Mosses in the Field (from the beginning)
Mon–Fri June 22–26, 2026
Instructors: Jerry Jenkins & Sue Williams
$1200 | Camping or rustic cabins and food included
At White Creek Field School, White Creek, NY
First, a content warning: mosses are beautiful and dangerous plants. The closer you get, the lovelier they are. Look at them close enough and long enough, and you can lose your heart.
That accepted, this is a five-day course in looking and thinking about mosses. There will be some liverworts too: they are strange and ancient and Sue and Jerry like them. It will start at the beginning; focus on field study; be taught as a series of exercises involving examination, drawing, description, comparison, and diagnosis; and have, addition, short daily lectures on moss history, abilities, relations, collaborations, and accomplishments.
On Day 1, we introduce mosses and look at the common mosses of stream banks and post-agricultural woods at the field station. On Day 2, we go up the hill to the Notch for common boulder-and-ledge species; on Day 3, to Mount Equinox for limestone species and some rarities; on Day 4 to Branch Pond for boreal shoreline species, focusing on Sphagnum; and on Day 5, back to the Notch for a merry ledge moss-and-liverwort Hunt.
The course will start with large common species and then work, carefully, towards smaller and rarer ones. Designed incrementally to introduce about a dozen characteristic species from each habitat each day, and emphasizing drawing and description throughout. To learn to see, you need to draw; to understand what you have seen, you need to describe.
Offered jointly by the North Branch Nature Center’s Biodiversity University and the Northern Forest Atlas Project.
Course Details
About the Instructors
Jerry Jenkins has studied, puzzled over, and written about mosses for 60 years, and photographed them in the field and in the studio for the Atlas project for 14 years. He is the author of Mosses of the Northern Forest, a photographic guide, Mosses of the Northern Forest, a (large) digital atlas of annotated photos, and a series of photographic lessons in moss ecology and identification.
Sue Williams has studied and drawn mosses for 36 years, is the author and illustrator of the Ecological Guide to the Mosses and Common Liverworts of the Northeast, and one of the best field bryologists in the Northeast. She and Jerry Jenkins have taught courses together for 30 years. Teaching mosses is hard: they are small, shy, and sometimes scary. It has taken a while to learn, but we think we are finally getting it.
Recommended Reading
- The Ecological Guide to the Mosses and Common Liverworts of the Northeast. 2023. Sue Williams.
- Mosses of the Northern Forest. Jerry Jenkins.
- Digital resources and Photographic Guides available at Northern Forest Atlas
- These resources and more will be supplied for students at the course.
Location and Timing
the White Creek Field School in Eagle Bridge/White Creek New York. The school has a kitchen, classroom, photo studio, lab, library, indoor and outdoor showers and a (cold) creek, camping space on the lawn and in a couple of screen houses. Plus a few beds, two pizza ovens, foxes, skunks, bunnies, owls, and a school bell by the door. Botany classes have been taught here since 1978.
The course begins 8 AM on Monday and concludes each day by 5 pm. Tuesday-Friday mornings will begin at a time of the instructors’ choosing. The course concludes by 5 pm on Friday.
Meals
Food is included, and will feature local, organic, mostly vegetarian group meals prepared on site by our chief of camp, first mate, quartermaster, and general roustabout John Davis. Dinners will heavily utilize the pizza ovens onsite.
Lodging
Camping or overnighting in rustic screen houses onsite.
Physical Requirements
Participants must be able to walk about 2 miles over the course of each day, sometimes off trail over uneven and potentially muddy terrain. Participants should be comfortable outside in potentially hot, muggy, wet, and/or buggy conditions for long periods of time. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about mobility and/or other accessibility needs.
Academic Credit & Professional Development
This course may qualify for 3 graduate-level credits for an additional $450 course fee. All BioU courses are accredited by Vermont State University’s Center for Schools. Participants interested in receiving credit must contact us immediately after registration so we have time to arrange course accreditation. It is the student’s responsibility to ensure that home institutions will accept the credit. Participants pursuing academic credit will be required to complete an additional assignment above and beyond the course hours, including literature review, reflective writing, or a field-based project.
This course qualifies for 40 hours of professional development hours and continuing education units. Certificates of completion are provided upon request at the conclusion of the course.
Financial Support
We have financial support available for most courses! Please head to our Financial Support page to learn more and request financial support. Support is limited, but we do our best to make sure that participants are not turned away for financial reasons. Since many courses fill quickly, we suggest submitting your financial support request after registering for the course if you are able. Or you may email us after submitting your request to ask us to temporarily hold a space for you.
Cancellation Policy
While we realize that unexpected circumstances arise that are out of our control, North Branch Nature Center cannot guarantee refunds for registrations cancelled within 30 days of the course. If a cancellation occurs within this window, NBNC will attempt to fill the space from our wait list and provide a full refund. If the course needs to be cancelled by NBNC, we will provide a full refund.