Nature's Call

Making an impression

Quick! Name the leaves shown above.

If you said, "Pretty," it works for me. (They are mostly maple, for those you who simply have to know such things.)

For those who live in the Intermountain West -- or anyplace in which the leaves turn crimson, gold, bronze and orange in autumn -- fallen leaves are about the best part of the season.  They not only are brilliant and beautiful to behold, but they also smell pungent and clean and make a lovely crunching sound when you walk on them.

Now is the perfect time to take a walk and make something to remind you of autumn all year long.  When was the last time you made a leaf rubbing?  If your answer starts with "19..." then it has been far too long.

Grab some white paper -- that stuff from your printer will do -- a handful of your kids' crayons (Oh, all right. Take the children along, too), and head out to your back yard or favorite trail or park.  Collect a few leaves and start rubbing. Make designs by overlapping the leaves and using different colors. Put the date and location of the rubbing in a lower corner in neat print or script. 

Then laminate the results for some cool keepsakes. Rubbings on legal-size paper can become place mats. Rubbings on 3-by-3-inch sheets can be made into coasters or Christmas ornaments. Rubbings also can be done on Velum paper or similarly thin (but sturdy) paper, and affixed to blank note cards for some custom greeting cards for fall or even Christmas.

Of course, the best part about it is that you will be outdoors enjoying the crisp fall weather with your family and friends (the leaves). It only lasts a few weeks so don't wait.  The laundry, dishes, dusting and, yes, the raking will still be there when you get back.

Quick: What’s your most prominent family camping memory?

The sign pictured here is a composite of some of mine – names of the adults included. My mother is Florence, and my father’s name was Jim. And the rest of the image, well, it speaks for itself.

 Now, our family didn’t tent-camp. We used a tent trailer. You know the type. It had fold-out canvas wings on either side with a double bed in each one (ours had a third wing out the back, as my brother and I would just as soon eat live rats rather than share a bed).

 The whole mess could be neatly compacted into the trailer portion of the thing, which could then be pulled behind a regular sedan – theoretically, anyway. When it came to the neatly-folding-it-down part, the best thing to do, my brother and I discovered, was to be anywhere BUT near the trailer and leave the entire packing and folding to our parents.

 My father (Jim) was the labor. Mother (Florence) was the foreman. She and she alone knew how to get all the cooking gear, clothing, games, food and mini-bar (the key to my parents successfully staying married) into the contraption and getting it all folded down tight. My father’s job was to follow her directions no matter how many times they changed (hence, the mini-bar).

 It wasn’t until I was grown that I figured out that setting up camp did not require a whole slew of words you weren’t allowed to say in front of other people.

 Anyway, we loved being outdoors. My dad considered every walk a hike of great adventure, and it usually was. I recall a particularly adventuresome hike through the woods of Kentucky where my brother and I had a fabulous time scrambling over boulders and climbing trees. The treasure hunt for the chiggers in nearly every region of our bodies later that night wasn’t so fun, but it was definitely worth it.

And I was reminded of these memories and more when I spotted the sign posted above. It was hung just inside the entrance of the Museum of Family Camping, in Bear Brook State Park, just southeast of Concord, N.H.

The museum consists of an extensive, and eclectic, collection of camping gear dating back 100 years – including half a dozen travel trailers from the 1930s forward.

The heavy canvas tents, folding wood stoves and sleeping bags of yesterday will make any camper really grateful for the lightweight nylons and Gore-Tex of today. I have sofa cushions that would be easier to pack than that 1895 sleeping bag on display.

Curators of the museum, however, say their days at Bear Brook State park are numbered. New Hampshire state park officials want the exhibits packed up and moved out of the park’s historic Civilian Conservation Corps building by December this year. So better see it this summer.

Better yet, drop an e-mail to New Hampshire’s park officials and ask them to give this cool little slice of Americana a reprieve until other permanent digs can be found.

And then, make some plans to go camping with your family this summer. It’s cheap. It’s fun, and, best of all, it gets everyone outside – chiggers or not.

This may be the last post for a couple of weeks, as I am starting field work in remote Downeast Maine for graduate school. Stay tuned, however, as I may have a chance to upload some cool photos.

Embracing a sense of place

This is my home -- not my piece of property, of course. But it is a typical Utah vista, the photo of which I snapped during a recent outing with the Wild Bird Center of Layton.

The birding trip was a birthday gift for my other half, and it happened just three days before I left Utah to start my graduate work in New England. I will only be in Maine for a month of field work before returning home. Still, I will miss Utah's scent of sage and juniper, its vast sea of sky and its distant silhouette of mountains.

Many of us live our lives in the places chosen for us by parents or jobs. Still, some of us manage to find work in places we choose for ourselves because we love them. That is how I came to Utah, and I would not trade living here for any opportunity, no matter how lucrative. It is here, among the scrubby, dry high desert of the Great Basin, that I feel my sense of belonging -- my sense of place.

So getting the chance to explore the 250,000-acre Deseret Ranch -- a privately owned gem in northeast Utah -- was an opportunity not to be missed.

The leader of our daylong adventure was Bill Fenimore, author, naturalist and owner and the Wild Bird Center of Layton. Fenimore is the region's premier birder and could identify birds on the wing before I'd had a chance to lift my binoculars. John Belmon, a founder of Wasatch Audubon and expert birder, joined us along with his wife Carol.

We spotted some 114 species -- 34 of which I had never before identified. (Birders call these "lifers," which are added to one's "life list.")

They included burrowing owls standing on spindly legs atop abandoned prairie dog mounds, beautiful green-tailed towhees sporting iridescent emerald tail feathers and, my favorite, a pair of great horned owl fledglings and their mother. One of them was perched on the rafter of an old barn, and the other lay outside in the tall grass along the barn wall, snapping its beak at anyone who ventured too near. (See photos of the fledglings in the Nature's call photo section).

This was a grand trip and the memories of Utah's astonishing landscape will sustain me as I embark on this month's journey of personal and academic growth.

Growth is a part of nature, but it is not always easy. And you never know when it may happen. So spend some time this holiday weekend finding your sense of place to hold close in those times when everything around seems to be changing.

Nature preschool lesson plans -- Utah Early Childhood conference

Hello --

This post is for those who attended the Early Childhood Collaboration Conference at Southern Utah University June 27. These are the lesson plans created by participants in the afternoon sessions that I facilitated. 

The 21 participants in the 1:15 p.m. session created the "INSECTS 1 pm session" plan.

The seven participants in the 2:30 p.m. session created the "INSECTS 230 pm group" plan.

I also have added instructions for the "Build-A-Bug" activity that is included in the "Things with Wings" lesson plan I gave out at the conference (and also is included in the lesson plan created by the 1:15 group).

I will be leaving to do some graduate work July 1 and will return Aug. 1. And in early August, I will post more of the Bear River Early Childhood program lesson plans here for you to download and use. Thank you to all who participated in the workshops and made them a success!

Download INSECTS 1pm session

Download INSECTS 230 pm group

Download BUILDaBUG

Getting to know the neighbors

The arrival of daylight saving time is bittersweet.

 While the time change typically means that long, lazy summer days are just around the corner, it also means that dawn arrives late – after 8 a.m. in the spring. Our neighborhood sits in the shadows of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains , so I am heading off to my teaching job by the time it is light enough for the finches, sparrows and chickadees to congregate around our back yard feeder.

I often wonder why we change our clocks so that we have an extra hour of daylight to waste on driving home from work. If we left the clocks alone so many more of us could spend morning's wee hours sitting quietly in the yard with a cup of coffee and a tattered bird identification book, trying to name the chirping visitors that flutter around a $10 piece of plastic filled with seeds.

Longtime bird-watchers who sport life lists and $1,200 binoculars on harnesses probably would roll their eyes at such elementary pursuits, as most entry-level urban feeders are not going to attract anything that experts have not seen 100 times over. But they, too, started this way.

Although I now have started one of those life lists and spend a lot of my free time looking for birds, it took more than a year of flipping back and forth between pictures of sparrows and finches before I could tell the difference between a house finch and a house sparrow. Heck, it took almost that long to know whether I was looking at a finch or a sparrow.

And if I go out there one morning and can't figure out what "that little brown one" is called, no one's the wiser but the cat, and he doesn't care what they are called so long as they flit down tot he ground once in awhile. (No worries. He is too old to catch one, but even a cat deserves to dream.)

Birds are probably the most readily available type of wildlife to watch, especially in urban areas. But many of us know almost nothing about them.

We Americans spend a lot of time keeping score, from the endless testing of our kids to the near-constant rating and ranking of everything we buy, wear and eat. We know the thread-count of our bed sheets, the amount of fiber in a slice of bread and the level of good cholesterol in our blood. We can learn the commands on a new iPhone in minutes, yet many of us can’t name the birds that enter our yards or fly past our windows every day.

Nature doesn’t change its access codes or passwords. But we do have to show up. Learning to name a few of our feathered visitors takes patience and little time – commodities that are in woefully short supply for most of us.

Still, it won’t hurt children to eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for breakfast on the back porch a couple of times a week. You don’t need a large yard or even good weather. A bird feeder mounted outside of a window and a few minutes spent there each morning will do (though you likely would enjoy a little fresh air before the day’s hysteria begins).

 Pretty soon you, too, will be the greeting the morning’s birds – some of which I am still calling “those little gray ones” --  and trying figure out why in the world we’re saving daylight for the other end of the day.

Following an internal compass

A couple of winters ago, a 9-year-old boy who was learning to use a compass in one of my nature classes looked up from his map and blurted out something that made me blush.

 “That’s the first science thing I ever got!” he said seconds after being told he had correctly found his compass bearing.

It was a proud moment for both of us.

 The boy and his class had arrived at our nature center donned in the khakis and navy blue blazers that are required attire at their private school. Winter’s snow was turning to mush during an unseasonably warm week, making mud the surface-du-jour at our 150-acre nature preserve.

 The class spent about an hour indoors learning how to use a compass and a map together. We then divided them into teams and released them on the preserve for the better part of another hour to use what they’d learned. Each team had a different set of orienteering checkpoints to find, guided only by their wits and their newly acquired knowledge of the compass and map.

 From the kids’ standpoint, the best part of this program is that they are encouraged – required, even – to find their own way without the help or interference of adults. Although the teachers and chaperons roam the paths and meadows to offer help when asked, the children are left to their own devices.

 Just this one time, they are allowed to leave the trails and ramble across open fields, poke around the edges of the ponds or go crashing through the underbrush as they follow their compass bearings. The only rules are that the teams must stay together and return to the education building by the appointed time, no matter how many of their stations they did, or did not, find.

 Of course, what the children consider the best part the adults in attendance often consider the scariest.

 “You mean they can just go out there -- alone?” a chaperon once asked one of my teaching colleagues. Yep, that’s exactly what we mean, my colleague assured her.

 We’ve never lost a child, although many a child has come back to say that his or her group got lost. They’re easy to spot, for they not only are the last ones to arrive back at the center and have the fewest checkpoint punches, they also are flushed and chattering like chipmunks.

 Getting lost, it turns out, is the best part.

 It is amazing how frightened we are as adults to allow our children to become lost, even when it is in a closed and carefully monitored environment. But children need to get lost in nature.

In experiencing nature’s indifference and steadiness, children can discover their internal compasses, find their own bearings and learn that they can get lost and find their own way again. It builds confidence, independence and strength.

Children who learn to trust their own internal sense of direction are able to discern when a situation or path doesn’t look right. They can be among the safest children in the world, no matter where they roam.

 The boy from the private school returned with his team, proud that they not only had found all of their checkpoints, but also had helped another team to find a couple of theirs. His prim navy blazer flapped open to reveal a now-smudged white shirt, and his khakis were muddied to the knees.

 He was fairly bursting with confidence.

 Yes, indeed, I believe he “got it.”

Sometimes the best earthworm is a spider

Armed with plastic gardening tools in primary colors, 10 preschoolers, their parents and two teachers set to work excavating around the thick trunk of a cottonwood tree.

 The order of our day? Bugs. The children scratched and scraped and gouged at the soil under a warm springtime sun, cooing in wonder with every red-and-black box elder bug or roly-poly potato bug that they unearthed.

 “Oooh look! I got an earthworm! I got an earthworm!” one ecstatic tot told the group. As the other 3- and 4-year-olds crowded around to see, a wail erupted from the somewhere in the knot of dusty knees bent over little feet.

 “I want to find an earthworm! Mommy, I want to find an earthworm!” one child cried.

 Sadly, he learned, not everyone gets to find the earthworm.

Nature is indifferent about what it chooses to reveal, when and to whom. It is a hard lesson to learn, but one that nature is best-equipped to teach.

 Earlier that morning we had strolled along the edge of a small pond, looking for the red-eared slider turtles that were beginning to emerge. My coworkers and I had recently counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 20. And while nature offered us few guarantees, the small stature of the pond yielded a better-than-average chance that we’d see at least a couple of the sleek, shiny-backed creatures.

 Still, it takes time to spot a turtle, and there aren’t a lot of preschoolers – or children of any age, for that matter – who have the patience to stand, look and wait. In fact, while standing at the pond’s edge with a group of second-graders the previous day, I remarked that seeing turtles, like other things in nature, takes patience.

 “That’s not going to happen with 8-year-olds,” one of the chaperones said dryly. My stomach turned over as I silently begged to see just one or two of the little heads pop up from the glassy pool.

 The expectation of wildlife-on-demand is understandable, seeing as how the children who arrive at our nature center each day are on class field trips or attending pre-arranged preschool classes.

 They come for programs that cover certain topics at certain times of the year, and they expect things to happen as scheduled. If they are looking for bugs, turtles, deer or chickadees on our walks, we’d better produce them. And heaven help the teacher-naturalist whose group is the only one that doesn’t spot the red-tail hawk or the doe that day. That’s typically when one of the parents will ask, “So are you paid to do this, or do you volunteer?”

 Certainly, I want them to see all those creatures and more. It’s my reason for showing up each day. Their glee is my glee, and when they are disappointed, that is mine as well. Still, we don’t always get everything we want, even when we dig and scrape and hope for it. That is a fact of nature, and a hard lesson that few of us have the heart or desire to dispense.

 So why not let nature teach it?

 Turn over a spade of dirt in the backyard and see what wiggles out. Take a walk through the park and look for birds, or crouch by the river and watch for ducks and turtles. You and your child might see all that you had hoped, or nothing at all. More likely, you will spot something you never even thought to look for – like the red and yellow spider the distraught preschool pupil found as he dug frantically for his earthworm. He was almost breathless with the excitement.

 “Oooh, look what I found!” he said, running over to show his mom the crawly creature at the tip of his shovel. He never did find that earthworm. But he didn’t seem to mind one bit.

What we don't see

I was 34 years old before I ever saw a bald eagle in the wild.

It is our national bird, of course, and presumably it is so because bald eagles were once found all over the United States.

But depending on where we lived, those of us born in the waning years of the Baby Boom (which ended in 1964) or the early years of Generation X (which started right after the Baby Boom) rarely, if ever, saw a bald eagle in flight.

As a resident of Northern Utah now, I can pretty much go out on any given winter day and find at least one bald eagle, if not a dozen. It helps that I know to look along unfrozen bodies of water, as balds are fish-eaters. And it also helps that I live in a region to which bald eagles migrate from areas farther north.

But it helps more than Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring," a book that revealed the deadly consequences of the widespread, and often careless, use of synthetic pesticides after World War II. The most infamous of these was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane -- more commonly known as DDT.

Before she became an acclaimed environmental writer, Carson worked as a biologist for the agency we now know as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. It was Carson's remaining Washington, D.C., connections that prompted Olga Huckins, literary editor of the Boston Post, to send Carson a copy of a letter she had written to the Boston Herald newspaper.

In her letter, Huckins described how the Massachusetts government had -- against her wishes -- indiscriminately sprayed DDT over the private bird sanctuary she owned. The result was a mass killing of the birds, resulting in a "silent spring" in which no birds hatched.

Carson, unable to get anyone in government to investigate the claim, delved into the issue herself. She intended to write a magazine article, but her work quickly grew into the book, "Silent Spring." The book Carson introduced mainstream America to such terms as "ecosystem" and "biomagnification" -- which is the accumulation of a substance as it moves up the food chain from smaller organisms to larger ones.

When DDT was sprayed over land in order to kill off mosquitoes, it embedded itself into the most vital processes of the plants and organisms exposed to it. It didn't wash away with rain or wear off.

And that brings us back to bald eagles. When DDT seeped into the water it contaminated tiny zoo plankton, which were eaten by small fish. The small fish, containing a more concentrated form of DDT, were eaten by larger fish. The larger fish, contaminated by an even more concentrated form of DDT, were eaten by bald eagles.

In just a couple of decades, bald eagles became so sickened by the amounts of DDT in their bodies that their eggshells were too weak to incubate properly -- leaving bald eagles unable to reproduce.

By the time I was born in 1961, there were only 50 pairs of bald eagles left in the United States. When "Silent Spring" was published in 1962, its detailed account of the "biomagnification" of chemicals in all of the nation's "ecosystems" started a grassroots movement that eventually gave us a the Clean Water Act, Earth Day and a ban on DDT, among other environmental movements and acts.

Tragically, Carson died of breast cancer 18 months after the book was released.

But because of her, children growing up in America today do not have to wait until they are approaching middle age to see the astonishing image of a bald eagle perched in a tree along a riverbank or scooping its dinner from a lake. And such images are important to a child, as Carson so eloquently says in her 1956 book, "The Sense of Wonder."

For those who live in or near Northern Utah, be sure to check out the new film about Carson titled "A Sense of Wonder," during its free showing at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 21, at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Brigham City, UT. The refuge visitor's center is located right off Interstate 15. A live bald eagle presentation will precede the movie at 1 p.m.

To see whether "A Sense of Wonder" is coming to a theater near you on its 100-city national tour, go to www.asenseofwonderfilm.com.

Now go outside and take a look around you. Even in the tiniest sidewalk crack there are natural wonders to be found. Take some time to ponder them before they are gone.

(And the Wednesday Whatzit photo? It was snapped at the annual Snow Goose Festival in Delta, UT. More about that later this week.)

Wishing on a seed

Teaching outdoors poses interesting challenges. For example, you never know when a deer is going to stroll through the classroom or a bird call is going to interrupt you mid-sentence.

Yeah, yeah. There are far worse occupational hazards.

Anyway, this whole notion of getting children to go outside more often is gaining momentum. And why not? In a sluggish -- if not plummeting -- economy, playing outside can be inexpensive family entertainment.

But it's not just economics. For the past four or five years, this movement also has been driven by fears about childhood obesity rates and fears of the implications that humans' ever-increasing demands on our planet's natural resources have on the natural environment.

Fears, I might add, that originate with adults. The nature movement is largely adult-led. And therein lies the conflict with getting youngsters interested in being outside:  Adults, by nature, want to be in charge. Children, by nature, want to follow their own curiosity. And nature, by nature, provides plenty for children to be curious about.

Take, for example, a Russian olive seed. In the Intermountain West, the Russian olive is a non-native ornamental tree that robs native vegetation of its rightful spot along streams, rivers and other waterways. Its pale green seeds are like buoyant little boats that bob along until lodging themselves somewhere downstream where they create more invaders.

But to the children from a local inner-city YMCA who come to a weekly after-school program at the center where I teach, these small seeds were a wonder unto themselves.

The topic for our day's excursion was animal habitats -- what makes one and what different animals need to make one. As we gathered on a bridge to talk about beavers and the wetland habitat they need, one of the girls wandered to the other end of the bridge and bent down to pick up something.

"Look!" she squealed upon examining the small item in her hand. "I found a seed! It's a seed! It looks like a little watermelon."

In seconds, the group of children crowded around to see her treasure, then began looking for their own seeds. My coworker and I stood there holding our beaver-gnawed stick and feeling virtually invisible.

"What is it? What kind of seed is it? Oh, look! There's another one!" the young girl said, squatting down to examine the ground.

We managed to get the group moving again, but they were walking much slower now. Running ahead of us -- typically a challenge on these walks -- wasn't even on their radar screens. Their gaze was fixed on the ground as they searched for the "wishing seeds."

Seeking to become part of their wonder-filled adventure, we tried to tell them about Russian olive trees -- their invasive tendency, how the seeds floated,, and all the rest of the stuff that grownups seem to find so fascinating. But they hardly heard us.

"No, they're wishing seeds," one of the boys corrected us.

OK, OK. "Wishing seeds." Got it.

As they stuffed their pockets with seeds, we casually asked what they would wish for. Many of them said money, but one little boy simply said, "I'd wish for all the animals to have all the habitat they needed."

And with that, one of his classmates fell backward into the snow and said, "I'm going to make a snow angel!"

Pretty soon we had kids making snow angels and wishing on seeds and talking about how much they loved being outside and with nature.

We just looked at each other and laughed. It was exactly the outcome we intended, even if we didn't get there the way we intended.

But that's the nature of nature -- and children who are allowed to explore it in their own way.

Now excuse me while I tend to a pocketful of seeds that need wishes ...

When your best bird has prickles

I thought seeing 19 bald eagles would be the highlight of our bird-watching venture today -- until I saw the porcupines.

They are pictured above, resting in the thick limbs of a Russian olive tree. (I am aware that, from this perspective, they look like a couple of cheap wigs left over from a New Year's Eve bash gone awry. Next time, you get closer with the camera, and I'll watch.)

We spotted them while roaming Antelope Island State Park with the local Audubon Society for the last of this season's Christmas bird counts. Audubon groups across the country take to the fields, marshes and parks of their local communities throughout the month of December to identify and count birds.

It is based solely on volunteer birders whose abilities range from expert to beginner. So some would argue that it probably is not the most scientific tally available. But the surveys date back about 100 years in some regions, and, over time, that kind of information can indicate trends -- such as occurrences of rare species or changes in habitat and populations of common birds, which often are brought about by suburban sprawl and development.

Participating in these counts not only is a great way to learn more about birds, but also is a terrific way to spend some time outdoors with a purpose. The latter is very important, for the most wondrous sights on any hike or scenic walk are those we discover by accident while looking for something else.

For example, while searching for birds tucked in the towering cattails (good) and feathery phragmites (bad) that bordered a small pond today, we found tracks made by coyote, fox, small game birds and rabbits, along with the feathered remains of what looked to be a quail that had recently made someone a hearty lunch.

Oh, yeah -- and we saw a bunch of red-wing blackbirds and a couple of magpies.

But it was on our return trip that we stopped to gaze upon the porcupines sleeping in the olive tree. We were helping our party's leader look for a northern shrike, which he had hoped to see but hadn't. In focusing our gaze upon the trees along the side of the road, we saw what I thought were two large nests or balls of twigs and leaves. (As one who has mistaken about 300 clumps of leaves for birds in this season's counts, I was not about to say anything about these dark spots in the tree.)

"Those are porcupines," our fellow birder said. He and the other two people in our group waited patiently while I trudged through the snow to the edge of the gully where the olive tree stood and snapped a few pictures.

While I was shooting, guess what landed atop a nearby tree?

The northern shrike.

If that turn of events doesn't strike you as funny, the appearance of a porcupine certainly would. One of them raised its head momentarily revealing a creature that looks as if Tina Turner's hair stylist had a hand in its creation.

Porcupines are plant-eaters (herbivores) that sleep in rocky or brushy dens on the ground or sleep in trees. The choice depends on the amount of cover available on the ground and the number of predators in the area.

In the Great Basin region that encompasses Utah and Nevada, porcupines often take refuge in trees. Given the number of coyote and fox tracks I saw today, I cannot blame these two for choosing the penthouse option. According to other members of our group porcupines are a common sight during the Christmas counts.

I suppose "common" depends on one's point of view. As we emerged from a cattail forest earlier that day, one of the new birders asked me, "What's the rarest bird you've ever seen?"

Tough question. My so-called "life list" names fewer than 200 species, none of which are particularly rare. For me, "rare" can mean I recall seeing it once before and can identify it. "Rare" also describes what birds were doing when I saw them -- such as the pair of bald eagle parents teaching their youngster how to hunt in a secluded cove in Grand Teton National Park late last summer.

"What's the rarest bird you've ever seen?" If he had asked me 35 minutes later I could have told him.

Porcupines.