A Great Egret, Fishing for Sunfish

February 10, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I shared part of a weirdly warm winter afternoon at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with a wading bird who was hunting fish in the pond. As usual, on the way to the pond I found strange and beautiful shapes in the winter grasses and forbs*.

Winter highlights some of the graceful and interesting shapes that we can find in plants. For example, the leaves of switchgrass remind me of curled ribbons. Many of them arc downward in graceful twists. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center describes switchgrass as one of the primary native grasses of the tallgrass prairie, growing an amazing three to ten feet. You can get a sense of that at Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. There are places within the demonstration prairie where the fine, slender seedheads of switchgrass tower overhead.

I also saw one of the Mexican buckeyes that grows on the preserve. The trees are typically small and are recognizable in winter by their clusters of big, three-lobed seed pods. By now the pods have cracked and the toxic seeds the size of small marbles are still inside. Parts of the plant may be toxic, but the clusters of pink flowers that will emerge in a month or so are beautiful.

It is a short walk to the south pond, but these things hijack my attention and so the walk takes some time – and it is time well-spent.

The great egret was wading the pond when I arrived, searching in the water for small fish or the bigger invertebrates that live there. Spotting me, he (or she) flew a little further away and continued his fishing. What an amazing bird! The great egret spends time in shallow water, mud, and algae while remaining white as snow. The bird moves forward in the most deliberate, stealthy way, with those yellow eyes watching and a bill like a long, yellow dagger ready to stab into the water, propelled by an impossibly long neck.

*Great egret with a sunfish held in its bill*

Sometimes the egret was motionless, a bright white ghost seen through dried yellow and brown reeds and brush. And then he moved like an apparition, lifting one black leg and taking a step, and then the other, soundlessly gliding across the shallows. Without warning the yellow dagger stabbed into the water and brought out a small sunfish.

If you have noticed sunfish, you have seen that there is a dorsal fin on top of the fish, and that fin starts with a series of tough, sharp spines. When caught, that fin is pulled forward so that it is erect, hard and sharp. The fish itself is tall, not bullet-shaped, so that it is painful to imagine swallowing one. But that is what great egrets do.

There was a minute or so in which the bird’s neck twitched, perhaps as the fish struggled going down or as that long neck tried to shift the fish to a more comfortable position. I figured that the egret had been able to get the fish into a head-first position in its mouth, because any other way seemed so much more difficult.

And then the egret resumed that patient, slow strategy of fishing, moving like a ghost into some emergent vegetation and remaining motionless.

It was time to walk up the hill to visit all the familiar spots, the oaks and “toothache” trees, the bee tree, and all the rest. At the base of the hill a mourning dove walked the trail and then flew up into a tree. He called that familiar, soft call: “oo-woo-oo” followed by “oo-oo.” The notes sound as though they might be made by an alto recorder, that wooden, flute-like instrument you hear in some baroque and renaissance music.

The call is very musical and we usually hear it as lonely or mournful, and so the bird is called a “mourning” dove. If we heard those notes from a human voice, low and soft, dropping a little, most of us would hear some sadness and loss. That is how our brains are tuned to recognize emotion in voices, but it’s good to be aware that it reflects our brains, not a dove’s brain. Perhaps the bird is saying, “hey, let’s hang out together, maybe get a pizza.” We can still be moved by hearing mourning doves at sunset, imaging a lonely voice in the gathering darkness singing about the weight on its soul. I’m sure the doves don’t mind.

From the top of the hill, one trail threads past some boulders on its way down, and I sat for a while soaking in the low sunlight reflected off sandstone, bare trees, and dried grasses and forbs. I will miss this quality of light as spring arrives and the sun stays higher in the sky. I also noticed another smaller trail that disappeared under the trees and low juniper branches. And I imagined other lives in other bodies using that trail, the raccoons or the occasional fox or rabbit who wander this place, mostly when the people go home.

I wonder what they think of the big people who share this space with them, who seem not to hunt, not to fear predators, but just move among the trees and prairie patches. Some jog, some walk their dogs (triggering wariness and fear among the animals that live here), and some go from flower to tree, from dragonfly to moss, stone to bird, as if they cannot get enough of this patch of creation. “Oh hi, rabbit – I see you watching me. Thank you for being part of this place.”

So that was another day wandering this little patch of creation for a while, having the privilege of sharing the pond with the egret and seeing some of the beautiful shapes and forms of plants in winter. It never becomes repetitive, and hopefully these words and photos convey some of that freshness and beauty.

* That word, “forb,” is not one that most of us easily recognize. Nature folks may know it, and certainly botanists would know it. According to Etymology World Online, forb comes from the Old Norse word “forbær”, which meant a fodder plant. Back then it referred to any of the plants used for animal feed, but later it came to mean a herbaceous plant other than grasses and sedges.

*Sun and sky through the crowns of trees*

A Place of Sanctuary, Framed in Ice

January 28, 2026 / Michael Smith / 1 Comment

I wrote about ice at the local preserve and ICE as a source of fear for us all. I hope you will follow the link over to Substack and have a look. I wrote, “Yesterday I visited my old friend, the Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve. I do it all the time, but this was my first outing after several days with temperatures below freezing and several inches of sleet and some snow on the ground. That was outside; inside, my heart was buried under another sort of ice after weeks of abuse, murder, and lies in Minneapolis.”

It was beautiful at the preserve and I thought about how being there was like “looking away from the abyss.” I said, “I looked away and walked up that lovely hillside to the bluff at the top. When the ground is covered with snow (or in this case, fine sleet), the woods are opened up and the contours of the landscape made obvious. Against the white background, the trunks and branches of oaks form a sort of stark, jagged, and detailed calligraphy, the script of the woodland revealed.”

I hope you’ll give it a read and have a look at some of the photos.

Holding On … To Ourselves and To Each Other

January 25, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I wrote this on Substack, before the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. That murder intensifies what I express below, but it also compels me to recall how important it is to hold on to each other. Faith in our government is broken, and we have to find ways to support each other while we also try to keep hold of who we are individually.

We each have an identity, a sense of who we are. It is made up of such things as what we value, what we love, what we choose to do and aspire to. My sense of myself is being inundated lately with outrage, loss, and worry. Our country is turning into something cruel, corrupt, and crazy, and it affects many of us profoundly. But I don’t want to lose myself in outrage and worry; that can’t become who I am, or who my community members are.

The answer cannot be to give up, to stop doing what we can to fight back. I have been a part of several public protests last year and the beginning of this one. I make comments in social media, because it may be a source of mutual support among my acquaintances and occasionally an actual exchange of ideas. I even still contact my political representatives – even if that is like writing a note and throwing it into the fireplace. None of these things feels like enough, nor do many of them feel effective, and that sense of near-helplessness probably affects a lot of us.

I know from my psychology training and from living more than 70 years what a pervasive sense of anxiety, helplessness, and anger will do, especially if they become chronic. Such things as depression, withdrawal, and retreat into distracting rituals, or worse than those may happen. And then what happens to my self, the part of me that cares for family and friends, loves nature and finds joy and rejuvenation there, finds essential truths in religion, literature, and music? These things could be overwhelmed and pushed away from the center toward the edges. That makes room for the worry, rumination, anger, helplessness and loss that cannot fully coexist with the rest of who I am.

And such things cannot really coexist with who you are. I’m thinking about the majority of us, I’m pretty sure, because polling data show tremendous dissatisfaction among most of us, and millions of us have taken the time to march and hold signs saying that the current situation is unacceptable. I worry for all of us, that we might lose a part of ourselves as this national emergency drags on, becoming a chronic trauma.

People at other times in history have borne trauma, and compared to some of them our situation might seem mild. We are not spending day after day in bomb shelters like the London blitzkrieg (or something similar in parts of Ukraine today). We are not suffering widespread famine like the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1800s (or in Gaza today). But we should understand that worse trauma elsewhere does not make ours negligible.

We are in this situation and we have to see it through. We cannot wish it away. And it will take a toll on us, especially for those in Minneapolis as communities try to take care of each other at substantial personal risk. And perhaps now in Maine, and tomorrow in other places as ICE swarms into other cities. Increasingly, people talk about the potential that the country might pull itself apart. And there is the dissolution of the world as we knew it, with allies pulling away from a rogue U.S. and the potential for war increasing. It was easier, a decade ago, to dismiss all this as naive and alarmist, but in the years that followed, much of what we warned about has come true.

*ICE Out of Fort Worth, 1/10/26 (participants agreed to be photographed)*

Holding on to ourselves is important during an extended crisis like this. When doom scrolling or ruminating about these problems, I can work on coming back to the “center” of who I am. If I feel lost or numb, the thing to do is to come back to myself. Find a way to step out of what is pulling at me and remember who I am.

Wendell Berry describes this sort of thing in The Peace of Wild Things. He writes about what he does “when despair for the world grows in me.” He goes into nature, “where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.” He joins the birds, who are free from worrying about what will happen tomorrow, or in the next hour; they live in the present. And he is aware of the stars and their light, maybe not visible now, but their light will come. Such things free him.

Mindfulness offers a way to step away even if there is no physical refuge, no pond or tree or quiet room where we can go. The practice of mindfulness can give us an ability to let go of things and come back to the present moment with a greater acceptance, even when there is suffering in the present.

This is necessary in order for us to respond to the crisis in some sort of effective way. Taking care of ourselves – holding on to who we are – must happen in order for us to take care of each other the best we can and do whatever else will help. We know what happens when someone becomes saturated with fear or anger, or descends into numbness. That is not how we get through this.

When we feel lost, we work to bring ourselves back. That may be easier when we have a clearer picture of who we really are. Reading and reflecting on the items below might be helpful for that self-knowledge. I hope so.

How I spend my time in work, play, and with others
What I value and want to see happen in myself and for others
How I tend to understand others’ motives and reasons for what they do
How I cope with challenges, and how I recognize blessings
What gives purpose and meaning to the world – where I think it comes from
Who helps sustain me, and how I give back
Are there places that sustain me, and can they be re-visited

A Letter About Small Things

January 15, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I have experimented with writing letters to you, because I want to communicate about nature and I love the idea of doing so in a personal way. I started with Letters to Nature Kids, which are short and informal “letters” about being out somewhere, or about how nature experience is related to gratitude or coping with fear, and so on.

This latest one has to do with all the small wonders we can notice when out for a winter’s walk. Finding a half-hidden lizard or noticing a tiny shell and tracking its identity down (it was a Texas liptooth) make a walk fascinating, even when the discoveries aren’t very dramatic. Being able to notice and appreciate small things is a valuable skill, and the letter is an attempt to show that this is true.

I notice that these letters get downloaded fairly regularly, but I rarely hear from anyone about them. That makes the whole thing very experimental – writing for the reader who I imagine might read it but not really knowing how a reader felt about it. If you wanted to bring the whole idea of a letter closer to reality, you could write back to me. One way would be to use the contact page here, or there is an email address at the end of the letter. Then we would be having something closer to a conversation, and I would be very grateful for that.

But if not, it’s OK. My hope is that the letter gets read, and that it gets the reader thinking about things and wanting to get outside for a walk.

For the Luck of the New Year

January 1, 2026 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

We had black-eyed peas and cornbread at my house today, like many people do on New Year’s Day. It’s supposed to bring luck, and we can use all the luck we can get in the coming year, so I’ll throw a bit of salt over my shoulder if it will help.

And after lunch I took a walk in a lucky place, a familiar place that I thought should be visited at the start of the year. Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve is clearly a lucky place. It escaped the bulldozer and remains a little fragment of the original oak woodlands and little prairie openings while everything around it has been scraped, paved, and built to become streets and houses. It’s a survivor. And it’s a talisman for all the people who have spent time there and become rejuvenated, charmed, educated about the living world, calmed, or inspired during their visit. So, to start the year off right, I made a loop to the north pond, up to the bluff, and back down the south side of the hill.

It felt somewhat warm but looked like winter. It was 72 degrees in the area, but long, gray clouds with filmy edges stretched across the sky, and the sun shone in a diffused way through part of them, like a light behind a thin cloth. This sky would have been a match for a winter day with temperatures in the 30s.

The north pond has become smaller and more shrunken as the weeks have gone by with no rain. I skirted the water and climbed the hill behind it, and then sat for a little.

After that, I walked eastward along the north prairie. On that walk at the edge of the woodland, honeysuckle was beginning to bloom. And really, how can you blame the honeysuckle for such a crazy thing, when we’ve been breaking records for warmth. So the preserve can be forgiven for sending out mixed signals like this. I also noticed a very small bird nest from last year, now plainly exposed in a low branch after the leaves have dropped. I hope it brought the birds good luck.

I climbed up to the bluff, where there is a spot nearby that is great for sitting, writing, or just being there. As I sat, pulses of breeze came through, a whoosh of air or hiss in the branches and a papery rattle as the breeze scattered a few leaves on the ground. And a butterfly blew in, a painted lady (or maybe American lady) that landed about eight feet away and rested briefly before taking flight on the wind.

More insects were busy today, like the bees coming into and out of the bee tree. Maybe they found the blooms of honeysuckle, or maybe they were bringing water from the pond back to the hive. The colony of Comanche harvester ants was clearing another opening at trailside and maybe searching for a few more seeds.

My walk lasted just over an hour, but it was enough. Now 2026 is off on the right footing, with a little time in nature along with that southern tradition of black-eyed peas and cornbread. May we all have a good, healthy, peaceful year in the coming months. It’s not too late for a walk at the preserve, and you can come by for some peas.

A “Letter” for New Year’s

December 31, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Happy New Year everyone! Thinking about what we do to mark New Year’s Eve and where it comes from, I’ve written a new Letter to Nature Kids. I hope you will have a look and share it with any kids who might want to have a look. (When you click the link it will download as a pdf)

Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. May we all have a good 2026; may the light return figuratively as well as literally.

New Pages for the New Year

December 30, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I’m updating the website, and I hope you’ll find the changes useful. The primary change is the addition of a page for my “online book,” Naturalists and Nature Kids in North Texas. I want to write about what naturalists do, how to observe, practice mindfulness, keep a nature journal, and how to encourage and guide kids toward a love for and an interest in nature. I also wanted to include sections that describe these things in practice, experiencing the woods and prairies of North Texas. I hope you will have a look at this work in progress at the Online Book page.

It really is a work in progress, and if you read some of the chapters or journal entries, I would be very grateful if you would share any comments about them. Could Naturalists and Nature Kids join my other in-print books? I don’t know at this point, but for now I offer the completed sections and hope that you will like them.

Wild Things

December 19, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

This week I met several groups of kids in a little patch of wildness at their school, looking for the various ways that plants make seeds, or, with younger ones, playing a game of “Food Chain” (no one was eaten, even during the wild rumpus). The kids know the place well, and many of them have explored the Ranger Circle, the Dark Forest, Maria’s Meadow, and other spots many times over several years at the private school.

*The climbing tree – a juniper with well-worn limbs perfect for climbin*g

My role is to channel some of their energy into new forms of discovery and understanding of what lives there. I can be a counterweight to a child’s fantasy about “poisonous” spiders or aggressive snakes, trying to replace such ideas with realistic caution and a sense that, overall, nature here is a safe place. I can invite them to think in new ways about animals in nature.

For example, the third and fourth graders know a lot of animals, but their knowledge of what the animal eats – and in turn what eats it – is limited. And so, in the “Food Chain” game, when we name one of the animals that the kids have seen there, a child who can name that critter’s predator or prey comes over to the “naturalist’s corner” and we ask about the next animal, until all the kids have come over to the naturalist’s corner.

But running around and exploring is part of it. When I sent the older kids out in groups of three or four, they sprang into the woods and fields as if shot from a slingshot. They scoured the place and came up with lots of wonderful examples of seeds. There were huge bur oak acorns with the stiff, curly fringe around the acorn cup. They found the small, dried pods of the partridge pea that was flowering just a couple of months ago. They noticed all the yellow, fleshy berries of horse nettle that we had talked about on an earlier outing. Yes, they look a little like tiny tomatoes, and they are even related (but poisonous). There were mimosa pods and the dark blue berries of privet, and I mentioned how invasive and destructive privet is in a place like this. They found seed heads of Indian grass and a couple of other grasses. One girl brought a sprig of juniper, so I mentioned that this species has separate male and female trees (and the sprig with the yellowish tips was from a male plant).

*The kids found acorns, berries, dried flowers, a buckeye pod, and other things*

The younger kids were ready to run well before I was able to tell them what they should do. They would have been delighted to simply run. There was a lot of “wait, sit back down – no, you’ve got to stay with your group.” The instructions were as short as I could make them. “This group goes to this area, your group goes this way … and look for animals or signs that the animal was there, like a bird nest.” Then I sent them out. I might as well have said, “Let the wild rumpus start.” And kids started coming to me in excitement, “We found a bird nest! Also a beaver nest!” I had to see what this last really was, and they led me to some piled up brush someone had cut. That’s fine; the important thing was excitement about finding things. A spider web. A hole or burrow of some kind (armadillos had been digging in various spots). A dragonfly.

*If you’re looking for evidence of animals, you might find these*

The trick which I do not claim to have mastered is to allow and even join a bit of wild rumpus while keeping things structured enough to accomplish what we set out to do. Some kids are quieter and are already locked in on the goal, and usually they bring a good bit of knowledge to the activity. For other kids, nature study is not on their “to do” list, but running and discharging energy is. I think that we won’t get anywhere without some kind of curiosity and joy, so I would never turn any of this into “nature boot camp.” Working with groups of kids gives me additional appreciation for what teachers do (and they do it every day, not occasionally as a volunteer).

But it’s great to hear a kid say they look forward to these outings, or ask hopefully if we’re going to “play that game again” (from last month, an activity drawn from Joseph Cornell’s book, Sharing Nature).

Tandy Hills on December 12th

December 12, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Tandy Hills Natural Area is over 200 acres of prairie in east Fort Worth. In spring there are beautiful wildflower meadows at the top of a ridge, and then the prairie drops down toward the Trinity River (on the other side of Interstate 30) to the north. The whole area has stands of oaks and other trees, with many of the ravines having thick stands of juniper.

*The Fort Worth skyline seen from the Tandy Hills prairie*

I paid Tandy Hills an overdue visit today. It had been a while, and I missed this lovely place. When I wrote Mindfulness in Texas Nature I wanted to wrap up the purpose and the message of the book in an epilogue, and a late winter visit to Tandy Hills was just right. Its significance was that it is a survivor in spite of everything, and it offers small and humble but beautiful gifts like the annual appearance of trout lilies. Its resilience and the broad support it receives gave me reason to hope for a renewal of connection between humans and nature.

I talked about it as an island of nature that was under constant pressure by the surrounding city. The city has done many things right, from buying the property to the support of the parks department. What I meant was that it absorbs the impact of a lot of human visitation, including prohibited motorized vehicles (for example, I saw motorcycle tracks in a muddy spot today) and certain commercial photographers who cynically treat it as a backdrop while trampling the area. Its boundaries do not shut out the nearby highway noise, and invasive plants – especially privet – are constantly trying to make inroads, choking out the native species.

Tandy Hills Natural Area is looked after by a devoted group, the Friends of Tandy Hills, who work with the city to battle invasive plants, manage and improve trails, catalogue the over 2,000 species of plants, animals, and other organisms, and offer programs to the public.

The prairies are beautiful, and they remind me of the places I explored at the western edges of Fort Worth as a kid. Thin, dark soil over white limestone, and a treasure trove of grasses and other plants: little bluestem, Indiangrass, eryngo, basket flower, gayfeather, and many others. And even at this time of year, in their dormant state, they amaze me. There are the subtle colors as well as the beautiful shapes of flowers and seeds.

This was one of those days when the weather is unusually warm, and I go for walks in a t-shirt and enjoy the bright blazing sun when it is low in the sky and makes everything just a little bit warmer in color without the walk itself being overly hot. A few grasshoppers hopped and flew away and several dragonflies hovered and darted around. The prairie changes in each season, and much of it may become dormant in winter, but it is never quiet for long.

Thank you to the prairies, oaks, and junipers. And thank you to the people who keep this place as natural and undamaged as it can be.

Rumors of Winter

December 3, 2025December 3, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

After the warm days of October and November, now we are seeing a bit of cold with a first freeze (barely, in some places) yesterday morning. And it is December now; in the “meteorological” way of tracking seasons, winter starts on December 1st. Most of us use the winter solstice, December 21st this year, as the boundary between autumn and winter, but North Texas is at least hearing a few rumors of the winter to come. And that calls for a walk somewhere, putting our ear to the ground to listen.

I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, eastward along the “yellow” trail near the big pond and then turned and walked up through a tangle of woods to the “blue loop” and back toward the boulders. It was 63 degrees, a jacket needed only when the breeze blew. The place was full of sun and damp sand, native grasses going dormant and a coolness that balanced the sun perfectly.

In my journal I wrote “Phenology Note” on a sketched calendar page, and made a few notes about the trees and leaves. “The trees are still mostly leafed out and green. Many oak leaves are tinged with caramel …. Some trees look ragged but we’re still waiting for autumn color and/or leaf drop.” Back near the parking lot, many of the cedar elm trees are becoming bare, but the oaks seemed barely touched by autumn.

Phenology is the study of seasonal events in nature, and so looking back through a nature journal can show how the seasons change from year to year in a place. What’s the average time when trees lose their leaves, and how much is climate change pushing such events to new places on the calendar?

*Some caramel color or a tinge of red in leaves that are mostly still green*

Using a journal in that way puts me in the mode of science and data, my thoughts separated from emotions about climate change as if severed by a scalpel. But journaling can – and I think should – be more than intellectualizing. On a good day I’ll make room in those pages for what I miss from a time when life was anchored by things you could count on. Winters could be hard or they could be mild; summers might vary in how hot or dry they got; but after whatever variation in the weather, we always returned to an arithmetic mean, an average that we all recognized as something we could count on. But now the math isn’t our friend, and the arithmetic mean is shifting upward and we don’t know what we can count on.

I kept walking, looking and listening for wildlife. A one-minute sample using the Merlin app detected no sounds of birds. I did find a delightful grasshopper resting on a leaf turned nicely red. Uploading a photo to the nature app iNaturalist, the insect was identified as a “mischievous bird grasshopper.”

Now this was a find – what kind of mischief does this sort of grasshopper get into? This particular one was sitting motionless, perhaps too cool for tomfoolery and just feeling lucky to have survived yesterday’s freeze. Adult grasshoppers often don’t survive winter except as eggs deposited in some protected spot, although with increasingly mild winters, more adults like this one might get lucky.

I wanted to follow up on the walk with Logan a few days ago in which we saw southern jack o’ lantern mushrooms. In that particular spot we visited, mushrooms were still there. It might be some particular combination of the right soil, shade, and moisture, but that place stood out with all those mushrooms. There was even a new one of a different sort. According to iNaturalist, it was a type of puffball mushroom. I want to go back to see if it matures to rupture and release a tiny cloud of spores.

Even without a lot of fall color, there were places where the bright, slanting December sunlight backlit a group of leaves and created a dramatic display of color. Going slow, we can notice so many small and wonderful things.

And that includes the mosses. After the way Logan brightened with every new patch of moss he found, I was attuned to them today and really appreciated how they grow on the sandstone up at the bluff. Looking at some boulders was like seeing a miniature topography of meadows and hills.

I also noticed, on the way down the hillside, that the bee tree is active again (there were no bees visible on that cool and cloudy November 29th). I stood for a moment, imagining the extent of the hollow space within that tree, and all the honeycomb built within the spaces, and all that honey!