In August, mornings are the best times to take a walk, although that advantage begins to disappear not long after 9:00am as the bright burning sun rises to a nice, hot angle overhead. Add a little overnight rain and it’s like wearing a hot, wet sweater in the sunshine. But what’s a little sweat and discomfort when there are woods and wildlife to see? My friend Barbara, her two kids, and I hit a trail through part of the LBJ Grasslands Saturday morning with no regrets. Or only a couple of regrets, maybe!
This trail threads its way through oak woodlands and small openings that people call “pocket prairies” because the Little Bluestem and other native grasses make miniature prairies tucked away among the trees. A wild profusion of flowers hung on this year until the Fourth of July (when Jo and I visited – see the earlier blog post). Some are still tucked away in these pocket prairies, including lots of bitterweed, the beautiful little scarlet pea growing at ground level, and other flowers. On the way out, we saw a few Snow-On-the-Prairie, a favorite of mine.
However, if you walk along the trail looking for flowers, you’re apt to run smack into the web of one of the Spotted Orb-weavers that spin silk into concentric rings suspended between nearby tree branches. These chunky spiders are extremely common here, so bumping a web is pretty much unavoidable. Most of the time we saw the silken orbs and could dodge around it or duck under it, but not always.
Nick, who is eleven, is the shortest of the group right now (just you wait until he hits a growth spurt!) and so he had the easiest time. He’s also got good eyes for such things, and often warned us when we were about to face-palm into one of the webs. Nick’s keen vision also got us our only reptile sighting, a very small lizard skittering through the leaf litter. He described it as gray and said it did not look like the Little Brown Skink we saw on our last trip here, so perhaps it was a hatchling Texas Spiny Lizard. Nick also came up with an earthstar (a “False Earthstar” to distinguish it from a related fungus), which I always think of as a magical sort of thing to find. False Earthstars are fungi with an outer cover that splits into rays and opens in response to humidity, exposing a sac rather like a puffball, full of spores. Great find, Nick!
Dani liked to walk ahead of the rest of us. She’s a friendly, smart thirteen-year-old who said she tends to either go ahead or lag behind, even when she enjoys the group she is with. However, walking ahead down spider web alley means you’re going to plow through the webs – and she did, numerous times. She would smack into it, hands desperately clawing at her hair and face to clear the silk away, and run back to have her mom check her for stray spiders. After a moment’s recovery, off she would go to risk further entanglement! I share that same reaction when running into a web, and so I responded with empathy the first time – “Oh, no, I hate when that happens.” But after a time or two when she took the lead again, I had to chuckle when the inevitable happened. No harm done; like her brother, she said she enjoyed the walk (except for the part about the hot, muggy, sweaty morning … and the getting up early to come here). And, I’m pretty sure the kids would want you to know that I had my own freaked-out, sputtering moment when I ran into a web.
We stopped at a pond and looked for Red-eared Sliders poking their heads above the water’s surface, but this time did not see any. We did see plenty of Cricket Frogs, and a young American Bullfrog that ducked under the water before I could get a photo. Compared to the crowds of leopard frogs we saw on our walk on July 28, this pond was nearly frog-less.
As we walked, Barbara and I talked about old times. She’s the founder of the DFW Turtle and Tortoise Club and we’re both veterans of the DFW Herpetological Society. However, going out into the field with her is a recent thing, and part of her motivation is seeing Nick and Dani spend more time in wild (or semi-wild) places. We both see time spent in nature as physically, psychologically, and spiritually nurturing. I don’t mean “spiritually” in anything more than what happens when the “built” world is stripped away and we have the chance to feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, something grand and beyond our comprehension. Of course, the various parts of the natural world are comprehensible through the science of biology, and we have some understanding of how the parts work together through the science of ecology. But without picking it apart into food webs, species, and ecosystems, on one level the whole thing seems bigger than our scientific understanding. And being wrapped in it, walking through it, feels good!
After a while, the kids declared that maybe we had walked enough, and so we sat in the shade on the cool, sandy trail, drinking water and talking quietly. We talked a little about what we were seeing, but we also talked about other things: how “paying attention” works and the things that can interfere with it, what it’s like to navigate different peer groups and how we can have different styles to match different groups, and such things. Sitting in the shade of the Post Oaks after a walk is the best way to have such conversations. The woods quiet the mind, relax the spirit, and invite calm reflection.
The walk back was warmer and went more quickly. Before long the car came into view, but for me there’s always a little bit of reluctance to leave. There were still so many kinds of flowers tucked away in the grasses, and in a little bare patch of wet, sandy soil a group of small yellow butterflies was fluttering around, looking for the best place to land and pull a little moisture from the damp sand. So much to see and experience!
