Seeds

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*

“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).

Our Lives In Nature

How nature supports, informs, and inspires our lives

A Great Egret, Fishing for Sunfish

Wild Things