Stephen Heard
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stephenbheard.bsky.social
Stephen Heard
@stephenbheard.bsky.social
7.7K followers 3.7K following 2.3K posts
Evolutionary ecologist & Boggle aficionado. Author: The Scientist's Guide to Writing; Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider. He/him.

Blog and book links: scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com
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stephenbheard.bsky.social
It's 4:15 p.m. and we're working by headlamps... here at the very eastern edge of a time zone, winter approaching, dark comes EARLY!
A view into a fir forest. There's a light scattering of snow on the ground. The trees are well spaced and the canopy is high above. It's almost dark, the shot illuminated only by my headlamp
November 9, 2025 at 11:02 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
The area where we're working. Chic Choc Mountains (OK, <1000 m, let's say Chic Choc Really Big Hills), Gaspesie, Quebec. Not a bad view from the "office".
View across a fir/spruce forest to a low mountain capped with snow
November 9, 2025 at 10:59 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Yup, pretty snowy at the northern/high elevation sites. There's a buried datalogger in there somewhere...
Two men in orange reflective vests in a very snowy fir forest. They have cleared about a square metre of ground and one is searching it for a buried datalogger. The other is looking helpfully on.
November 9, 2025 at 10:57 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Field work today in Gaspesie, Quebec - one more time to our network of forest plots where we're looking at soil carbon and other ecosystem changes following defoliation by spruce budworm.

The snow is a bit early... complicates things a little!
Selfie, wearing a wide-brimmed canvas hat and a reflective safety vest, against snow-covered spruce trees
November 9, 2025 at 1:12 AM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
By the way, you can't copyright titles. So Kolbert's book shares its title with this 1968 book by Howard Ensign Evans https://amzn.to/47H5GGW. Also well worth reading - but the cover. Oh, the cover. Maybe in 1968 this was chef's kiss? I don't want to think so...
Book cover with the title mostly covered by a large, splotchy image suggestive of a butterfly in lurid red and blue
November 5, 2025 at 12:47 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
This looks great - new book, a compilation of long-form essays, from Elizabeth Kolbert. And the cover - chef's kiss! https://amzn.to/43b0AS3
Book cover. Title and author are in clean, simple font on a white background; across the centre is a band of illustrations of Earth, a bumblebee, two caterpillars, a leaf, a flower, and a whale's tail
November 5, 2025 at 12:47 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Our university's "secure" file-transfer system doesn't require that the sender's name match the sender's email address. I'm sure there's a way I could exploit that for evil, but my inner 12-year-old prefers to exploit it for amusement.

So one of my admins just got this notification:
Message from the file drop system: "Fidel Castro and Joan of Arc's illegitimate love child (email address redacted) has sent you the file listed below using UNB's secure file drop system"
November 3, 2025 at 7:01 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Thought this cheese looked astonishingly healthy until I looked at the serving size.
Nutrition chart showing 0 g fat, 0 g cholesterol, 0 g sodium..... but a serving size of 0 g.
October 28, 2025 at 4:33 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
One of the (many) rabbitholes I went down doing research for something I'm writing led me into Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. This is a page from the Leicester Codex (some of Leonardo's notes about fossils). The notebooks are amazing to read (in translation, if you're me)
Handwritten page of Leonardo's notebooks. Densely packed script in brown ink with a couple of small sketches embedded at upper right: one appears to be globe, the other some kind of machine with a fire under a box that supports a weight on some pulleys.
October 28, 2025 at 1:28 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
The car was built here... you can perhaps smell the last-minute desperation. But they did it!
Inside a single-car garage. Kayaks, canoe, two windsurfers hang from walls and ceiling. The floor is absolutely strewn with tools, fasteners, metal scraps, garbage, and everything else you can imagine.
October 26, 2025 at 3:14 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
The F1 piloting his "coaster car" down the UNB hill. Some cars reach 60 km/h; I'm not at all unhappy that his didn't...

Race checkin was at 7 a.m. At 6:30 a.m., car didn't yet have functioning brakes. What's the point of a deadline if you don't go right up to it? 🤣
October 26, 2025 at 3:11 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Clearly fans of Halloween. Overdoing it? Is that even possible?

But look at the headstone in the closeup. 10/10 no notes.
A bungalow beneath a maple with bright scarlet leaves. For Halloween, the front yard has been turned into a graveyard, with a mock wrought iron fence and about two dozen (!) headstones, each with amusing epitaphs. Closeup of one headstone: "H.T.D., age 4. It's too bad there wasn't a vaccine for this"
October 24, 2025 at 5:18 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Really cool art installation, waterlilies by Sarah Maloney, at the Beaverbrook Gallery in Fredericton, NB. Definitely zoom in to appreciate.
Installation in an art gallery, on a light heavily varnished wooden floor with indirect light from large windows behind. The art is a set of four groupings, each of about half a dozen water lilies made in bronze. The pads and flowers are at about shoulder height, with the intertwined stems going in wiggles down to the floor.
October 21, 2025 at 4:17 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Can't wait to find out if the blog post I just scheduled for Tuesday counts as "ivory-billed woodpecker discourse"...
A mounted ivory-billed woodpecker. It's a large woodpecker with a flaming red cap, a yellow-ivory bill, a sharp white blaze on the side of the neck, and white wing patches that look like the back half of its back. Behind are specimen cabinets, carts, specimen trays, and other museum parephernalia.
October 12, 2025 at 4:41 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Had a wonderful tour of the collections at the New Brunswick Museum yesterday. Among many other things there were #SharksNearMe - these are jaws from the blue shark, Prionace glauca.

Saw many treasures - a few I'll post later; some so new and wonderful that I can't post about them here!
A museum drawer pulled open to show about a dozen shark jaws resting on white foam. Each is about 8" wide with sharp teeth all along lower and upper jaws.
October 10, 2025 at 12:57 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Probably the first time I've seen a pseudoscorpion featured on signage at a nature reserve. I approve! This is at Tromtö Nature Reserve, near Karlskrona, Sweden. (Photo from last May, I'm slow)
Sign reading (in Swedish) "Nature Reserve - Welcome to Tromso". There's a map of the reserve, and several illustrations of creatures found there. Closeup of an illustration of tree-associated creatures, featuring the pseudoscorpion Anthrenochernes stellae. It's a tiny spider-like organism with two big scorpion-like pincers and an orange-brown body that looks a bit like a harvestman.
October 6, 2025 at 12:36 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
There's always something new to see. This absolutely wild little thing is the insect-egg slime mould (Leocarpus fragilis). Each fruiting body is about 1.5 mm long.

Bob Orr Pond Trail, Caughey-Taylor Preserve (Nature Trust NB), near St. Andrews, New Brunswick.
Closeup of a slime mold on a small log. The slime mold is fruiting, with hundreds of small oblong red-orange fruits. Each is about the shape of a Tic-Tac, but only about 1.5 mm long. They are coming from the remnants of a silvery-grey reticulated plasmodium.
September 27, 2025 at 4:50 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
The miniature forest. Spruce seedlings and Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense) berries. Caughey-Taylor Forest Preserve (Nature Trust NB), near St. Andrews, New Brunswick.
Photo shot from ground level through the woods. Foreground is a deep carpet of light green moss. Two small spruce seedlings rise from the moss midfield, and three sprigs of Mainthemum - with their leaves dead, but each with a small cluster of wine-red berries. In the background, a fallen spruce log and some spruce trunks.
September 26, 2025 at 12:19 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Bright orange lichen common on rocky shores of the Bay of Fundy - here at Letete Lighthouse, New Brunswick. I think this is Seaside Sunburst Lichen (Xanthoria aureola), which has a transAtlantic distribution (well, transNorthAtlantic).
Closeup of the bright orange lichen; each patch is a dense spreading layer of bright orange strap-like lobes pressed to the rock Rocks by the ocean, with many patches of bright orange lichen; water in background
September 25, 2025 at 7:36 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Fall colours. Brizley Stream (which, due to our epic drought, is now Brizley Trickle), at the Ledges, north of Central Blissville, New Brunswick.
View of a small river at extremely low water. Most of the riverbed is exposed, consisting of ledges of reddish sandstone. Forest lines both sides. White pines, spruces, and hemlocks are green, but several trees are bright yellow and on each side of the photo a maple is blazing scarlet
September 25, 2025 at 11:17 AM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Uh oh, it's General Woundwort.
An adorable light camel-coloured bunny feeding on grass
September 24, 2025 at 8:14 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Lighthouse selfie! Gosh, that's a big head...

Letete Passage Light (Green Point Lighthouse), near St. George, New Brunswick
A white octagonal lighthouse with s red cupola on a rocky knoll. Foreground left: me, looking right, and with perspective my head is as big as the lighthouse!
September 24, 2025 at 6:16 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Turns out, where I stop is here. Partly because I have (more than) enough slides; and partly because peppers and capsaicin are such a fun story.
A slde titled "Capsaicin", showing part of a habanero pepper plant; the capsaicin molecule; a box of capsaicin cream; and a Sayaca tanager perched on a hot pepper plant with a pepper in its beak
September 20, 2025 at 5:42 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Finishing up the slides for a talk I'm giving at a nearby garden club next week. The only problem with this topic: where on Earth do I stop???
Title slide for a talk: "Nature's pharmacy: Where medicine meets evolutionary botany". With a medieval illustration of a herbalist grinding plant material in a mortar, surrounded by foliage and piles of seeds.
September 20, 2025 at 1:18 PM
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Absolutely bonkers flowers on this night-blooming cereus (Selenicereus undatus) at the Montreal Botanic Garden @espacepourlavie.bsky.social!
Closeup of a cream-yellow flower, surrounded by long narrow greenish-yellow bracts. Visible in the flower's opening is the pistil, which is a couple of inches across and looks like a many-armed yellow starfish with a round opening in the middle. Behind that is a crown of stamens. The whole flower is maybe 5 inches long and three inches wide, with the bract whorl more like 10 inches wide. Wider shot of the plant, behind a low rope barrier. There are several flowers against a messy tangle of long, triangular, dully serrated succulent stems.
September 17, 2025 at 1:39 PM