. . . what kind of a tree would you be?” asked Barbara Walters of her interview subject Kathryn Hepburn. It was parodied ever after as an inane interview question, but Barbara was ahead of her time. How did she know that, thanks to artificial intelligence, the question would go viral?

According to my great-great-grandson Asa’s estimate – carefully arrived at while on a mission to take a census of our local tree frogs and occupied bird nests, there are 78 trees on the property here at Kartar Ridge Ranch. Until recently, though we never really got acquainted with our leafy fellow residents. They were our “neighbors” but we mostly didn’t know their names and we just ignored them, even when they tried to get our attention by dropping on us all kinds of fruit, nuts, pine cones, blossoms, needles, leaves, twigs, and bird droppings.

All that changed recently. We now have a new hobby here on the farm. I guess you could call it addicted tree-watching. This strange phenomenon is due to some recent reading material we’ve been passing around.

The first is a book recently published but one we haven’t even read yet! According to a review of it in the Smithsonian Magazine by Richard Grant:

“A revolution has been taking place in the scientific understanding of trees, and Peter Wohlleben is the first writer to convey its amazements to a general audience. The latest scientific studies, conducted at well-respected universities in Germany and around the world, confirm what he has long suspected from close observation in this forest: Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated—and even intelligent—than we thought.
My guide here is a kind of tree whisperer. Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author, has a rare understanding of the inner life of trees, and is able to describe it in accessible, evocative language. . . Wohlleben has devoted his life to the study and care of trees. He manages this forest as a nature reserve, and lives with his wife, Miriam, in a rustic cabin near the remote village of Hümmel.
Now, at the age of 53, he has become an unlikely publishing sensation. His book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, written at his wife’s insistence, sold more than 800,000 copies in Germany, and has now hit the best-seller lists in 11 other countries, including the United States and Canada.”

Interesting, huh? But before we could even lay hold of a copy of the book, we “branched out” by stumbling on this article from the Washington Post by Michael J. Cohen: https://wapo.st/3LZhgm5 In case you can’t access it, the title is “These 4 free apps can help you identify every flower, plant and tree around you”. This is a summary:

“There are more than a dozen apps promising to help you identify the natural world, many of them paid. Don’t bother. Four apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, meet all your ID needs free of charge. And every observation will advance our scientific understanding of the natural world.
The easiest to use is Seek. The app, an offshoot of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you shoot live video. It automatically grabs frames and analyzes them. The augmented reality experience is like downloading a foreign language into your brain. The app identifies the taxonomy of plants and animals instantly as you shoot. If it can’t figure out the species, it will give you its best guess . . .The only drawback? The app doesn’t include deeper context about the species it identifies.
. . . For that, there’s iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. Both offer sophisticated, if slightly less user-friendly, apps that upload and analyze photographs of flora. In seconds, they typically return a ranked list of potential candidates with rich descriptions of each. The identification of the most common species is a slam dunk. For rarer ones, it’s easy to compare your observation against those of others in the database. . .
. . . Finally, there’s Merlin Bird ID, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Merlin feels like magic. The app uses a phone’s sensitive microphone to identify bird vocalizations in the sonic landscape around you, painting a visual representation or sonogram analogous to a musical score.”

Actually there’s many more apps to do the tree/shrub/plant/animal identification, age, and characteristics cropping up all the time, so take your pick, and then enjoy the party. It’s like unexpectantly stepping into another dimension.

And if you’re a Mom, Happy Mother’s Day. As a hint to you from me, the next time one of the kids is trying to come up with a project for the Science Fair, I hope you’ll know what to suggest. You can thank me later.