While it was snowing in Seattle in January of 2012, two friends of mine and I explored Volunteer Park. It was the first time I had ever seen a snowfall in a natural setting, and watching it drift in in waves as the sky grew dimmer was nothing short of enchanting. We ran across flat surfaces that had once been full of tiny mounds and depressions, threw snowballs and shook the powder off of thin tree-branches, raining cold dust upon unsuspecting walkers below. All the while, the leaves, the rocks, the very ground sparkled with otherworldly scintillation, as the sleeping Earth rested under our feet. As night fell, the glimmer of moonlight upon the fallen snow transfigured the land, bequeathing us a new realm full of magic and mischief. As we eventually left the park, I could not help but notice that every surface I saw was just as stunningly beautiful as the natural splendor we had just left. Under inches of snow, who can discern grass from concrete or asphalt? That night, nature laid its white carpet all the way to our door, and as I warmed up with a hot toddy I gave thanks to the great forces around and above that we might be so blessed– not only to have experienced this frigid bounty, but to have a respite from it as well.

(A note: The enclosed photo was taken not at the park, but about a mile away at the waterfront. It was remarkably hard to get a clear photo from a cellular phone camera in a snow flurry, so I chose the clearest and most striking from my album, rather than the most area-specific.)

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.