Flames of Green and Sprites to Catch

After a visit to Pierce's Woods, a well cared for native forest patch within the great botanical gardens at Longwood in Kennett Square, PA, I took to the wild woods of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Five Points Trail meanders deeply into a river hills ravine following a stream as it builds capacity from its start at a stonewall encased spring head built by German settlers two centuries ago. The stone cabin foundation sits nearby, a short walk to the fresh, cold waters that flowed dependably from the hillside.

Two hundred years ago German settlers built a stone and log home that stood here until the 1920s. 

The trail wanders up and down the stream valley from low points to high points, five high points to be exact. Passing through tunnels of rhododendron to rocky bluffs where huge white pines touch the sky is otherwordly. It's a challenging walk of four miles and can be looped with connecting trails through the Susquehannock State Park, PA. One of my favorite local parks!

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty . . . it beholds every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The low morning sun provided dramatic lighting. At some bends in the trail the woods looked as if they flickered in yellow-green flames, each new leaf unfurling, adding a blaze of bright color. I walked slowly, reverently along the trail. It was so beautiful.

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is.
~Albert Einstein

The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout and hands full of flowers. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My work is to love the world.

- Mary Oliver

Many of the buds of trees and all of the ferns unfurling from their fiddleheads were swathed in fine silks like whispers of possibility. The morning sun sets ablaze a tickling of light that makes the young things smile and laugh as I go stumbling down the trail.   - Journal entry 4-17-14

Canada mayflower leaves shimmer and dance in the morning breeze. If I squint my eyes it looks like green fire licking at the edge of the trail. - Journal entry  4-27-14

At the last of the five points before I descend into the valley to catch a loop trail back along the edge of the park, I stop and admire. Just admire. I can hear the creek the whole way along, even when I can't see it. There's so much may apple popped up like a million umbrellas, when just a month ago there was still snow.  It was so still cold, so penetrating, that on this point those few week back, I turned around, shivering.  - Journal entry 4-27-14

The creek is captured by a larger stream near the point where all of it falls over the edge of the hill, and tumbles loudly over a series of rocky ledges to the Susquehanna hundreds of feet below. I don't go out there though. I have my two coonhounds who are hard-pulling and - well - you get the picture. But there are lots of sprites to catch and the dogs love snapping at spray and splash.

Against its will, energy is doing something productive, like the devil in medieval history. The principle is that nature does something against its own will and, 

by self-entanglement, produces beauty.

- Otto Rossler

Pierce's Woods

Wildflowers of the spring forest come and go quickly, their colorful flames of blossoms and leaves dimming as the canopy overhead begins to fill in, shading the woodland floor. Today I walked the natural forest trails of Pierce's Woods at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. This is a great place to learn the natives by sight with a wildflower I.D. book and journal, or by joining one of the pleasant walking tours with a staff naturalist. Then venture out into any of the beautiful state forests or parks in Pennsylvania to test your identification skills in the wild!

Blue Cohosh in Pierce's Woods

Emerging fiddleheads of cinnamon fern.

Pierre DuPont bought the large tract in the early 1900s. Named Pierce's Woods, the Quaker farmer whose family had settled and farmed a portion of the land, held the original land grant assigned to his family by William Penn. DuPont, in addition to being a gifted business man, was also a naturalist and horticulturalist. When he learned that property was up for sale, he quickly purchased it to save it from development. He appreciated the 200 acre property for containing a vast native forest that had been lovingly preserved and protected from the plow and logging by the Pierce family for hundreds of years. Today it is well cared for by native plants gardeners and serves as a refuge for rescued native plants relocated from highway projects and construction sites.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

Virginia Bluebells

Red trillium

Rue-anemone and Trout lily among the fiddleheads, Pierce's Woods.

Visitors to the Pierce's Woods section of Longwood Gardens should pick up a map or check the website for times and dates of wildflower walks. The wild area is quite unlike the manicured and sculptural formal gardens, that has uneven, unpaved, and mulched trails. The wooded site borders the soon-to-open Eastern prairie meadow site - open to the public after years of ecological restoration this summer!

Check the website for up-to-date events and educational opportunities. These change frequently and there are dozens of classes and walks throughout each month. If you live with an hour of Kennett Square, it is well worth the price of an annual membership. You want to come back again and again!
http://longwoodgardens.org/

Living With Wildfire - Or Not.

Today our rural Pennsylvania landscapes are under a wildfire threat. Impressive winds and dry conditions. My time last week in Austin, Texas is definitely not the Mid-Atlantic, but a recent trip to the Capital of Live Music, did afford me a few short excursions to observe and compare how we live - or not - with increasing threat of wildfire.

The greatest challenge to ecosystems in the Hill Country region of Texas is the threat of wildfire, made more so due to severe drought conditions. Texas straddles the boundary between the East made wetter by warming oceans and more frequent and intense precipitation events, and the West made drier by less rain and hotter, longer dry seasons.

Blackjack Oak leaves are thick and waxy, an adaptation to prevent water loss.

Wildfire has become a daily threat almost year-round, especially for residents in the sprawling West Austin suburbs. Folks have pricey homes built inside or perched on the edges of the scenic canyons filled with highly combustible woodlands, composed mainly of the ashe juniper whose volatile oils literally explode the tree into flame. Many home owners were on the emotional edge in 2011 as the Bastrop County Complex Fire swept through the valleys below and burst up canyon walls like torches. "Every summer," a local confided, "I swear I worry 24/7 until a little rain falls. It seems a little rain is all we get anymore. Sometimes less."

Honey mesquite is a favorite for BBQ's and grilling because of it's fragrant oils.

The soils of Hill Country are naturally sandy and dry. Mesquite and oak predominated as the larger tree species found along streets and in parks. Some tree and shrub species have adapted to tens of thousands of years of fire cycles. Ladybird Lake, the main recreational and scenic feature of Austin provides waterfront habitat for many fruiting trees, willow, sumac, and ash, but also creates a worrisome path for canyon fires to follow in dry season. The famous Congress Avenue Bridge, occupied below by tens of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats, has it's own observation park for bat-watchers who gather every evening to watch them take flight. It's a great view from the pedestrian walkway above, looking all around at this dry forest (where it isn't paved or built upon). The landscape is one of contrasts: bustling city and quiet waterfront, wetlands and uplands, wildland and a skyline that is rapidly transforming. The week of the Bastrop County Fire, more people gathered to watch the approaching flames and walls of smoke than bats.

People gather in the observation park to watch bats at the Congress Avenue bridge.

Being a Mid-Atlantic naturalist, the contrasts between our lush temperate forests, frequent rains, and abundant waterways and the Hill Country's dry sparse woodlands was stark: scarcity of water determines what, where,and how plants and animals survive here. Thorns and thick bark protects many trees and shrubs from browsing animals and sweeping fires. Animals that can dig, burrow, or roost in cooler places readily do so, while those left to the sun and dry conditions are scaled (lizards!) or plated (armadillos!). One of my mammal encounters was with a "herd" of huge eastern fox squirrels, clearly not as endangered as our own DelMarVa fox squirrel. Big, bushy, reddish gold, these Texas-sized tree squirrels did their best to recover every possible seed, acorn, or nut from the park near our conference hotel. A lone armadillo dug a burrow on a construction site I could watch every morning.

Austin's linear parks serve not only as wildlife habitat - valuable green space in an otherwise parched landscape, but also as wildfire corridors that potentially could bring fires directly into the city.

The threat of wildfire is a constant concern, though this is hidden from most tourists. Residents are asked to protect themselves and their property year-round. Yards are cleared of brush and flammable forest litter. Some neighborhoods that occupy canyons are at very high risk: when developers sited these tony communities in picturesque valleys, they ignored the drought-fire cycle history of the region and built directly into the combustible woodlands. Many canyon communities have only one way in and out, putting entire neighborhoods at risk. Not unique to Texas, the same 'prime' real estate development pattern can be observed in California and Arizona, where hundreds of ill-sited homes are lost in "one match fires" that become deadly infernos. 

2011 Bastrop Fire at Austin's doorstep. Credit: Austin Humane Society

I spoke to a Master Gardener who was leading a tour of Austin's beautiful pocket gardens. Lucy remembered well the Bastrop fire that destroyed 1700 suburban homes. Frightened family pets, not adapted to the fire-prone landscape - unable to burrow beneath or outrun the flames - fled through the outskirts of the city to protected parks and lake shores where they were gathered and housed nearby until owners could claim them. Displaced families, unable to take their pets with them to temporary housing sought foster families to care for beloved animals (including horses, llamas, donkeys, and goats) until new homes were found. "It makes you think very hard about where and how we live. Zoning laws need to take into account the natural and changing cycles of drought and wildfire seasons when permitting new homes," she said.

Credit: Bastrop Fire Authority, TX

Besides frightened and injured pets, the Bastrop Fire Authority noted that during the 2011 fire, numerous wild animals, including birds, bats, deer, and bear, fleeing the burning canyon hillsides fled into populated neighborhoods to escape the flames. A city on alert, Austin became a haven for wild and domestic critters alike. "It will happen again," said Lucy, "There is no doubt. We've built so far out into the canyons that we occupy wildlife escape routes. Usually they flee by following waterways and lake shores, but that is prime real estate these days. They flee through our yards and shelter in our gardens."

The fire alerts are up throughout Pennsylvania and I am thankful it is a fairly rare occurrence.  Even though fire is an essential ecological process, vital to many biotic communities, climate change and shifting land use forces us to reconsider how and where we live in relation to the possibility of a burn.

More about this complex fire - one of the most destructive in Texas history can be found here: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastrop_County_Complex_fire

Austin Humane Society's film of the pet rescue:   http://vimeo.com/30580170

Spring Came Today!

Four weeks ago, a friend from Chancellorsville, Virginia emailed to ask "When are you going to post a story about spring?" I thought a moment before answering. A month ago, at the time I received her email, it was still snowing with nightly temperatures in the single digits. I had to remind myself that where Cathy lives and works, spring was already budding and peeping and greening up. I was still sloshing through snowy trails. My Friday night peeper watch had been less than exciting. Only last week did about five peepers call at my favorite riverside vernal pool framed by well-built stone walls of the old Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal Lock 12. I responded I would post a story about spring when I was sure it was here. Well, today it came!

A spring peeper, handsomely translucent! 

The temperatures shot into the seventies and it seemed, in an automatic response, that my lawn immediately turned green and started to grow. The wetlands at Swan Harbor Farm where I work, about twenty miles south, has been loud with peepers since Monday, but tonight Lock 12 was roaring with tiny frogs. Suddenly maples popped their chubby red buds. My apiary has been busy for about three days now, after a long winter of worry. Many field bees are returning with pollen baskets heavy with bright yellow pollen. The skunk cabbage decided it was time to send up leaves after weeks of tentatively hiding hooded flowers in semi-frozen muck. It was a start and stop spring, long in coming, but then voila! here it is at long last.

Dutchman's breeches, Dicentra cucullaria - oh the scandal!

Down at the old canal pond along the river, the peepers were all about yelling. They were determined to shout spring into existence. It was deafening but exciting to hear - at long last! From little green clumps of fresh foliage on the forest floor, Dutchman's breeches were beginning to bloom. A close, on-the-ground examination of these favorite spring blossoms revealed two outer petals fused into the 'pants' imagined by early naturalists, with the two interior yellow petals peeking out from the bottom. Victorian naturalists were embarrassed by the 'breeches' part of the popular name, for as any good, cultivated botanizer of the day would have known, 'breech' actually meant 'rump' or rudely put, 'backside'.  So they were pretty proper about using the scientific name Dicentra. The tightly sealed downward hanging flower is only accessible to the long tongue of the bumble bee, an important source of early spring nectar.

Trout lily leaf knifes it's way upward.

Another exclusive bumble bee flower is the trout lily, Erythronium americanum. Though no flowers yet graced the forest around the canal pond today, the sharp-pointed leaves emerging from underground corms several inches below, were knifing up through a thick mat of leaves. Also downward facing, the soon-to-appear lily blossoms will attract queens with their delicate scent. The queens are eager to collect nectar and pollen to provision their nests. She'll provide honey pots full of nectar and pollen cakes for her young, whom she's been incubating patiently with the heat from her body in an old mouse house hidden in a clump of grass or pocket in the stonework of the canal wall.

No longer watered by the river, the old Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal at Lock 12 is a vernal pond that stretches over sixty feet in length between the lock walls. By early summer the pond dries up and the peepers return to the forest.

Hoping to see an emerging bumble bee queen, I hung around until almost dark. The river was roaring with snowmelt from northern Pennsylvania and New York. The peepers were exuberantly announcing the first real day of spring. But, it soon turned chilly again, and I saved watching for bees for another warm day. So while Cathy at Monticello has enjoyed the early spring flowers and bumble bees for several weeks now, the fun has just begun for us in the Susquehanna Valley with so much more to come!

For the folklore of our native wildflowers:

Jack Sanders. The Secrets of Wildflowers: A Delightful Feast of Little-Known Facts, Folklore, and History. Lyons Press (2003).

Nature of Home

My 'home' plant: mountain laurel.

I recently accepted a travel award to attend a symposium for graduate students doing research in environmental studies and agriculture. The symposium will take place in early May and I will have to take some time off from work to attend. I filled out my request for vacation time and began to make plans for my first trip back to Chicago in over 40 years. When I was young our family traveled to Chicago to meet with my aunt and uncle (he was in the Navy) and to see the sights. I remember standing on the shore of Lake Michigan with my aunt. I recall the trash, the smell, and the color of the water. It wasn't pretty. We didn't stay long!  I'm looking forward to going back and visiting what is now a restored shoreline, full of birding areas, parks, clean beaches, and a city celebrating a return of its 'wilderness' - I can't wait to see it again!

My aunt grew up in Baltimore and mentioned to me how different the Great Lakes area was, how hard it was for her sometimes to really get to know a place being in the Navy and transferring all over the world. She was a birder, as was my grandmother. I remember her saying how she never felt at home unless she could see some of her favorite birds: cardinals, orioles, and chimney swifts. She was glad that she'd seen all of these in the Chicago area.

One of my Aunt Loretto's favorite 'home' birds, the cardinal.

So as I begin to research some trails and birding hotspots for my trip, I think about what animals and plants remind me of my growing up in the hilly Piedmont of northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. From my childhood are the mountain laurel and barred owls. Living along Deer Creek and the Little Gunpowder River and roaming day after day, sometimes night after night along the woodland trails, both mountain laurel and owls were plentiful and became part of my natural 'mooring' to place.

The smell of a thawing skunk cabbage wetland is my 'home' scent, from river valleys in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

I've traveled a bit across the country and have a real love for different natural landscapes:  tallgrass prairies of the Flint Hills,  bald cypress swamps of the Lowcountry, alpine balds of the White Mountains. But these places, though novel and incredibly exciting, are visited not lived in - not raised on.  I remember standing in the Chiricahau Mountains in southern Arizona. My sister and I could not get enough of the pine-scented air and the volcanic ash soils that crunched underfoot on the trails. Once home, however, I recall heading back to work (Maryland Park Service) after our vacation had ended and hiking down a mucky trail to the river. The bright woods, waiting for leaves to shade the hollow, was thick with the scent of skunk cabbage and thawing mud. That, I thought, was the smell of home in springtime.

I plan to pick up another sketchbook before I head to Chicago. I have over twenty sketchbooks loaded with maps, illustrations, poetry, notes about birdsong and animal tracks - all from forty years of exploring the outdoors at home and far off. It's time to start a new one. I wonder what natural sights, smells, and sounds will make an impression on some blank pages? With a trip to Austin, Texas right around the corner (Farm-to-Cafeteria Conference), a new place for me altogether - this will be nice spring time to compare far away nature with the nature of home.

Nature Despite Us

In 2007 Alan Weisman wrote an amazing book, The World Without Us. I love to revisit this book from time to time and immerse myself in an imaginative, yet fact-based and entirely plausible outcome  of some catastrophe: something that takes some species (us) but leaves others. For instance, the idea that frozen methane deposits encased in permafrost could suddenly burst into our warming atmosphere as the Arctic continues to melt - bad news for us but maybe a relief and an opportunity for the rest of Life:

In our absence, presumably plenty of wild and feral creatures will rush to fill our void and set up house in our abandoned spaces. Their numbers no longer culled by our lethal traffic, they should multiply with such abandon that humanity's total biomass - which eminent biologist E.O. WIlson estimates wouldn't fill the Grand Canyon - won't be missed for long. 

- The Petro Patch (p. 129), The World Without Us

A drag path for an oxen team pulling logs, circa 1920s. Blackwater NWR MD.

Weisman conducts this marvelous thought-experiment with an interesting question in mind: will we be missed? As I hike, paddle, and bike around the Mid-Atlantic and encounter places like the Cornwall Banks and the dying infrastructure of our once-industrial landscape, I often wonder at the speed of takeover nature employs when a human endeavor fails. I wonder if we will even be an afterthought! In our region, we don't have to wait 'for the end' to appreciate how nature invades and reclaims the anthropogenic landscape. Post-industrial landscapes revert quickly in our temperate and increasingly wet climate to a semi-wild state.

Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal is now the domain of frogs and salamanders.

While hiking or paddling or biking in what you think is a natural area, look around for patterns in the  landscape that seem out of place or different from the rest. Nature doesn't like straight lines and these stick out: constructed waterways, old hedgerows, abandoned roads. A single old tree in a mass of younger trees is a clue to a recent shift in land use: a former pasture, a yard tree in a deserted neighborhood.

A farmhouse, deserted in 1930s, is reclaimed.

Old lines of transportation: canals, railroad beds, farm lanes, logging roads, abandoned and no longer maintained, collapse or relax into the landscape. My favorite vernal pond is an old section of the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, high above the river, closed in the 1860s and collapsed by a century of neglect. Easily accessible on a north and south mule path, it is a window into the resiliency of amphibians as they re-inhabit an area that was once industrial and devoid of trees. On March evenings we set up our camps chairs on the path and, donning our headlamps, enjoy the early spring chorus of singing frogs and the wriggling of salamanders as they head into the shallow canal to mate and lay eggs. Barn owls and vultures nest in the open attic of a deserted farmhouse nearby while bats have reclaimed the widening gaps of the clapboard sidings. Frogs in the canal, bats in the house, owls in the attic.

Once a busy country crossroads where a school, post office, country store, and three roads converged. Shenandoah NP, VA

The 100th anniversary of the death of the last passenger pigeon is May 2. We've altered and exploited the natural landscape to such an extent that hundreds of species have disappeared from the continent during our short tenancy. But nature always bats last! As a contemporary local example, a long-deserted town, on the shoulders of the Blue Ridge Mountains is now home to a healthy population of wildlife - some of it so rare during the heyday of this little logging town, that to mention a sighting of a bear would raise skeptical eyebrows. We love to hike this area, the old Corbin Hollow area on Robinson Mountain. The hustle and bustle of this early 1900s crossroads town was facilitated by a two lane paved road, quite the boast for it's day!  Now it is a single track trail traversed by backpackers, coyote, black bear, and deer.

Barn foundation sprouts a forest. An pasture or 'wolf oak' stands where livestock shaded up and is now a bee tree.

What would happen if our path follows that of the passenger pigeon?  Species that depend on us or that are bred by us are ill suited to life in a human-less landscape and would soon follow us into oblivion  Rats and mice would decline as human stores of food and waste are depleted. Predators will be quick to return. Plants will facilitate the destruction of the built environment from highways to tall buildings.  Based on Weisman's book, The History Channel produced this dramatic film "Life After People" - not exactly for a young audience, but I know the older kids and adults will find it hard to look away after one day, a week, a year, five, twenty five.. I think it's a tad dramatic but worth the telling for some fun and creative what-if's. I liked the book much more, however.

The plants that takeover our deserted homesteads and crumbling cities, however, will most likely not be native species. They are, in fact, already at work in our more neglected areas: purple loosestrife, ailanthus, Japanese honeysuckle, and kudzu - all introduced accidentally or intentionally by humans from other continents. But English ivy will probably succumb to the native Virginia creeper, so there is that bit of native revenge. As our region warms, southern mammals will continue their northern spread, faster without our interference. Opossums, originally from South America will march double-time to New England. Manatee will fully colonize the Chesapeake. Armadillo will skitter happily into our abandoned farmlands en masse.

Three years ago I encountered this manatee while kayaking in Havre de Grace, MD. A climate change migrant!

As a thought-experiment, imagining the Mid-Atlantic without us adds great fun to an afternoon hike or bike ride. In a city park or suburban trail, whip out the sketch book and draw the scene gone wild. Working with a middle school class of boys, we imagined and then sketched Baltimore street scenes a century after people had vanished. Of course they included herds of elephants and prides of lions, escaped from the zoo! Far from being a doom-and-gloom exercise, creating a future world of plants and animals re-inhabiting a landscape can be a wonderful entry into storytelling and art for kids and adults. Imagining a re-wilding of familiar places reminds us that our time here is, like all species, just a fleeting moment in the larger story of geologic time. 

Resources:

Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (2007)
http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Without-Alan-Weisman/dp/0312427905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395973326&sr=8-1&keywords=the+world+without+us

Post-apocalyptic literature can be categorized as  'speculative non-fiction' if well researched and supported by scientific evidence and prediction. But some critics of Weisman's book labeled it science fiction fantasy. You decide. Either way, the manatees are coming!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us  

Is a species-specific or family-specific extinction possible? Yes, says Elizabeth Kolbert. It's happened before and can happen - or is happening - again! Learn the difference between background extinctions, extinction events, and the sometimes surprising after-effects...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994

Fear and Risk: Part I

My granddaughter goes arboreal whenever she sees a climbing tree.

Lately, a lot of social media chatter has been on the topic of risk and fear, prompted in part by Richard Louv's recent visit to Baltimore. Richard and I visited with each other a few years ago about his groundbreaking work that identifies nature deficit disorder - a suite of problems that seems to plague children and adults who spend little or no time in nature. I decided not to pursue this topic for my (still ongoing) dissertation research, but my interest in fear and risk is still a topic I am fascinated by. When I was raising my own children, I took a fairly hands-off approach to letting them explore the natural world. Richard calls this being a hummingbird parent, as compared to a helicopter parent. I stood well out of the way, allowing them to make discoveries, encouraging them to spend lots of unstructured time exploring, but always mindful and ready - to include cliffs. My son, an experienced mountain hiker, seems always to find the furthest, highest perch for that important summit picture. Those pictures are my absolute favorite when he sends them along. What confidence! What happiness at his accomplishment! I can picture myself on many, many summits - long exhausting trails behind me, elated that I'd made it. It takes a lot of skill, preparedness, and the ability to weigh the risks.

Finding summits was a favorite passion when my kids were young.  George and Emily (with sketchbook), Acadia NP.

George at a summit cairn on Mt.Monadnock, NH 

Risk is defined as an exposure to danger. There is risk in every part of our lives, and some would argue there is more risk in driving a car on the beltway at rush hour than in climbing a mountain. The important aspect of considering risk in our activities, whether driving a car or climbing to that summit, is how we assess it. Children who are not exposed to risk at all, helicoptered by all too protective parents, never fully develop the ability to assess risk. It is a survival skill that, with plenty of practice and a hummingbird parent nearby, becomes an inherent skill that a child will carry forward into adult life, on or off the trail. A scraped knee is the best lesson on why we don't run blindly down the rocky path, a risk that I as a parent was able to accept for the teaching value of the fall! The safer alternative activity, of course, might be sitting passively in front of the computer or TV, but here no risk assessment skills are ever taught -except maybe that in video games you can always have a do-over. Not so in nature. This is a critical lesson for children to learn about the outdoors. There are levels of risk, some we can accept, and others we should avoid. To do is to learn. 

My grandson is perfectly content to explore on his own. We just keep an eye open for poison ivy and let him go.

But what about fear? Sure there are lots of things that can be scary in nature: the warning hum of a nearby wasp nest, the sound of rapids around a blind turn in the creek. The outdoors child is given opportunity to face these fears, assess the actual risk involved, and to make decisions to proceed or avoid. It takes practice and exposure. Something that many modern parents afraid of. Sometimes the fear of the parent aborts a teachable moment. Sometimes the fear of the parents confines the child to sterile environments where risk is removed.  The child, grown into an adult, cannot make healthy choices about risk and often (without the easy do-over that video games afford) make poor choices. 

Liam loves to explore the crevices and spaces between the rocks on the Henlopen jetties for hidden surprises. 

Just playing outside is not the same as being outdoors. Being outdoors is a state of being. Like a long leisurely stroll punctuated with bursts of discovery, imagination, and wonder.  Unstructured and unconfined space and time for a child outdoors is a process of finding his place in the bigger picture of nature and life. He builds a deep-rooted sense of adaptability and appreciation for natural occurrences. Even death, encountered along the way - a vacant turtle shell, a fish hooked and bleeding from its gills, a skull in the leaves, a dead gull between rocks of the jetty - all become part of the enduring experience of being outdoors and developing an understanding of risk and fear. Questions about why an animal died (there are diseases, predators, accidents, old age) and  how to express sadness (with compassion, empathy, understanding) develop a child's awareness and appreciation of the risk inherent in all life, and that we are part of All Life.

Someday I hope my grandsons and granddaughters will follow their Uncle George into a solo experience with a wild river.

I've worked with many parents over the years who, for many reasons, have a very different relationship with nature as parents as compared with the relationship to nature they had as children. Many parents have told me about their long jaunts into the woods, running out the backdoor on a Saturday morning and not coming home until dinner. They also wonder why they can't be that carefree with their own children today. We begin to think about the virtual world of video games, internet, TV, smart phones. Is this really a safer place for children? Is the world so much more dangerous than when my children were young, or have we made it so in our heads? I cringe with all the fear mongering in the media - fantastic coverage of a world of terrorists/child abductors that take the headlines to a whole new level of sensationalism. No wonder parents are a nervous wreck! 

Turn it off. Just turn it off. Take a child, go outside for a long while, and just Be. Sometimes this experience is more important for the parent than for the child. Once a parent's fears are calmed and a true understanding of real and perceived risk is achieved, then maybe they can allow and encourage their child to simply Be in nature.

I still lead trips for parents only, into wild remote places, so they can come to grips with their own fears and sense of risk. It's an amazing experience for them and me to see their confidence and understanding grow. When they return to their own kids, they tell me of a new-found confidence in letting go a little more, and allowing the greatest teacher of all, Nature, to take the helm.

Resources:

Richard Louv identified the concept of nature deficit disorder and continue to collect data and write about how this is affecting us as parents and our children:
http://richardlouv.com/