Oct. 25, 2017: Dahlias in bloom. Trees a drab green. White-throated sparrows arrive on time. Still picking pole beans. High, 66. Low, 45.
Fred Buse perches in his kitchen, flipping through thin pages in a neat, white binder. A blue jay rocks on a branch in his backyard, its call clear from inside the house, where a speaker amplifies the outdoor racket.
Many of Buse’s mornings are spent peering out his kitchen window, slowly scrawling notes on sheets of paper fastened with a clipboard. He counts birds, assesses their health — conjunctivitis remains a problem in house finches. He tallies insects and frogs.
He records the dates his plants bloom and wither. He plots temperatures. Occasionally, he cuts out a newspaper story about a gas pipeline explosion or rabid squirrel.
Buse can be counted among a group of unassuming nature lovers whose journals are like buried treasure for scientists, measuring changes to the Earth’s climate and uncovering how plants and animals are adapting, or not.
Scientists would call Buse’s meticulous, near-daily nature journal entries phenological data, or records that track seasonal natural phenomena such as bears’ annual hibernation or cherry trees’ springtime blossoms. Buse calls them, simply, his notes.
April 12, 1995: Daffodils are out in full swing. Peach tree is about ready to bloom. Two cardinals. High, 57. Low, 46.
In the ’90s, the trees in Buse’s backyard spent more time with bare, wintry limbs. They flushed out their canopies well into the spring, and their green leaves faded to ruddy hues a little earlier in the fall.
Buse carefully plotted the leaf cycles on graph paper — he found that his trees bud in early May, about a week earlier than they did 10 years ago; and tend to hit peak color change in early November, a full two weeks later than in 1985, when they changed around Oct. 16.
His notes stretch back 40 years to 1977, when he was 41 and his South Whitehall Township cul-de-sac was newly converted from apple orchard to subdivision. Nary a squirrel visited back then.
Buse, who moved to the subdivision in 1969, built a forested haven around him. He started with spruce he excavated from his former home on a New Jersey farm. He planted a maple tree seemingly bent on changing color unseasonably and with great flourish. He became a neighborhood legend when he used a level to ensure an oak grew straight.
The note taking began in those early days. At first, Buse’s records are the unorganized scrawlings of an enthusiastic birder watching his favored creatures flit from feeder to tree, with an occasional update from his personal life. He started tracking his garden in 1983, curious to see how the birds’ arrival correlated with his backyard blooms.
A more scholarly turn came in 1987, when Buse became one of more than 4,000 to join the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s FeederWatch bird count. His observations became part of a nationwide data set used to show bird distribution and abundance; the project is ongoing and has more than 20,000 participating observers.
The notes continued to progress to a carefully organized series of binders, arranged so entries can be found both by month and by year. Buse adds to them every day he is home.
His backyard, like his notes, matured. Rhododendrons, azaleas, lilacs and goldenrod take their turns in bloom on the terraces he built with 11 tons of limestone. Wire mesh over a goldfish pond keeps the hungry herons out. One bird feeder is an artful likeness of a creamy mansion; another is a log slathered in smooth Skippy peanut butter.
Development can explain some of the changes Buse has noted. A series of subdivisions now surround his cul-de-sac from Tilghman Street north to the Lehigh Valley Thruway, sliced east-west by Little Cedar Creek. Buse surmises the development pushed deer out of the neighborhood, though the squirrels and chipmunks remain active. He blames deforestation for occasional dips in the number of birds that stop at his feeders during their flights north.
But some changes are not easily explained by development or deforestation: Onetime summer birds, like the goldfinch, are starting to winter in Buse’s yard.
Feb. 1, 2017: Every month since March 2015 has been above-average temperatures. High, 48. Low, 23.
Buse doesn’t need a climate scientist to know the Lehigh Valley saw unprecedented February warmth this year, when fruit trees started to bud weeks before normal and the temperatures reached above 70. He created a chart using the average temperatures listed on his monthly power bills. They show an upward trend — the Lehigh Valley is getting warmer.
Buse’s observations helped scientist Diane Husic in her quest to record natural changes in the Lehigh Valley. Husic, director of Moravian College’s Department of Biological Sciences, runs the Eastern Pennsylvania Phenology Project, which collects records from backyard observers to form a picture of what’s happening outdoors throughout the year.
Husic and other scientists appreciate Buse’s tidy tables and graphs, but his observations of leaf color and bird habits are more interesting to nature laymen, Husic said.
To most, charts are boring. Nature is not.
“We can have all this data about the physical environment and the climate, but what’s most interesting to humans is how it is changing the biosphere, the living things,” she said.
Buse’s records are especially powerful because they extend so far into the past, Husic said. She plans to someday use them for a deeper research endeavor. But even old records are more powerful when combined with what others observe — what happens in one backyard might not indicate climate change, unless others see the same.
“That’s what’s valuable, if you have 10 or 15 people with their own microclimates but seeing the same trends,” she said. “It’s the combination of people watching their backyards that’s important.”
And yes — Husic said others in the Lehigh Valley have noted what Buse is seeing in his yard. Spring is arriving earlier; fall, later. Plants are blooming at different times. Average temperatures gradually rise. Some plants and animals have changed with their surroundings. Some invaded new territory. Some died out.
Some famous nature journals have helped modern scientists uncover how America’s plants and animals have changed over time. Scientists used transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau’s notes from Concord, Mass., to demonstrate that the plants that have adapted to warmer spring temperatures have survived better than those that continued to bloom when they did in the 1850s.
Other records achieved fame on their own. Thomas Jefferson’s manuscript of weather conditions and his garden progress from 1766 to 1824 are still reprinted as “The Garden Book.” Conservationist and author Aldo Leopold used the spring bird migrations and wildflower blooms he saw from his farm in south-central Wisconsin to write “A Sand County Almanac” in 1949.
Buse never intended to write a manuscript. His infatuation with birds began when he was young, when his mother taught him to garden at their Long Island home and his father gave him a copy of John Audobon’s acclaimed 1942 book “Birds of America.”
The infatuation faded during high school and college, when Buse trained in engineering. The career track led him to decades at Ingersoll-Rand Co., where he worked in the commercial pump division, and his love of birds and affinity for observation manifested in his free time.
They have become somewhat of a calling in his later years. Buse presents his findings to garden groups and seniors enrolled in extended education classes. He does not intend for his work to go unused.
A prediction of 2030: An earlier spring, a warm summer, a late fall.
Buse is synthesizing them into a manuscript with a working title “Anticipation of a Backyard.”
The first draft was 700 pages long.
So, between scratching observations into his ever-growing notepad, Buse whittles his work. It’s a daunting task — Buse’s year begins in March, the month when critters rouse from their winter slumbers and the air takes on a fresh, alive scent. He is only through May, a 96-page chapter.
The book should help readers prepare for what will happen outdoors each week: Grosbeak should be fluttering in during the first week of May. Chipmunks should be snacking on young dogwood buds by the month’s end.
The book might someday serve as a bookmark for scientists tracking changing global temperatures, disrupted bird migration or plant seasons.
Buse ponders his own scientific questions: If mild and warm temperatures expand further through the year, the leaves might continue waiting longer to show their colors. Perhaps flowers will bloom at different times — will that confuse the birds? Will it change when birds arrive, or when they go? Will the insects they eat be out when they are?
He will be there, perched at his kitchen table, to figure it out.
ENTRIES FROM FRED BUSE'S JOURNAL
Oct. 26, 2006: Flocks of crows go over. Plant 100 tulip bulbs. Young cardinals are here. Juncos are back. White crown sparrows went through. High, 50. Low, 40.
Feb. 1, 2015: Superbowl Sunday. Overcast. Fox in the back yard, and a squirrel eating icicles like ice cream cone. High, 35. Low, 10.
Jan. 1, 2017: 7 a.m.: sun’s out, a lot of birds. Flock of 30 geese go over. Line of tiny ants go from a piece of food to a crack by the back door. Mercury and Venus on rise in the southwest before the sun. Put out peanuts. High, 46.