FIELD NOTES: W.S. Blatchley, Hoosier Naturalist

“The glamour of a perfect fall day once more enthralls me. A temperature just to my liking—a dome of cloudless blue above me, a carpet of velvety green beneath my feet. What more could I ask?”

—W.S. Blatchley, Boulder Reveries

~by Jim Eagleman

Willis Stanley Blatchley of Indianapolis entered those words in his journal in the autumn of 1904, later to be added to other works, Woodland Idyls, Gleanings from Nature, and A Nature Wooing.

Blatchley grew up on a farm in Putnam County. His love of nature began as he collected insects in his father’s garden. Both of his parents were teachers. At 17, his first job was peddling notions in summer and fall, using his profits to enroll in the normal school in Danville. There he acquired a teacher’s license and taught four winters in county schools, “the first winter for $1.50 a day, and the last one for $2.50 per day.” In the spring of 1883 and at the age of 24, he entered the preparatory department at Indiana University, with an “intensified desire” to enroll full time the following fall after visiting the university library, and “awed by the odor of gases and display of chemicals in the chemistry department.”

While at IU under the tutelage of Dr. David Starr Jordan (of Jordan Hall fame), Blatchley enrolled in botany classes, studied plants, and then collected specimens for the university herbarium. This was in 1883 when the campus included just two buildings.

In 1885 when Jordan was appointed university president and still teaching, he asked Blatchley to accompany him and a class of 30 students on a field trip to Weed Patch Hill, near Nashville. Jordan wanted Blatchley to collect common plants and teach the students. Blatchley was also asked to secure lodging for all the students at farmhouses that night, which he did, but didn’t find any lodging for Dr. Jordan and himself. They found a small cabin just before dark in the pouring rain. At first the owner refused, but then agreed after Dr. Jordan insisted. In the morning, “Dr. Jordan and I went down to the spring house to wash our faces in an old tin basin there provided. He then looked around for a towel and seeing some cloths hanging on some bushes he picked one of them. The lady of the house having watched us, came running out of the kitchen with a towel and said: ‘Don’t use that, mister, that’s the baby’s didy!’”

Blatchley’s career in the geologic and natural sciences took him to many places, every Indiana county, South America, and abroad. Concentrating on entomology, the study of insects and a relatively new discipline, he accumulated much data from his travels for a Key to the Orthoptera, classifying mantids, crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts. Blatchley paid attention to detail in the natural world which allowed him to develop patience, a habit he said gave him much pleasure. “My practice of patience allows me the grand title of naturalist who is a generalist. I’m called a specialist in my field, but I honor the title, generalist.”

Blatchley’s description of “the glamour of a perfect fall day,” allows a perspective from Indiana naturalists who are thrilled at all of nature, particularly the autumn of the year. In Boulder Reveries he references “ironweed in bloom amid the many kinds of goldenrods, a purple Joe-pye weed stretching high above them, and the golden glow of a favorite sugar maple.” He documents the beauty and the regular account of change. “Nature has her own time and mood for doing things. It matters not though the protests of a million men be on record.”

Despite the unrest now due to COVID, a collective uncertainty of what lies ahead, somehow another fall in Brown County returns us on a regular course. Keyed into nature’s processes, we can attempt to resume a plan of normalcy. While all things in life, work, home chores, and school, are on different schedules requiring our vigilance, nature can be a stable force for many, maybe the only force that makes sense.

Sounds, songs, and sites of nature we look forward to, like a cool, crisp fall morning, fog on an open pasture, the call of cranes overhead, still occur. Timed by the seasons, inherent and predictable, we are heartened by the “business of nature.”

Guaranteed in the thought nature’s schedule is intact, an infallible occurrence in an otherwise uncertain time, we can continue.

As the pulsating cicada chorus winds down and the last thrushes are marked on the August calendar, a slight coolness of most mornings now greets me as I head from the house.

Like Blatchley, with a kinship of all Indiana naturalists, I make mental notes on my walks, eyes towards the ground, but mindful of distant sounds. If I hear a bird I know, it’s comforting. If I smell a scent not always present, I know something different had happened at night, and I wonder aloud. Never bored, always aware of changes, the season’s color now a favorite, it is the time to walk your favorite trail, reassured, and return to what can stabilize, comfort, and renew.

For more information about W.S. Blatchley, contact the Blatchley Nature Study Club, Noblesville, Indiana.