Celebrate – It’s Amphibian Week

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

This week, take a moment to remember the frogs, toads, and salamanders of North America. It’s Amphibian Week, started in 2020 by the Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC) and partners such as Save the Frogs! These animals are important to the ecosystems in which they live, partly because predator species depend on them being so numerous (in places their biomass – total mass of amphibians – makes them a significant source of food to support the community). One way that they are important to us is how the calls of frogs and toads bring the nighttime to life in many places. The famous herpetologist Archie Carr said, “Frogs do for the night what birds do for the day: They give it a voice.” And amphibians are important just because; like other species, they have intrinsic importance.

Strecker’s Chorus Frog

To celebrate, here is some information about Texas amphibians, adapted from the pdf file you can find right here on my “herpetology” page. Here in North Texas it is expected to be rainy for part of this week, and the amphibians will appreciate that. Maybe you can get out to a wetland in the evening and listen for some frog and toad calls.

Amphibians include frogs, toads, salamanders, and caecilians. All of them are vertebrates that cannot generate their own body heat – that is, they are “cold blooded” or ectothermic. Amphibians have smooth, slimy, or warty skin which allows them to “drink” through the skin but also makes it easy for them to lose water by evaporation. They lay eggs without shells and almost all species hatch into an aquatic larval stage. One of the exceptions to that rule is the Slimy Salamander, which lays eggs in moist soil and leaves, and embryos develop into miniature adults before hatching. For other species, after growing and developing in ponds and streams, tadpoles and most larval salamanders change from aquatic, gill-breathing animals to animals that breathe air with lungs.

A very young Western Slimy Salamander from Williamson County

Frogs & Toads

Toads have relatively dry, warty skin, shorter back legs compared to most frogs, and often live further from water than frogs. Most frogs, on the other hand, have slimy and fairly smooth skin and longer back legs – they can leap where toads only hop. Both frogs and toads are dependent on water or moisture and often live near the water’s edge or in places where there are moist refuges. Toads may live in fairly dry habitats like prairies (a few live in the desert). Frogs don’t have to stay right beside the water; at night in some places we might see leopard frogs or bullfrogs wandering some distance from the nearest creek or pond.

A leopard frog at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge

Frogs and toads have a “seat patch” of skin that easily absorbs water and that is how they drink! Many toxins can easily cross an amphibian’s skin, making many of them particularly sensitive to pollution. (Do not handle them if you have chemicals such as insect repellent on your hands.) On the other hand, frogs and toads secrete various toxins from their skin, which helps protect them from infections and in some cases may help protect against predators. Most frogs are completely safe to handle, and none will give you warts! However, do not rub your eyes or get your fingers in your mouth after handling them. The skin secretions of toads can result in a burning sensation if it gets in your eyes.

Woodhouse’s Toad

The males of the various species of frogs and toads “call” to females during breeding. This often takes place in the water of ponds and creeks, because when a female approaches a suitable male and they pair up, she will lay eggs in the water as the male fertilizes them. The calls of frogs and toads are a little like bird song, in that different species have different calls and an experienced listener can identify the species by listening to the call. A very good book with audio recordings of many calls, is The Frogs and Toads of North America, by Lang Elliott and others.

Many frog and toad species that used to be common have become harder to find or even disappeared. In many places, populations of frogs and toads are being monitored to see how they are doing.

Salamanders

A Marbled Salamander from White Oak Creek WMA in northeast Texas

Many of them may look a little like lizards, but salamanders are not reptiles; they are amphibians. They have skin that may feel rubbery, slimy, or slightly rough, but they do not have scales and they can dry out easily. Like other amphibians, most of them start out as eggs laid in water. Instead of a shell, the egg has a clear membrane through which you can see the embryo developing. With a few exceptions like the slimy salamander mentioned above, here is what happens next: When the eggs hatch, the babies are not like adult salamanders, but are larvae that breathe in the water using gills. This is the salamander version of a tadpole. Later, most of them change into an air-breathing adult form (one group, the lungless salamanders, do not have lungs as adults). Some salamander species live entirely in the larval, aquatic form, and these are called “neotenic” salamanders. Neotenic salamanders are not a different kind of salamander, but the term “neotenic” simply describes the fact that the salamander did not change into an adult, air breathing form.

One group of salamanders, called “sirens,” always remain aquatic and do not develop hind limbs. They are long and eel-like. Another group that is always aquatic and whose members have a long body like an eel are the “amphiumas.” Some of these animals, like the “western lesser siren,” are relatively small. In contrast, some amphiumas can reach lengths of over three feet.

A Small-mouthed Salamander seen at Old Sabine Bottoms WMA in East Texas

Because they depend on healthy wetlands or other habitats that are shrinking because of things like development for human use or drought and climate change, salamanders are in trouble. Like frogs and toads, their skin is porous and they “drink” through their skin. This makes them particularly vulnerable to chemical pollutants in water. Overall, because of pollution, diseases, habitat loss and other reasons, amphibians are disappearing in many parts of the world. See organizations such as AmphibiaWeb for more information. You may also be interested in my book, The Wild Lives of Reptiles and Amphibians: A Young Herpetologist’s Guide, from Texas A&M University Press.

“No Direction Home”

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

(I recently wrote this over at Substack – yes, I’m still struggling with where to land – but I felt the post ought to be here, too, because of its importance. I hope you will read and go to the Federal Register site and comment. Thanks.)

Suppose a group of people came to your house and stole the roof from over your head. “What??!” you might protest, but they tell you they needed the shingles. Shortly after, a crew plows up the easement in front of your house, and water shoots up from the broken pipes, then subsides to a trickle. Eventually you sit in your house, unharmed, but with no protection from the elements and no water. The police tell you that you have no recourse, because none of these people physically hurt you.

That is what the Trump regime plans to do to species protected under the Endangered Species Act. A proposed rule would re-define “harm” to only mean “taking” a protected plant or animal. Changing or degrading its habitat would not fall under the definition of harm. Only such things as trapping or killing the animal, or digging up an endangered plant, would qualify as “harm.”

Sand dune/shinnery oak habitat in Monahans Sandhills State Park

The beneficiaries of this, of course, are extractive industries. Loggers can log and the spotted owls just have to deal with it, because if nobody is shooting owls out of the sky, no harm done. In the Permian Basin of Texas, industries can go on mining sand for fracking, and the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard will have to learn to live on caliche roads and patches of remaining bare sand. I visited the area last year, writing about the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard for Green Source DFW. Researchers have found that this lizard requires very specific habitat that includes sand dunes and a low, shrubby oak species called shinnery oak. If you remove that habitat, the species cannot survive.

Over a year ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard as endangered, but a loophole in the law allowed them to defer setting aside any habitat for it. (The Monahans Sandhills State Park provides some good habitat, but the whole park is only 3,840 acres.) The land in Texas west of Midland and Odessa is like a big outdoor industrial park crisscrossed with roads and sand trucks, sand mining sites in the spotty areas where dunes are found, drilling sites and the network of caliche roads connecting them. A lizard could look around in most places out there and see no direction home.

Sand mining operation near Kermit, TX

So, back to our analogy, if you were an endangered species, industry could come steal your roof, dig up your water pipes, and leave you with no food, water, or shelter, and according to the current regime you would be completely unharmed. To further quote Bob Dylan, “How does it feel?”

From a conservation biology perspective, it’s fair to say that all species depend on certain conditions to survive. The more they are habitat specialists, the narrower the range of conditions that they need in order to survive. That is, if they are adapted to very specialized diets or ways of living, they can’t just decide to be more flexible and live outside those requirements. The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard did not just decide it liked sand dunes and shinnery oak and would be annoyed if they couldn’t get them. Over a long span of time, generations of these lizards survived by making use of that habitat and only that one.

Regarding this proposed rule change, you can submit a public comment before May 19th here. I really hope that you will. With the Musk-Trump regime, it is too easy to conclude that since they don’t care what we think, it’s a waste of time. But that’s not quite true. They don’t care unless we speak up in large numbers, signifying a big wave of opposition that they cannot ignore. Enough of us, acting together and persistently, might still have an impact.

Also, giving up on telling them what we think reminds me of the first of Timothy Snyder’s lessons for resisting tyranny: do not obey in advance. Staying quiet teaches them the extent of their power, and it is also a kind of signal to our neighbors and friends that there is no point in resisting.

There are over 1,300 species federally listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and a number of them occur in Texas (including the Ocelot, Mexican Long-nosed Bat, Golden-cheeked Warbler, Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Louisiana Pinesnake, Salado Springs Salamander, Comal Springs Riffle Beetle, Hinckley’s oak, Neches River Rose-mallow, and many more). I hope we won’t leave them “on their own, like a complete unknown.”

(Apologies to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”)

Sanctuary!

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

This new trail at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge is a favorite. I have walked it in winter with those bare tree limbs reaching up towards the sky and beautiful patterns of shed leaves on the ground. Now I have been there when it is greener and darker with all those new leaves shading the ground. The trail winds among the tree trunks and I can hear the quiet and the birds and the soft crunch of footsteps. That quiet and the new leaves as well as the carpet of old ones makes for a woodland sanctuary. A protected woods becomes a protective place for all who walk there.

I remember the 1939 film – “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” – in which Quasimodo rescues the wrongly condemned Esmeralda and flees to the cathedral, crying “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Notre Dame is a place of safety and protection from a corrupt French Chief Justice. Both the disfigured Quasimodo and the Romani girl Esmeralda are safe within its walls.

I respond to the prairies, woods, and wetlands as places of safety and protection, sanctuaries from thinking about the current regime and worrying about how it will play out. Extrajudicial abduction, defiance of courts, hate and scapegoating, wrecking the economy that sustains us, and on and on. We might imagine that, like Esmeralda, we all need to be taken to some place of safety, away from the worst of our fellow humans.

At the same time that such things are going on in human society, the sun keeps rising each morning, birds sing, water flows, plants give us oxygen and food, and there is quiet and peace in the woods and fields. I am very thankful that they are part of the world. As Robin Wall Kimmerer said, “Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy” (Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 327).

Sanctuary! I need to be in such places. I must do whatever good that I can in the world, and then for a time I need the shelter of nature.

Flowers of Dakota Mock Vervain

And so I went to the nature center yesterday, the day before Earth Day. The sun was shining in a clear blue sky, and a Northern Cardinal’s call was joined with those of other birds in the patch of prairie where I started. The temperature was still in the 70s, but not for long.

In the meadow with butterflies and bird song

After a time in the trees, the trail entered a big meadow or prairie surrounded by trees. This, to me, is the heart of this trail. There were flowers visited by butterflies – a Common Buckeye, several Goatweed Leafwings, and over by the bench, a Painted Lady. Once I settled in, I saw some species of sulfur flying and fluttering a little above the tops of the grasses. Most of the time the nearby air traffic did not disturb the place, so I could hear the Northern Cardinals and also Carolina Wren, Carolina Chickadee, White-throated Sparrow, and Tufted Titmouse (much of the identifying was with the Merlin app, but even if they were not identified the songs in the meadow were beautiful).

From there, the trail meandered through the woods some more. Sometimes I got on the ground to examine mushrooms; other times it was to see a small jumping spider. There were more flowers: Smallflower Desert-Chicory, Fraser’s Wild Onion, and at the end, a few patches of Texas Bluebonnet in clearings as the woods opened onto another prairie.

Unidentified mushrooms
Paradise Jumping Spider
Smallflower Desert-Chicory
Texas Bluebonnet

When I reached the end of the trail, the marsh boardwalk was a short walk away, and so I headed down to the marsh. Black Vultures were examining some exposed mud, a Great Egret flew by close to the boardwalk, and at some lotus stems in the shallow water an Eastern Phoebe perched. Then it flew to a nearby spot, disappeared, and returned. Once it dipped to the water’s surface, apparently to capture something. It is a busy life for a Phoebe on the hunt.

The Eastern Phoebe, scanning for insects

It was three hours well-spent. We all need this kind of sanctuary, and such places can be an important sort of self-care. I wish everyone could take an hour or so and be held in the peace and beauty of places like this. If you can, go and sit for a while in mindful stillness or walk the trails and notice the unending stream of wonderful things that you will find.

Elegies for Animals

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Our responses to losses and extinction of our fellow creatures should reflect our complete selves, not just what we make of the losses intellectually but also how they resonate in our hearts and souls. When a species is gone, it should pull from us something beyond what is measured in statistics. Birds do that, as you can hear in the magnificent elegy by Christopher Tin, called The Lost Birds. It’s a collection, a heartbreaking instrumental theme memorializing the Passenger Pigeon (“Flocks a Mile Wide”) and songs, some with original lyrics and some drawing on others’ poems such as “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.” Those lost birds, our distant relatives, deserve memorials such as this.

Of course, it’s not just birds. Many of our other animal relatives are disappearing, and some of them have eloquent advocates. Wolves have passionate defenders, and even the Monarch butterfly inspires legions of helpers planting milkweed for their caterpillars. 

Amphibians and reptiles have captured my interest and affection all my life. A great many are declining, and the loss of many amphibians has been deemed an extinction “crisis.” At least, it’s a crisis as seen by herpetologists and some others. Turtles are disappearing, too, along with many reptile species. 

You can see where I am headed. No elegies for the disappearing Louisiana Pine Snake or the Yangtze Giant Softshell Turtle. Our culture does not elevate them in that way. The flight of birds symbolizes freedom for us. Our cultural stories equate birds with hope; a dove with an olive branch signifies peace, and those feathered wings remind us of angels. The snake, in Western culture, brings up temptation, fall from grace, and being condemned to crawl on the belly. We have to look elsewhere, like Asia or Indigenous Americans to find some positive cultural meanings.

Speckled kingsnake

My point is not a resentment of birds, just a wish that we could do for other animals what we’ve done for birds. I wish we had stories and images in our culture that found more positive inspiration and affection for the animals without beautiful songs and wings, with no soft fur or expressive eyes. It would make it easier for us to find room for them in the family of living things. It might give a little boost to our willingness to go out of our way to conserve them, and maybe we would need fewer elegies.

Small Wonders

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I’ve added another downloadable “Letter From the Woods,” this one is about a recent walk at LBJ National Grasslands. The link takes you to a PDF of that letter that you can download, print, and share if you like. Or, if you would prefer, I posted it yesterday at Rain Lilies on Substack, and you can see it here. Either way, have a look and see how great it was to visit the grasslands again!

About Empathy

/ Michael Smith / 1 Comment

I’m writing again to kids and to anyone else who is interested, about the values that can shape our lives if we choose them. Like empathy.

So – empathy. The thing that lets us know that a classmate is going through something bad, even if they say they’re “fine.” And also lets us share a friend’s joy. The ability that lets us connect with each other, lets us care about each other in a meaningful way.

Empathy is our ability to understand what it is like to be another person in their situation – to sense what their emotions and thoughts might be. If you see someone being bullied, see their expressions and hear their voice, you might feel some of their fear, pain, and anger, and want to help them.

What is it like to be small and have a hurt? And to have someone who is there for you?

It’s not the same as “sympathy,” which is having concern for someone but without the emotional part that happens when we feel what they are feeling. Empathy connects us through emotional understanding, while sympathy really does not.

If you look these things up online, some places in social media and websites don’t get it quite right. There’s some good information here and here. And I learned a good bit about these things during my career as a Psychological Associate. Empathy is crucial to what was required in that career.

I guess a person who is worried about being seen as weak or vulnerable has no use for empathy or else would find it hard or uncomfortable. It amazes me that some politicians and some churches are saying that empathy is a problem, or even a sin.

When Elon Musk says that empathy is a “bug” and a “weakness,” he is wrong. Empathy helps bring about the kind of connection and trust that holds relationships, communities, and societies together. Right now, as a society, very many people are isolated from each other and mistrustful of most others. We need to have relationships in which the other person “gets” us.

It would be great to have more face-to-face relationships that include empathy, making us feel understood by a wider group of friends and people in the community. I think we would feel less isolated and mistrustful of everyone else we see. And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?

Looking around me right now, I see too many people who have no time or desire to understand others except to use them, who act as though getting through the day means shoving people aside, and who desperately want to be invulnerable, untouchable, armor-plated like a superhero. Empathy would mean sometimes opening yourself to difficult feelings, connecting so that it could matter – a lot – how another person is doing. You can’t do that with armor on. (You can and should do it while maintaining some sort of “boundary,” but that’s for another discussion.)

So I hope you will grow up being strong enough and wise enough to have empathy for others. Being with someone when they need it, without giving advice or trying to “fix it” and quickly move on, but instead just being present so they don’t carry what they’re carrying all by themselves.

I’m not sure how I managed to write the above without bringing in one of Bruce Perry’s books, Born for Love (written with Maia Szalavitz). Not that I wanted it to be a long essay with a lot of references, but this is a popular, readable book by a psychiatrist who I regarded as a rockstar earlier in my career when I heard him speak and read his books and articles. So, if you can take the time, go get this book!

For the Kids in My Family

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

This is heartfelt but maybe preachy, so bear with me. And it’s particularly for Eli and Lilly, should they want to read it at some future time. I was thinking of boys in particular as I wrote it, but it’s for anyone. Especially for those raising boys or having influence in their lives, and for anyone whose life is woven together with the lives of boys.

Lilly and Eli

I hope you will question what means to be a boy, and a man. Don’t just absorb what the culture teaches without some careful thought.

The culture (schools, places of worship, movies, social media, etc.) shapes what we expect of boys and men. But we don’t have to follow the culture when it holds up domination or aggression as ideals. We can turn away when it yells, “do it!” because stopping to think before acting is supposed to be weak. We don’t have to end up as men who are hardened, isolated, determined to win no matter who gets hurt. And we don’t have to raise our sons that way.

So … who do you want to be? I don’t mean work or a career, I mean what values could guide you as you make your way through the world?

Here are a few that are worth thinking carefully about: equality, empathy, truthfulness, integrity, compassion, kindness, and work as well as play.

Equality ought to be easy, right? People talk about it, even in our Declaration of Independence, the part about believing that “all men are created equal.” Nobody is above another person. It’s a great idea, and yet they wrote “men” and left out women. They left out people of color, too. Over the next couple of centuries, we began recognizing what we left out, and a lot of people have tried to correct that.

I hope you’ll think about equality on a very personal level, about you and the people around you. They way you are with girls, women, people of color, people with less money. Older people, like me, often used the right words about others being equal, but didn’t act like it. Our sisters and girlfriends were equal, but … boys and men needed to do things for them, speak for them, and make the important decisions. We said one thing but acted like it wasn’t true. Equality was mainly just a nice word. I think many younger people are doing better, but the problem is still here. In fact, some churches and politicians want to go back to the time when women were supposed to be quiet and obedient.

Women and girls should matter just the same as men and boys. Neither one should try to control the other, as if they were better. This especially includes the old problem of men and boys thinking they can control the bodies and the affection of women and girls. If we really mean it about being created equal, then we each make our own decisions about what to wear, who to hug, when it’s OK to touch or be touched. And of course that goes for any gender, gay, straight, transgender, or other way of recognizing who we are.

And being treated equally goes for any other person who is different in ways like race and skin color, or what country you are from, or how much money you have. I’m not better than a person who is different in those ways, and neither are you.

People who are opposed to these ideas may try to make it seem like we are saying that everybody has more rights than men or boys, like we are getting left out and these others are getting special rights. I guess what bothers them is that we men have less of a special privilege than before. We are used to having a special status, and so just being equal to everyone feels like we lost something. But the deal is, no one has more rights or is “more” equal than anyone else.

With equality, being female doesn’t give girls and women special rights, just the same rights.

And it doesn’t give Black people special rights over White ones, just the same rights.

And so on, with other kinds of differences.

So I hope you will think about the values that you want to guide your life, and I hope that equality is one of them.

I want to write more about these issues, maybe touch on those things like empathy, truthfulness, integrity, compassion, kindness, work, and play. What is happening in our country right now seems to challenge and distort those qualities, and some people are glorifying power and even violence. They would give special privileges to the rich and make women conform to mistaken ideas of what is required to be virtuous. They would re-define truth to be whatever is convenient at the moment. If we think such ideas are wrong, we have to speak up.

Mindfulness at Spring Creek

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I think about what we are all going through right now, and I wonder what would help. I bet we could make a list, right? One of the things on such a list might be mindfulness. It offers a way of seeing things with fresh eyes and a deep way of experiencing the beauty and wonder around us. Also, it is a practice that involves letting go of our restless intensity and fostering patience and acceptance. It is associated with trust, compassion, empathy and kindness. Those are qualities that are not just in short supply but are being discouraged by some people in the mistaken idea that they are weak.

Sunday afternoon, March 23rd, I led a group in a mindfulness-based walk through part of the Spring Creek Forest Preserve in Garland. It was a good day to see things with fresh eyes and let go of some restlessness. The day was warm with low puffy clouds and that feeling – a sort of “softness” – that comes on more humid days in spring. The walk was a follow-up to a talk I had given for the Preservation Society for Spring Creek Forest about three weeks before, talking about mindfulness in nature.

The Spring Creek Forest

In the talk, I described mindfulness as a special way of paying attention to our experience in the present moment and accepting whatever that experience brings. I said that it is a meditation technique that can be practiced on a walk in the woods, informally. That’s what we would do on the 23rd. We would take a walk without our usual activities of taking photos and uploading them to iNaturalist or chatting, or being lost in thought.

At the beginning of the walk, the fifteen or so people gathered and I mentioned some of the basics of mindfulness, including some of the qualities and emotions that tend to emerge from the practice. One of those is stillness, which does not mean you would sit still all the time. Instead, it is a lack of restlessness, impatience, and wanting the next thing. It is a sense of quiet and calm, even while you are walking. And a related quality – patience, allowing things to come about in their own time and accepting that things take time. Not that we cannot or should not act to bring things about, but we don’t need to struggle against the timetable if it is different than we would prefer.

There are times when I am restless or impatient, but when I am able to have that sense of stillness and patience, it is very freeing. And it is not hard to imagine how our lives would be better if all of us experienced more of those things.

Instead of going first to names and categories, we can stay with the basal leaves, tall erect stems, and beautiful yellow flowers for a moment. Later we can consider if it should be called a groundsel.

During the walk we talked about “beginner’s mind,” when we experience something as if for the first time, with the vividness and newness that can happen at such times. The more we are in the present moment, the more we step away from past experiences and preconceptions about what is in front of us. We see something with the mind of a beginner.

Mindfulness is also associated with compassion and empathy. Imagine the compassion that would result if everyone put aside more of their judgment about bad or good, lazy, malicious, and so on. We quickly think of people in this context, but we’ll keep it in the realm of nature for a moment. Perhaps there is a copperhead in the woods, and we know that this snake is venomous and capable of sending us to the hospital. With that sense of stillness and patience, we watch it from several feet away, noticing the beautiful earth tones with shades of reddish-orange. The snake remains perfectly still in our presence (unless we get too close or step on it) and is non-aggressive. We might know that the snake’s venom is primarily an adaptation for subduing the animals it eats. I think we would see the copperhead as something to be respected and even appreciated, while being very careful around it. Our compassion would mean we would not want it to suffer by starving or being defenseless, just as we do not want to suffer if we accidentally touched it and were bitten.

At a place where the trail reached the creek, we stopped and spent a couple of minutes with eyes closed or looking down so that our other senses would be more prominent. People later commented about listening to the sound of water flowing in the creek and the songs of birds in the woods. There was also the feeling of sun and a light breeze on our skin. We talked about the smell of spring, even though our vocabularies struggle to describe what we are sensing, the new green growth and what one person labeled as “herbaceous” (like the small plants emerging from the woodland floor). Noticing such things, along with touch and the sensations coming from how we are supported by the earth as we sit, walk, or stand, made our time richer.

Crow poison with a native violet growing beneath it

There is a lot more, but you should go and experience it for yourself. Emerging from the woods into a pocket prairie with butterflies, the beehive in a hollow tree, the leaves of trout lilies with their speckled or spattered appearance, and the scattered expanse of the small, white flowers of crow poison dotting the forest floor. If you go, take a little time for stillness and for being in the present moment.

Letters to “Nature Folks”

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

For about three years I’ve been publishing a short, free publication that is like a letter. At least that’s my intention – an informal, even personal style like a letter. My original idea was to write to older kids who like nature and like to read. I started out on a December day at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge, seeing wasps, turtles, egrets, and talking about leaves. I wrote:

Do you know what a hundred tons of leaves smells like, laying on the ground? (I’m not really sure if it was a hundred tons, or even a ton, but they covered the ground everywhere I looked.) In my walk, the smell was really strong in a spot between two little hills where the air stays still. Now sometimes when people say that a smell is “really strong,” it’s a polite way of saying it stinks. That’s not what I mean. I loved that smell, but I don’t have good words to describe it. The leaves fall and they break down and return to the soil. That smell is leaves turning into soil.

That was the first issue of Letters to Nature Kids, and I kept writing, at least several times a year. I tried to bring the reader along on my walks, or talk about nature journaling or coming to terms with things like fears of spiders. Another goal was to not talk down to kids, and while I don’t get technical or in-depth in the letter, I do think there’s an appeal for adults as well.

I’ve experimented with something called Letters From the Woods, something taken essentially from my nature journal so that it is a letter written “from” the woods or prairies. I hope to come back to that.

But the latest I’ve written is a letter not just to nature kids but to nature folks. I hope you will download this March, 2025 issue and give it a try. Pass it around if you know someone who might like it. And if you have any thoughts about it that you would like to share, please do send me an email. Writers often get little feedback; we send something out there, and hopefully some folks read it, and hopefully it lands in a good place for them. But how wonderful it would be to have a bit of dialogue about it! If you are inclined to reply, please do (use the email address at the end of the letter or the contact form from the Lives in Nature website). Thanks!

A Small Restoration

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I had to go to the woods today. Among my frequent visits to those places, some are for spiritual and psychological first aid. Today was a day like that.

Cardinals like this male were singing throughout the preserve

Here at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, I can sit on the ridge and look down into the brown and gray woods, still in those colors for a while before the leaves appear. There are some glimpses of green, bits of juniper seen through oak branches, and patches of moss at the base of tree trunks. And there is a flash of reddish feathers from a female northern cardinal.

Yes, there is traffic noise and a barking dog somewhere, but it feels quiet and there is a stillness to the dormant woods, here at the edge of spring. I needed this respite. Not a respite from my home, except that home is where the news arrives. Home is where I get sucked into the Internet, with stories from the world: destruction, corruption, and bullying. Here, I don’t allow the news to appear on my phone, which is used only for photos or checking the Merlin app to identify some unseen bird.

The sun is at my back and a butterfly dances by. Mosses and lichens growing on the stones of the ridge provide endless color, life, and art. And there is the stillness that hardly seems able to be found in the city.

Butterflies agree that spring is ready to arrive. On the trail from the ridge to the boulders, a fritillary glides in toward me on rigid orange wings. It sails on past, wings now flapping to carry it up to the treetops. Nearby, a pair of butterflies suddenly appear and spiral up in their fluttering flight, above the crown of the nearest tree. When I reach the boulders, a pair of sulfurs chase each other down the path. The fluttering, erratic flight of butterflies might make us think they cannot control their flight very well, but have you noticed how often they can weave among obstacles without hitting them? That erratic flight seems to be a gift, an ability to make quick turns and maneuvers that help them escape predators.

The historic 200-year-old post oak referred to as the Caddo oak

I walk around the preserve, past the historic Caddo oak, seeing many more butterflies and hearing a number of bird species: Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, a chickadee or two, an eastern phoebe, and many northern cardinals. I see a red-tailed hawk overhead, soaring and then turning on powerful wings.

A slightly fuzzy photo of the red-tailed hawk

Arriving near the north pond, I think about how much data we have about the benefits of mindfulness and time spent in nature. There is the reduction in stress, the cardiovascular benefits, an immunologic boost, reduction in depressive rumination, and increases in empathy among other gifts. Those things make time in the woods not some privileged escape or ignorance of the troubles of the world. It is a sort of refueling for the work that lies ahead. It is restorative – a little like sleep – and so it should not be undervalued.

Blanchard’s cricket frog at the pond’s edge
A young red-eared slider, basking

It is now 77F in the shade. Down at the north pond, life is in full swing. red-eared sliders swimming or pulling out and basking in sunshine. Cricket frogs jumping into the water as I get too close to them. All that is needed is the emergence of dragonflies, and the pond will seem complete. I walk back to the car after nearly two hours of walking, sitting, and noticing things in a world that seems so different from the big events of the wider world. It has been a small but important restoration.