Author: Michael Smith
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Wading a Winter Creek
On a day when the temperatures reached the upper 70s, under bright sunshine, we took a walk and a wade through a cold creek, ten days into winter (using the December 1st meteorological beginning). It was delightful. It probably seemed ridiculous to Barbara’s kids when we arrived at the creek bed and found much more water […]
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Embracing the Cold, Looking for Solitude
Today was cold and cloudy. Not bitterly cold, but there was a sort of damp chill underneath the deck of gray clouds that made you pull your jacket close around you. I wanted to get out for a while to somewhere pretty close by and so I chose Oliver Nature Park in Mansfield. It is […]
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Autumn at Eagle Mountain Park
Today I walked a rolling patch of Cross Timbers woodland at Eagle Mountain Park, to the Ridge Loop Trail. The numerous other walkers and joggers reminded me that this was no unusual accomplishment, but the 3.8 miles I walked and climbed today is a sort of extension of my cardiac rehabilitation. In fact, I went […]
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Grateful for an Autumn Walk
Today’s walk at Southwest Nature Preserve was especially rewarding for me. A week ago last Sunday, I got prompt, excellent medical care for a heart attack and I seem to be recovering well. As a result, I had the chance to take a very routine short hike today, and even though it was routine, it […]
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Summer’s Snakey End
It was September12, with ten days of summer left to us before the autumn equinox, and so we decided that the last outing of summer ought to be spent at the LBJ National Grasslands, in Wise County. It was some combination of work on this book I’m writing about spending time in nature, and just […]
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Guiding Another Group of “Rangers”
Yesterday, on a slightly muggy early September day, I walked the bottomlands at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge with this year’s class of Cross Timbers Master Naturalists. We “met” last week via Zoom as I conducted the class covering reptiles and amphibians, mostly looking at Powerpoint slides in which I tried to convey as […]
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Field Herping and Fighting “The Nothing”
(This one first appeared in my earlier blog, “The Great Rattlesnake Highway,” in March of last year. I describe how my field herping evolved as I learned more about the animals and places I love.) I spend as much time as I can in woods and prairies, or wading creeks and watching turtles slip into […]
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“What Makes It Strong?” – Teaching Kids About Nature
I’ve been busy lately writing and putting together a couple of free downloadable PDF publications, one of which was the June issue of “The Treefrog Times.” In that issue, I wanted to include a little fun exercise for kids to think about what strengthens wings to enable birds and insects to fly. I drew a […]
Our Lives In Nature 