Brown County naturalist Jim Eagleman has never-ending love for nature

Walking along a snow-dusted gravel path, Jim Eagleman’s crunching feet come to a stop as he spots a wounded American beech.

“‘Tom loves Susan’ — I’m really happy to know that,” Jim says, pointing out a carving on the tree trunk.

He pulls out his pocketknife and asks a volunteer to give him her bare arm, but the woman backs away. Jim has made his point: No one wants to be carved with a knife, not even trees.

“Does the tree just stand there and take it?” he asks. “Well, yeah, it stands there and takes it, but it hurts it.”

Jim explains to the group he’s teaching that even small carvings, including “Tom loves Susan, cause damage to a tree’s health. Then he moves on to the next tree, a shagbark, and discussed the features that make it easy to recognize. He says recognizing trees is just like facial recognition with people.

For Jim, trees are like people. They’re the people he sees every day, the people he studies, the people he works with. But even after 34 years as an interpretive naturalist at Brown County State Park, he doesn’t get bored seeing the same trees every day because they are always changing, just like any other living thing.

It’s his job to be curious like this. He doesn’t have an average day because he sees something new every day. Every day, he is learning more about the land.

“A naturalist is a curious person,” Jim said. “You’re never satisfied with learning 20 trees when there’s 50 more to know. We don’t know all there is to know yet. That’s an exciting thing.”

Growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, Jim, 62, learned to appreciate nature at an early age.

“The love was there from early on, and it’s still there,” he said.

Instead of playing baseball with his friends, he spent time working on the family farm. His father was a veterinarian who taught him to care for the animals and land they owned. Jim frequently noticed that his friends never had fresh produce while his family had plenty.

“I think it gave me an appreciation for what we get from the land and why it’s important that we respect it,” Jim said.

Jim’s father was a driving force behind his interest in nature, from working on the farm to encouraging him to explore the outdoors to taking him hunting and fishing.

Educating people of all ages is one of many jobs Jim has as a naturalist for the park. But he doesn’t want to bore anyone with a lecture, so he takes a different approach.

“I think my philosophy is get immersed, get involved, touch it, rub it on your body, get it all over you,” he said.

One afternoon, Jim visited an elementary school in Indianapolis. Before he spoke to the kids in kindergarten through sixth grade, a falconer addressed the crowd.

Jim noticed an 8-year-old boy sitting in the front row of the bleachers. The kid was watching the falcon fly around the gym and pretending to shoot it anytime it came close. Jim knew exactly what the kid was thinking — he wanted to get the bird closer to him so he could see it.

When Jim was young, he did the same thing. He was walking to the farm one day and shot a cardinal. He examined the bird, excited to have it in his hands, but threw it away before he reached the barn. He knew he wasn’t supposed to shoot songbirds.

“I know exactly what he’s thinking from when I shot the cardinal,” he said. “You don’t shoot it to be mean. You shoot it to get it close to you, and you examine it. And that’s all this kid was doing.”

Jim wanders along the trail, looking left to right and up and down. He’s not looking for anything in particular. He’s observing what the woods are like in the winter.

His eyes wander, and then he sees two black cherry trees about 50 yards away. The bark looks like burnt cornflakes, a comparison that is his trick for recognizing the tree. Smiling as he tells the group of people he’s out with this mnemonic device, he knows they’re learning something.

On his way to the cherry trees, he stops to examine a musclewood. Someone in the group Jim is out with today asks about its age.

“Well, I can see the circumference, so I can guess the diameter,” he says as he wraps his hands around the skinny gray trunk.

He shakes the tree, watches the movement and makes his guess.

“Twenty to 30 years old,” he tells the group.

Betsy More, 68, is in Jim’s group, hoping to learn something new from a man she met a few years ago after moving to Brown County.

“It’s clear that he’s done this,” Betsy says. “He’s got all of this down pat. He’s kind of the face of the park.”

Jim sits at his computer desk typing notes for his next meeting. During winter, his schedule is mostly meetings.

But today, it’s a little different. He’s meeting with Laura Grover, creator and producer of the Bloomington Storytelling Project. She wants him to tell some stories, but he’s slightly nervous because he doesn’t know what to say.

He titled his first story “Snake in a Bottle.” It’s about a man who called Jim about a supposed copperhead snake he found on his property. But when the man dropped the snake off to Jim, it was a harmless worm snake.

After Laura leaves, it’s back to his office. He has phone calls to answer and programs to plan.

He struggles to find time to get outside because there’s office work that needs to be done, especially in the winter, when there are fewer programs to teach. It’s easy to get stuck inside.

But if he doesn’t schedule time to wander outside, he won’t know the park, and if he doesn’t know the park, he can’t teach others about it.

“You have to know all this stuff,” Jim said. “You can’t know it without getting out and seeing it. I make that my excuse. It’s work-related if I go out.”

Living close to the park, Jim enjoys spending time there with his wife, Kay, even when he’s not working.

They’re always observing nature when they’re outside. It might be noticing what birds are around or what flowers have started growing. They enjoy hiking, fishing, birding or anything that lets them spend time outside.

“We even built our house in the woods because we love being outside,” Kay said.
A pair of white socks is attached to a plaque hanging in Jim’s office.

The plaque is surrounded by his other awards, including the 1992 Naturalist of the Year for Indiana State Parks, but it stands out among the rest.

He didn’t receive this award for his dedication to being a naturalist. It was for his knowledge about music.

Jim played banjo and guitar in a band one night at the park lodge, and a former state parks director was surprised. 

“He said, ‘Boy, you really knocked my socks off,’” Jim said with a laugh.

The director was serious, though, serious enough to create the “Knock Your Socks Off” award and have socks mounted to a plaque.

“I guess he was impressed I not only know about nature, but I know about music, too,” he said.

In Jim’s office, there’s a black-and-white photo of a man who reinforced what he learned as a kid from his dad.

The man’s is Aldo Leopold, and one of his biggest contributions was the idea of land ethic, that we need to love and care for the land.

“I could see that early on as a kid,” Jim said. “And so when I started reading him, it just made sense.”

To Jim, loving the land should be just like loving a spouse or parent.

“You get so much from them. You’d never hurt them. You’d never take away anything that you couldn’t return,” he said. “Well, you can think of the land that way.”

Part of respecting and appreciating the land is being knowledgeable about it and sharing that knowledge. He said he’s not an expert, but more of a generalist who knows a little bit about a lot.

“Really, it’s a life pursuit,” he said. “We’ll never know it all.”