Naturalistic Observations in Science Investigations

The term nature study is used in the sciences mainly for the observation of plants and animals in their natural settings. There is an obvious problem: How do you find something (plant or animal) in its "natural" condition? Humans have spread out over our planet Earth (and into space) and have changed conditions so much that we have made it hard to find things in their natural settings. You can study planets, stars, and galaxies in their natural conditions because there is nothing we can do to change them. Such a study is clearly naturalistic observation. While you cannot experiment with the stars, constellations, or planets, you can observe them and report on what you observe.

Studying Animals and Plants

Bird watching can be a good kind of naturalistic observation, even in and around big cities. Many people find observing birds fascinating. There appears to be great variety in the way birds get along in their settings—what they feed upon, their nesting habits, their mating habits, their plumage, and so on.

If you live in or near the country, there are many opportunities in fields, woods, and streams for naturalistic observation. An important limit in such observations is to try to observe the plants or animals in ways that do not disturb them as they go about their natural ways. In contrast with experimenting, you try not to change the object of your investigation.

On what kinds of plants does a wild rabbit feed? How many baby rabbits does a wild female rabbit have at one birthing? How often does she bear young? In what seasons of the year? How many of the young live long enough to mature and to reproduce? What other animals such as foxes and hawks prey on rabbits?

Finding answers to such questions is all part of doing naturalistic observation for a science project. This kind of observation can be a good way to do science, and it has been the result of much of what we know about the world around us. Can it be done in a city or town? Yes, but there it is sometimes harder to find plants and animals in their natural conditions. Trying to observe insects or angleworms (earthworms) in a natural setting could be a fairly good project, assuming the area has not been sprayed with insecticides or is not too heavily fertilized. Or, if you do attempt such a study, you might want to include the weed killer or fertilizer as part of the "natural" conditions under which the worms or insects now exist.

Why do naturalistic observation? As early European explorers went around the world, they discovered a great many species of plants and animals that they had not seen before. They gathered specimens and put them on display in zoos and museums to enable many other people to understand about the great variety of species in existence. Always, there were questions about how and why all of this great variety came to be. Scientists make much of trying to answer such questions, as we will explore later in the themes of cause or causality.

These days it is especially hard to find people in natural settings for observation. Yes) anthropologists work at doing this) but far from big cities and other "modern" places. You may ask) Isn't it "natural" by now for people to live in big cities? In a way) that's right. Humans are moving into different ways of living) but we are still part of nature.

As these examples show, it is still possible to do naturalistic observation scientifically. However, it takes a lot of skill and determination to find and observe suitable subjects. As in any scientific investigation, record-keeping is important in naturalistic observation. Methods include note-taking, sketching, still photography, videotape, and audiotape.