fiction Paleoterrific future. Her nonfiction ranges from Diary of a Citizen Scientist to Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist. Sharman is a professor emerita at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, and affiliate faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives with her husband in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico.
 

Editorial Reviews

Named as one of the top ten best nature books of 2014 by GrrlScientist in The Guardian.


Russell has always been a thoughtful writer, able to examine issues as diverse as ranching (Kill the Cowboy) and hunger (Hunger: An Unnatural History) with balance and clarity. With Diary of a Citizen Scientist, her most personal book yet, Russell ranges from thoughtful examination to luminous revelation that reads like William Wordsworth or Annie Dillard, the soul shivering with ecstasy… Diary of a Citizen Scientist is a journey narrative, a chronicle of a search that changes the author along the way. Russell is a 57-year-old writer and teacher of creative writing at the college level when she decides to combat her growing sense of helplessness about the state of the world today by doing something useful. She picks tiger beetles because they are found near her Gila River Valley home, and because while they are widespread across the earth, the basics of their lives remains unknown (like where the burrows their larvae live in are located, and how long it takes the earth-bound larvae to go from egg to winged adult).

Along the way, Russell learns the thrill and tedium of field science, the excitement when something happens; the long hours when the search yields a big fat zero; and the challenges of dissecting tiny beetles, which she realizes are no greater than those of translating her fascination with tiger beetles into the minds of the third-graders who Russell's daughter teaches. Russell learns to speak entomology jargon of setae (bristles) and metanotums (body parts), and comes to understand the point of the quotidian, the mundane work of counting and collecting, taking notes and tallying data.

Most importantly though, Russell learns the power of seeing and understanding the earth at a deeper level, participating in a search for answers that is the ultimate antidote to despair. Diary of a Citizen Scientist is both a journey that transforms Russell and her understanding of herself and the planet she loves, and a clarion call to join a movement.

—Susan J. Tweit, Storybook Circle Reviews


Diary of a Citizen Scientist is full of wit and wisdom and forays into neuroscience and psychology. Even better, the book also offers a portrait of the phenomenon of Citizen Science.

Citizen scientists are devoted amateurs. They spend large chunks of their lives cataloguing galaxies, tracking tree frogs, or identifying fossils from long-dry seas. They range from enthusiastic retirees to schoolchildren to just about every type of person you can think of. Pygmies in the Congo use specially formatted smartphones (images instead of words) to record data about deforestation and illegal poaching. Every year, of the 19,000 species newly described, citizen scientists are responsible for 60% of the descriptions.

The information about Citizen Science gives the book heft, the sense of the author joining a movement larger than herself, that will be here and growing long after she’s trapped her last tiger beetle. Several times she quotes a line by a scientist who inspires her: “You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would know more than anyone else on the planet.” The line goes some way to explaining what drives her.

—JJ Amaworo Wilson, Mailbox Chronicle Reviews

From the Publisher