My friend Julie Zickefoose found some fur on the ground the other day, and in rather short order had determined it had previously belonged to a bun-rab that was currently turning into a Great Horned Owl pellet. She used many clues, including a few nearby feathers and her own dog’s reaction to the scene, to rule out other likelihoods, and I have little doubt she nailed it. She’s fun as hell.

If I should ever perish in suspicious circumstances, I would like you all to get Julie on the phone. She’ll have it sorted out in no time. And then, please see that my remains are pooped out over the landscape by vultures. Julie would want that for me.

No matter what you’ve heard, not all naturalists play naked volleyball. Julie is an authentic naturalist. What this means is she is educated, alert, and her noticers are all tuned up. The natural world is jammed with life stories and murder mysteries, and clues are absolutely everywhere, and the keen of eye and limber of brain can suss out a lot of them. Julie could probably intuit a painful thistle laceration on a beetle from a bent antenna. Give her a good microscope and she could probably pick out an individual bacterium, recognize unusual and concerning activity, infer a nutritional deficiency, and have something in her cabinet to fix it right up.

Basically, Julie can hear very quiet stories and she’s generous about sharing them.

It’s exciting. It’s exciting just to be able to recognize a single bird out of a flock, and then track its comings, its goings, even its staying-puttedness. It’s a recipe for joy, and for caring, which are related. I only just noticed one of my chickadees—I’d like to think she’s one of Studley’s kids, because she converses with me—is actually discernible from the rest. There’s an aberration in the face feathers.

My crows, all four of them, on the other hand, look exactly alike. I know there’s only one that flies to my porch railing when he sees me inside at the door, and will let me get within a foot to hand him a peanut. But until he does that, I can’t pick him out. And I think I know which one is the youngest, because he always has poop on him. The others take turns pooping on him. I’ve seen it. Birds must have an exceptional cloacal embouchure to have such good aim, and cloacal embouchure is just the sort of thing I like to think about.

I am much enriched by noticing things like this. It folds me into the greater community of the living. Julie is that much more snugly folded. It’s not easy for most of us to see the scope and texture of a tapestry we’re a part of, but Julie can tug on a thread here and observe a ripple there, and get the whole picture.

So when my friends Pat and Mary were here and Pat shared her photo of a soiled and defunct bird on the beach, we puzzled it out for a good five minutes. Nothing seemed right. And then I played the Julie card. Sue me: I sent her the photo and a minute later, ping! she’s back. “Drake bufflehead.” Bam!

I actually do know it’s not nice to use your friends as your personal Google, because they have other things to do, and you could use—I don’t know—Google for that. But I have tried to be judicious and not go to the well too often, and so far she has indulged me. Such as the time my niece and I were tromping on some gorgeous gorge territory and came across an interesting turd and puzzled over it. Elizabeth was thinking cougar, and marveling at how, um, fresh it was, and suddenly I was inspired to take a photo and text it to Julie. Ping! A minute later a return text came winging in from Ohio. “Do you have lions?”

Why yes we do. I looked up from my phone. Look big, I told my niece, but neither of us has any talent for that. Brewsters are uniformly snack-sized.

I am not a heavy user of cellphone technology. It’s amazing stuff, but I have a bone-deep conviction it pulls me away from life in this magnificent, ever-thrumming universe, this many-threaded tapestry. It insists on my devotion, and is a thief of my days alive, which are measured. But I have got to say that the ability to identify a cougar turd while standing on a flowered bluff in Washington and communicating with a savant 2500 miles away is something to celebrate.

So is Julie. She’s one of the bright threads.