6/22/14 & 6/23/14: This week on "Fieldnotes:" "Tree Bark," written by Peter Lesica, read by Anne Garde.
"I was out in the woods with my friend Cooper doing forest inventories in the Swan Valley, where we had to identify each tree in our plots. That's not hard to do in Montana because there are only sixteen species of conifer in the whole state. You just look up at the needles. But Coop wasn't looking up to identify the trees; he just looked at the trunk. He knew the trees by looking at the bark, and after a while, I learned to tell the trees by their bark, too."