I love being engulfed in nature, to be surrounded by trees and rolling green hills without any evidence of human interference is my idea of a nature experience. For a few years now I have been rock climbing. Climbing is a great way to “play” with the natural environment. Mother Earth provides me with a fun-filled day and i make sure that she stays clean and healthy (Leave no trace). One of my most memorable climbing experiences was when I was in Joshua Tree. I woke up before the rest of my group and climbed up to the top of a nearby face, and just sat there. I looked at my beautiful surroundings and felt the crisp desert morning air on my face. After taking a moment to meditate (my current line of research), I slowly went back down to meet with my group. Often times we get caught up in the every day hussle and bustle, I have found that when we take a moment to reflect on our environment we learn a lot about ourselves.

Every morning when I’m riding my bicycle to work I enjoy a meanful relationship with the natural world. I feel the warmth of the sun and the cool dampness of the rain. The wind brings the smell of flowers, soil, grass, trees, animal manure and many more. I hear the birds singing, the chickens crowing, the dogs barking and children playing. I see my neighbors, I watch squirrels, I see the changing season in the trees. My senses are alive and active. I feel joy and a connection to the world around me that I cannot get while in a car.

Hello,

Please view this slow motion video. http://vimeo.com/6746847″

Here is my story:

I am a roofer and help homeowners solve their attic squirrel problems. They hire me to close holes chewed in fascia by squirrels. Occasionally the squirrels are aware that I am closing their attic access holes and become agitated. When the squirrels are in this agitated state, I witness them making spectacular jumps. I wondered how they got so much distance from their jumps.

I may have found the answer.

One day as I stepped out my backdoor, a squirrel crossed a few feet in front of me. Out of habit I stomped my foot to scare it away. It jumped straight up and for a split second remained motionless in midair. So where else could it go other than straight back down to the ground? To my astonishment, he twisted his body, spun his tail and propelled himself “horizontally” to a nearby fence. I am private pilot and familiar with flight principles and realized that I had just witnessed an aerobatic maneuver.

I designed a simple apparatus to observe and video the body twist and tail spinning action. I set up a bird feeding platform with peanuts and put a small bench close by so a squirrel could jump up to the feeder. I then moved the bench further and further away so the squirrel had to make longer and longer jumps to reach the feeder. Sure enough, spinning of the tail started to show up. My slow motion video shows three distinct tail spins; one at the beginning of the jump and two near the end. Notice that the squirrel’s jump appears to reach a peak about two feet in front of the feeder. Then, with the last two tail spins, it is able to reach the feeder.

I thought this observation might interest someone at Nature.

Before dusk on a warm April evening I made the steep, short climb to the top of Mosquito Mountain, in Frankfort, Maine. There is an old quarry there, almost completely surrounded by steep granite ledge, rising 50 feet and more. The basin is full of water, and the ledges lined with small poplar and other softwoods, still bare in April. As I approached the quarry, I heard a shrill echo. Cresting the granite rise, I could hear uncountable numbers of peepers. Their calls echoed off the water and granite walls of the quarry, warm from the day’s sun and undisturbed by the faint breeze. No leaves rustling, no sound but the peepers. I actually called a friend with my cellphone and held up the phone so he could hear the moment. No pictures. The enormity of the moment – the sound – is still with me

When I was in sub Saharan Africa for the first time I was in Camaroon in the true wild.  The vast majority of places that Americans go to in Africa are not really wild; the animals are used to humans and the interactions that humans are allowed to have with animals are strictly limited, so they aren’t threatened by humans.  They are used to cars and the sound of them, to the smell of humans and the fact that humans have never hurt or threatened them.  But where I was in Camaroon was really wild, and many of the animals had never seen or smelled (or tasted) a human.  It was much, much scarier, and as I learned about the animals around me, about their defenses and senses and habits and strengths that help them survive and thrive, I felt extremely vulnerable.  Our little group of 5 or 6 people had only guns with us as defenses, and I was grateful for them.  Humans suddenly seemed so weak, with no fur even, to keep us warm.  Our senses are not particularly sharp, we can’t run very fast, we aren’t very strong.  We have to sleep a good part of the day and are pretty vulnerable then.  We don’t seem to have any special physical characteristic in the animal kingdom to explain our fantastic proliferation and dominance of the earth.  We are smart, but that alone didn’t seem to me to be enough.  It seemed to me, in a profound sort of moment, that we are so successful as a species only because we are so social.  The fact that we cooperated with each other in the early part of our existence so incredibly successfully was really our only defense against getting eaten more than we were able to eat.

The fact that humans are such social creatures accounts for the fact that we seem to be taking nature over in a way that is actually potentially self destructive to us.  The fact that we care so much about what we have or what we wear or what our profession is or whom we’re connected with, all of the things that drive civilization and “progress,” are driven by the fact that we are so social.  We define ourselves so heavily in relation to other people.  What they have, what they do, what they think and say.   The way I see it, the quality that nature gave us in order to survive doesn’t have an on-off switch, and although our destruction of nature may ultimately be our downfall it can also be credited with our success as a species.  Humans have not been around for very long in the grand scheme of the earth’s history.

Nature will probably win in the end.

Consistently breaching natural limits is something of a hobby for most nature-oriented individuals.  With each excursion ‘into’ nature and back, I never fail to be impressed with my own willingness to push the envelope and my effort always yields the same result: a humbling.  Whether it’s the same trail faster, or a few more miles on a two-day camp trip, there is that moment of thought that enters the mind: what am I trying to do out here, exactly?  And just following that is the deepest appreciation for nature and the wonders currently decreasing in this world one can feel. Those instances of clarity in our sometimes over-controlled lives are absolutely priceless, and worth whatever risk necessary to obtain. The search for those moments drives me back consistently into the wilderness and to new heights of exploration: both inside myself and into the wide world of nature.

When I was a toddler in 1950 my parents moved from a cramped New Jersey apartment to a new suburb on Long Island, NY. The house was on the site of a farm and had a large (from my perspective) apple and a maple tree right behind the house. One day when I was in the range of 4-6 years old, my mother was walking with me in the backyard and pointed at a nest high in the apple tree. Suddenly an American Robin flew out. It was almost as if her parental power had summoned the bird forth. For the rest of my childhood, I was fascinated with those trees and the birds and insects in them.
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That is my earliest nature story

Here are a few more interactions at those trees:

As a slightly older child I kept notes from hours of watching from my upstairs bedroom window as a Robin tended a different nest in the backyard maple.  One day I watched a Blue Jay hop around very close to the nest, looking for something. Fortunately for the Robin, the Jay did not find the nest. 

Below the apple tree were a vegetable garden on one side and a flower garden on a the other. My siblings and I collected insects from the gardens and trees. Some insects were mounted with pins, but we kept live crickets. We tried to keep praying mantises but did not realize that they would cannibalize each other if kept in the same shoe box. 

In the late 1950’s I became a Boy Scout. Insect Study Merit Badge had a requirement that in its current version states: “Observe 20 different live species of insects in their habitat.” (http://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Insect_Study ). I sat on a lawn chair next to the flower garden and started to take notes. Within a short while I had counted 20 species. But I thought I would just stay there to see how long it would take before I would find yet another species new for the day. As the morning went on there was a ‘new’ species every 5-10 minutes. After a couple of hours, I stopped observing the flower patch and left amazed and heartened at the variety of fellow life forms that inhabited our family’s little backyard.

One early September day, a dramatic cold snap knocked a cicada out of a tree. I thought the dead cicada would be great for my insect collection, so I put it inside my uniform shirt and trotted down the street to school.  At lunch time I was in the back of a class room during  choir practice when the cicada started to buzz. I pulled it out of my shirt and held it in front of me while I tried to figure out what to do. Some girls started to scream.  The nun assumed I was intentionally disrupting the proceedings and gave my knuckles a good rapping with the standard ruler.

In 2009 I spent 3 months sailing the south Asian seas with a group of 24 other people. It was incredible and put me in direct connection with the marine ecosystem. About 1 month into our journey we docked in the Maldives and spent a couple days around Male before exploring the other islands nearby. On one of the other islands is where this experience I’m about to share happened. Sound is a fascinating entity of our existence. We’re all connected to it one way or another, through hearing with ears or feeling/sensing the vibrations that sound creates. That night on this island 2 friends and I took small hand drums out to a small beach enclave that was protected by a protruding rock on one side and some bushes on the other. It was a little corner of beautiful white sand beach. We had been wanting to have a little drum circle for a few nights, but we didn’t expect to see what happened that night.  As we played longer and longer, the mood got more comfortable, and it almost seemed that we became a part of the nature that surrounded us. No longer separated by our conscious ideas and beliefs, we were just being. I took the hand drum and spun it around and began to sing into the hollow area of the drum, which created a droning sound that matched well with the other 2’s drumming. Sitting there we noticed that every minute or so, crabs would crawl out of the ocean and tentatively explore what was happening. Crabs are generally very scared of humans- any time I see a crab in nature, he is scurrying into a crevice so that I can’t grab him. These crabs began to gain courage, realizing we weren’t there to hurt them. We continued playing and the crabs began approaching and after a while they were just a foot or 2 away from us dancing with our rhythm. When I say dance I don’t mean it metaphorically or to sound nice in my writing, I mean they were wiggling back and forth, interacting with the sound we we’re producing, literally dancing. I felt very connected with the earth at this moment and continued putting myself into the moment and trying to just be as peacefully as possible. The drumming continued, evolving with changing sounds and rhythms, reaching a climax of energy and peaceful excitement. Then I noticed a crab 2 inches from my foot. It felt like this little crab had changed all his/her beliefs on interactions with humans. He would be the first crab in his line of crab families to gain the awareness to interact with me more personally, trusting in me his security. Guided by the rhythmic vibrations, he crawled right up my leg onto my waist and up my arm. He sat there for a few seconds before I lost focus and sure enough my energy probably transmitted that disruption to him. He ran off and most of the crabs shuffled back away to their homes. We are all connected, sometimes it takes an outside force (music) to remind us and our animal brothers and sisters.