letters about nature

Letters To You (And the Joy of Sharing)

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

July 19, 2025

Dear Nature Folks,

I enjoy writing to you, especially to kids who love nature or are curious about it. I’ve been writing these “Letters to Nature Kids” or “Letters to Nature Folks” for over three years. Sometimes I describe a particular walk or a kind of animal or plant I found, and always there’s some connection to something in nature.

As I sit in my back yard, there are birds in nearby trees, and their songs are complex and beautiful together. Repeated notes, rising and falling whistles and whirring trills. They seem to be in the Sweetgum and Pine trees here, as the branches gently sway in the morning sun. 

Merlin, the bird identification app, identified them as a Northern Cardinal and a Bewick’s and a Carolina Wren. Meanwhile somewhere there is a Carolina Chickadee and a Blue Jay. After a short time, the nearby birds have gone quiet. Was it just a brief stopover? Or have they finished saying what they had to say? What were they communicating, and to whom? Inviting someone in, or maybe telling someone to stay away? 

A Wren at nearby Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve

We tend to think that birds sing from pure joy at being alive on a quiet sunny morning like this. People who study birds say that they’re mostly inviting a potential mate in or claiming some spot as theirs and telling others to stay away. But that doesn’t mean there’s no joy in it. Perhaps there’s a gratitude for being alive that feeds the impulse to find mates and claim their place in the woods and fields. 

There’s also joy in my sharing what I find and what the Earth teaches me when I’m in wild places (and places that are just a little bit wild). If I can share that with you and encourage you to go see for yourself, I imagine that there would be smiles on both of our faces. And that’s the reason for these letters.

Two kids in particular have given lots of happiness and have played a part in these letters: Eli and Lilly. My granddaughter is too young to read letters, but maybe she will do so someday. She might read this letter about our visit to the Fort Worth Nature Center on November 5, 2024:

On a beautiful early November day, Lilly and I went to see bison and butterflies. When we climbed the ramp up onto the bison viewing deck, she noticed some bison that were eating grass and others that looked like they were napping. We had a snack in the shade of the oak trees up on that platform while the bison snacked on grasses below.

American Bison at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge

Is it “bison,” or “buffalo”? What some people call a buffalo in North America is really the American Bison. But if you call them buffalo, everyone will probably understand you. If you are interested, I wrote about bison and that viewing deck Lilly and I were standing on for Green Source DFW.

When we were back on the ground, Lilly loved seeing caterpillars making their way across the ground, “going home,” she figured. We watched small butterflies feeding on yellow wildflowers, and she gently touched one of them. Her delight in finding these small things made me feel some of the same delight.

Lilly, on the bison deck

She and I have gone on a number of these “adventure walks,” starting shortly after her second birthday. Now, with her fourth birthday coming up, we took this walk at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge (FWNCR). She has climbed onto boulders – small ones – at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve and Oliver Nature Park and admired a harmless DeKay’s Brown Snake at FWNCR. She is fearless, curious, and gentle, three wonderful things to be.

Being together and sharing experiences of joy and discovery – those times are very important. You may have noticed that happiness grows even bigger when it is shared. What are some things that bring you joy? Maybe they are beautiful places, music, things that grab your attention, or put you at peace. Do you share those things with people that you love?

One of the butterflies that we saw

You and I both know that not everyone likes the same things, so we might offer to share something and the other person is not interested. That’s OK, you may find other things that you both like. But if you love nature, I hope you will find someone who is eager to go on an adventure walk with you.

In April of 2020 when he was six, I took Elijah (who is more family than friend) to my favorite creek. We waded in the clear water and noticed mosquitofish and shiners. The mosquitofish swam in little groups at the surface of the water, and shiners took off with a flash of silver scales. In later walks we have found turtles, cricket frogs, and many wonderful things (see the Letters to Nature Kids in January of 2022).

Lilly at the marsh boardwalk

After seeing the bison, Lilly and I went to the marsh boardwalk. A marsh is a place with fairly shallow water and plants that grow out of that water. This one is a lotus marsh, with many big round lotus leaves. It’s getting toward late autumn, and so lots of the leaves are turning brown.

That was a really wonderful walk. And at other times, I lead walks at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve. Almost everyone on those walks is an adult and most are people I have just met, but sharing nature still brings joy. I suppose each one is an “adventure walk,” although adults don’t give them that name. But each of them is a kind of adventure, because we never know what we will see. And if we are lucky, we can see what we find as if it is a new discovery – even if it is a dragonfly we know well or a Carolina Chickadee we have heard many times before.

I hope you can go on a walk or two, somewhere a little bit wild. Find someone you can share some of those walks with!

— Michael

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!

“Letters to Nature Kids”

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I’m adding something new: free, downloadable “Letters to Nature Kids” that I will write from time to time. As I noted on the page for this publication, we “don’t send letters so much any more, but a good letter can feel like part of a long-distance conversation, informal and personal.” The first issue is only a few pages of text and photos, that includes a little information about wasps, egrets, turtles, and trees, without getting in-depth. The idea is for the natural history facts to be incidental to the telling of a story about something (in this case, about a walk I took at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge).

We will see how future letters go; they probably will not all be about future walks I’ll take. They might be about a particular kind of animal or plant, or something about how people and nature are related. In each one my purpose will be to “send” a letter to anyone who enjoys nature and would like to share a little bit of it. Readers might be around ten or older – including adults who, like me, can be “nature kids” at any age.

I hope you or someone you know will enjoy it. And I hope you’ll let me know what works and doesn’t work, what topics would be good. Please – write back to me!