Rumors of Winter

December 3, 2025December 3, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

After the warm days of October and November, now we are seeing a bit of cold with a first freeze (barely, in some places) yesterday morning. And it is December now; in the “meteorological” way of tracking seasons, winter starts on December 1st. Most of us use the winter solstice, December 21st this year, as the boundary between autumn and winter, but North Texas is at least hearing a few rumors of the winter to come. And that calls for a walk somewhere, putting our ear to the ground to listen.

I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, eastward along the “yellow” trail near the big pond and then turned and walked up through a tangle of woods to the “blue loop” and back toward the boulders. It was 63 degrees, a jacket needed only when the breeze blew. The place was full of sun and damp sand, native grasses going dormant and a coolness that balanced the sun perfectly.

In my journal I wrote “Phenology Note” on a sketched calendar page, and made a few notes about the trees and leaves. “The trees are still mostly leafed out and green. Many oak leaves are tinged with caramel …. Some trees look ragged but we’re still waiting for autumn color and/or leaf drop.” Back near the parking lot, many of the cedar elm trees are becoming bare, but the oaks seemed barely touched by autumn.

Phenology is the study of seasonal events in nature, and so looking back through a nature journal can show how the seasons change from year to year in a place. What’s the average time when trees lose their leaves, and how much is climate change pushing such events to new places on the calendar?

*Some caramel color or a tinge of red in leaves that are mostly still green*

Using a journal in that way puts me in the mode of science and data, my thoughts separated from emotions about climate change as if severed by a scalpel. But journaling can – and I think should – be more than intellectualizing. On a good day I’ll make room in those pages for what I miss from a time when life was anchored by things you could count on. Winters could be hard or they could be mild; summers might vary in how hot or dry they got; but after whatever variation in the weather, we always returned to an arithmetic mean, an average that we all recognized as something we could count on. But now the math isn’t our friend, and the arithmetic mean is shifting upward and we don’t know what we can count on.

I kept walking, looking and listening for wildlife. A one-minute sample using the Merlin app detected no sounds of birds. I did find a delightful grasshopper resting on a leaf turned nicely red. Uploading a photo to the nature app iNaturalist, the insect was identified as a “mischievous bird grasshopper.”

Now this was a find – what kind of mischief does this sort of grasshopper get into? This particular one was sitting motionless, perhaps too cool for tomfoolery and just feeling lucky to have survived yesterday’s freeze. Adult grasshoppers often don’t survive winter except as eggs deposited in some protected spot, although with increasingly mild winters, more adults like this one might get lucky.

I wanted to follow up on the walk with Logan a few days ago in which we saw southern jack o’ lantern mushrooms. In that particular spot we visited, mushrooms were still there. It might be some particular combination of the right soil, shade, and moisture, but that place stood out with all those mushrooms. There was even a new one of a different sort. According to iNaturalist, it was a type of puffball mushroom. I want to go back to see if it matures to rupture and release a tiny cloud of spores.

Even without a lot of fall color, there were places where the bright, slanting December sunlight backlit a group of leaves and created a dramatic display of color. Going slow, we can notice so many small and wonderful things.

And that includes the mosses. After the way Logan brightened with every new patch of moss he found, I was attuned to them today and really appreciated how they grow on the sandstone up at the bluff. Looking at some boulders was like seeing a miniature topography of meadows and hills.

I also noticed, on the way down the hillside, that the bee tree is active again (there were no bees visible on that cool and cloudy November 29th). I stood for a moment, imagining the extent of the hollow space within that tree, and all the honeycomb built within the spaces, and all that honey!

Jack o’ Lanterns in the Woods

November 29, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Yesterday we found several golden orange jack o’ lanterns in the woods, though it’s been a month since Halloween. There were no carved faces, just smooth clumps of orange. My young friend was delighted to find all these mushrooms, just as he was with all the mosses growing in the woodlands. And I was, in turn, delighted to watch his excited discovery of these small wonders.

The “southern jack o’ lantern” is a large mushroom that grows from wood, often in clusters at a fallen tree limb or at the base of a tree. They’re common from summer through autumn at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, which is where we were. It has been very dry from late summer through much of autumn, but now that rains have come, orange mushrooms are popping up.

A Missouri Department of Conservation website says that the southern jack o’ lantern is bioluminescent, so that “the gills of fresh specimens may sometimes give off a faint greenish glow at night or in a darkened room.” It would be fun to return at night and see if we could observe that.

*A big cluster of jack o’ lanterns that Logan found and photographed*

We are used to seeing a plant or animal that we can point to, whose body or structure is gathered together in one place as one “thing.” However, with fungi it’s more complicated. For much of the year, the jack o’ lantern is a network of tiny filaments and threads running through soil and decaying wood – the mycelium. If I said, “show me a jack o’ lantern,” you would have to dig in the soil or turn over a rotting log to find those little fungal threads and say, “well, there’s part of one.” The mushroom itself is just the reproductive structure, producing spores that are almost (not quite) like seeds that will grow tissues that will become a new fungus. So a mushroom is a little like a flower – the part that catches our attention but is only the reproductive part of a larger organism.

*Logan takes a closer look at a jack o’ lantern*

Logan wanted to know if it was edible, so I looked it up using iNaturalist and found that it is poisonous. Not like a death cap mushroom that might be fatal, but the jack o’ lantern would give you the sort of upset stomach that one website said might “make you wish you were dead.” Definitely a mushroom to admire just where it is.

The other thing that really captured Logan’s imagination were the mosses. These little soft, green mounds growing along the ground in protected places can bring many of us into miniature worlds, sitting beside a butterfly and drinking from an acorn cup. They are plants, but without true roots and without the little tubes (vascular tissue) that flowers and trees use to move fluid and sap around. And so they must grow in short, compact mats or mounds. In shady places, an oak tree may grow a garden of moss along one of its bigger branches or at the base of the trunk. At the preserve, the sandstone at the bluff can also provide good growing conditions. The porous rock can hold moisture and is easy for moss to anchor itself to.

Mosses can survive periods of drought to an amazing degree, seeming to spring back to life after a rain. At the top of the preserve there are many partially-shaded places where mosses grow. In the heat of summer, especially when it is quite dry, they become dark green crusts along the rocks, waiting for rain. Then, the plant’s cells fill with fluid and they become green and springy.

Another small growing thing that can produce a sort of miniature garden is lichen. Dead oak branches provide a great substrate for lichen to grow, either as the greenish- or bluish-gray foliose lichens that cover the surface in a ruffled coating, or else as little shrub-like fruticose lichens. One of the latter, the golden-eye lichen, is a favorite of mine.

Lichens are not plants. They are partnerships between two things. Not just a fungus, and not just an alga, but the two things fused together (or sometimes a fungus and a cyanobacterium). The fungus provides a structure and anchors the partners to a rock, a branch of wood, or other suitable place. The algae provide a means to manufacture food via photosynthesis. Together, they can survive sun, drought, freezing, and keep on going.

*Several forms of lichen growing on a twig*

Regardless of the biological details, these living things add wonder to a walk in the woods. To pause and get on the same level as a moss or mushroom shifts our focus from the everyday world down to a small scale and we see everything in new ways. The details of leaves and the texture of moss, or drops of dew like tiny crystal orbs on the strands of a spider’s web, these things can transport our imagination to new places. It was wonderful to watch Logan find each new patch of moss and each new mushroom with that sense of delight. It was a little like what I see when I take my granddaughter to such places; the emotion and fascination isn’t tied to a particular age (you might see it in me if we took a walk together).

Experiencing nature in this way with children is just the best. It can be a window back into our own childhood, or the childhood we would wish for our younger selves or for others. It is also a hopeful sign for our future, that children can still find magic and connection in nature. And if they carry that forward, we might protect wild places and heal some of the Earth’s hurts.

Searching for Autumn

November 15, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I went for a walk at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with gratitude for the warm day and yet wanting very much to find autumn. That’s a season I look forward to each year, and in this changing climate it is apt to hide behind 80 degree days and dusty drought.

Starting at 3:00pm under sunny skies, I walked up to the top of the hill and sat down to watch, listen, and write a little. it was 82.7F in the shade, with the crowns of post oak trees still covered in green leaves and swaying in the breeze. A little sumac shrub in front of me was brightly backlit by the sun in vibrant green with a little red. Other sumacs had mostly just dropped their leaves, skipping the part where they might live up to names like “flameleaf.”

*A few red leaves on some sumac along the hillside*

After a while I walked over to the boulder trail and watched a couple of gulls wheeling and hovering above me. There was some wispy high clouds like a feathery splash of cream in the pale blue sky, while on the ground the shadows were lengthening as 4 o’clock approached.

There was some red in nearby sumacs and a few red leaves of some other plant species. The scarcity of colorful leaves made them that much more welcome. Part of my wish for autumn is the hope of seeing yellows, reds, and oranges as the retreating chlorophyll exposes whatever other colors were masked behind the green. Those colors are part of what confirms that autumn is here, and so I’m grateful for each turning leaf. The rest of the woodland, in somewhat desiccated shades of green, seemed stripped of their place within the season, a shadow of summer.

*A patch of sunlight backlit this sumac so that it glowed like fire*

The clouds drifted, and a few had a hook or curve before stretching out southward or westward, caught and pulled by the currents flowing across the sky. This would be a great afternoon for lying back and watching how clouds are pulled along or drift with the upper winds. Yesterday they seemed in a hurry, but now their movement played out in slow motion.

Merlin reported a blue jay and a hermit thrush, though I did not hear them. Overall it seemed quiet; the traffic seemed to be some distance off and the preserve itself was nearly silent. At 4:12pm it felt like sunset was approaching, and the breeze had come up a little.

In a few days, things will change. There are reports that it will rain, maybe quite a lot. After that, the high temperatures are supposed to remain in the 60s for a while, like we might expect in late November. I will keep walking regardless, because these places like Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, Tandy Hills Natural Area, the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge, are gifts that must not be neglected in any season.

I walked back to the trailhead and was gone at 4:30pm. But I won’t be gone for long.

*The top of a heart-sepal wild buckwheat*

Sister Moon

October 10, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

This morning I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve for about 45 minutes, underneath a blue sky with the almost-full moon still floating up there, reminding us that we’re just objects in space. And so I remember; we’re on a big, round, blue planet, ever so gradually circling Brother Sun. And we can watch Sister Moon and almost detect her falling and rising as she circles us, mirroring some of the sunlight back to us in the middle of the night so that we won’t forget the day. Or in this case continuing to reflect the sun, framed in morning sunlight, because sometimes it’s better to shine than to go dark.

To shine seems easy and natural for Sister Moon, at least the way we understand it in terms of science. Does she sometimes struggle to do so, like we do? Maybe get up in the morning and say to herself, “I just can’t do this today.” If she is a barren sphere of rock and dust, then I suppose not. But we don’t have to reduce everything to such understanding. Native American wisdom recognizes the moon as a source of wisdom and guidance, and in the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address she is the oldest grandmother, governing tides, watching over the arrival of children, and serving as a leader of women. In the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon of Saint Francis, the Earth and the heavens – all of nature – are precious gifts reflecting a wonderful Creator. And so in multiple wisdom traditions, the moon is more than what we can measure with instruments.

And she shines throughout the year. Even when our planet is so dark, when human hatred and fear threaten to extinguish every light, Sister Moon gives us light in the darkness. When masked, armed men kidnap the innocent and march zip-tied children into the cold, and when soldiers carry out genocide, she does what I often cannot do: continue to provide light, not be overwhelmed by the darkness.

I would like to be as constant as Sister Moon, but we are not made for such constancy. Being human means simultaneously holding on to the light, doing our best to shine, while also accepting how complicated and imperfect we are. There are times when climate catastrophe, cruelty, runaway greed – the various crises we are facing – temporarily rob us of light. Some days our faces do not reflect the light, even if we want to shine. The important thing is not to accept defeat, to let the light die. We still can imagine something better, we still recognize truth, and we still have within us compassion and empathy, even if some people have discarded it. Such things are our light, and we must let it illuminate us and all those around us.

A Sad Underwing

September 26, 2025October 5, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I visited Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve today, much as I have for the past ten years. I followed the trail to the sandstone ridge at the top of “Kennedale Mountain,” walked around the hill and down the boulder trail and back to the west. Despite one recent rain, it is dry at the preserve and many of the plants are drooping. On some sumacs, the leaves are giving up and becoming dark and shriveled. Some others are turning colors and autumn has barely begun. I suppose it reflects the stress of recent hot and dry conditions. Soon, the rest of the sumacs will turn bright red and orange, if they can hold out until the days get a little shorter and the temperature cooler.

As I walked, a medium-sized moth flew across the trail in front of me and landed on an oak’s trunk. I was able to get a photo of this slightly fuzzy delta of moth beauty, and then it flew away. Those wings near the head were frosted gray with vague scalloping black lines and then irregular bands of darker color, then a brown band and alternating colors like soft squiggles. Finally there were dark/light dots – one above each scallop of the wing’s edge, with a pattern like tiny feathers. There were a couple of warm reddish-brown spots at the edge of an arc of dark color, symmetrical on each wing. The subtle patterns and colors were beautiful.

The iNaturalist app identified this as a “Sad Underwing,” with the scientific name Catocala maestosa. The genus (Catocala) means essentially “beautiful below” and the species (maestosa) is a reference to “majestic.” The underwing moths have hindwings of a contrasting and often beautiful color, thus “beautiful below.” Those hindwings are covered by the forewings when the moth is resting, and that explains the “underwing” part of the name.

Many underwings have splashes of orange or pink color in those hind wings, which might startle a predator when the moth suddenly takes flight. But this species, the sad one, has hind wings that are very dark brown to nearly black. Some sources suggest that this is the reason for the “sad” in the name, either that the darkness reflects something sad or perhaps that being deprived of color is a reason for sadness. The moth had no comment about it.

From what I can see, the larva – this moth’s caterpillar – is even more camouflaged than the adult, mottled brown and gray to look like tree bark. Multiple sources say that the caterpillar feeds on three tree species: Water Hickory, Pecan, and Black Walnut. The moth is found from eastern Canada down through roughly the eastern half of the U.S., including Texas. NatureServe says that it is found in woodlands and river floodplains.

Walks through this and other parts of the Cross Timbers are often like this. Some small treasure crosses your path somewhere, a moth or bird or flower with a fascinating life story and a beauty that you discover by staying with it for a minute, looking closely, and wondering about it. I have probably walked by underwing moths before and missed all this. I’m very glad I noticed this one today.

A Summer Adventure Walk

August 8, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Lilly began visiting the preserve with me when she was still two years old. She was captivated by grasshoppers and loved climbing on the sandstone boulders there. I guided and protected her as she visited the ponds and watched bees flying from flower to flower. She called them “adventure walks,” and that’s an important part of what we do together, grandpa and granddaughter. We have gone adventuring in several semi-wild places nearby over the last couple of years.

Now she’s four and she grabs her backpack, picks out several essential snacks, gets her hat, and is ready for another adventure walk. Back to Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve where she still loves ponds and grasshoppers – and sand!

We hop out of the car around 8:15am, while it is still pleasant outside, and head for the north pond. Along the path, we find footprints in the dry mud, and I point out the miniature hand prints of a raccoon. Lilly is not too sure she likes having a raccoon nearby, but I tell her that the raccoon is sleeping. She said we have to “walk like this,” tiptoeing past the imagined sleeping raccoons.

As we arrive at the pond, she says she would be afraid of a bumblebee “because it could sting you,” and the dragonflies that swooped around us make her a little jumpy at first. I would love for her to be mostly fearless but careful when caution is needed, and so I invite her to watch for a dragonfly to land, greeting them joyfully.

Maybe we haven’t done this regularly enough to make ‘bugs’ seem familiar and fear unnecessary. Or maybe during a child’s development we have to keep revisiting potentially scary things, at each age, to push back against fear.

She wants to explore further, so we climb the hill toward the north prairie, stopping to rest – well, grandpa needed a little rest – under the oaks. For Lilly it’s time to break out some snacks.

I’m not sure how the I Spy game started. I had pointed out the thorny Greenbrier and asked her to listen to a bird. She looks at me and invitingly says, “I spy, with my little eye … something green!” I make a wild guess, pointing to some plant, and she laughs and shows me the right choice. Now it’s my turn, and then we keep taking turns. She picks up a piece of wood which becomes the pointer and also the baton, passed to show when it’s my (or her) turn.

“I spy, with my little eye … something wrinkled and tall,” I say. She immediately points to the same tree trunk I have in mind. It’s a fun game, and I think of how it encourages attending to what is around us in a mindful sort of way. Not a bad way start to a naturalist’s way of noticing our surroundings. But, importantly, it’s a game that Lilly initiated and is delighted to play.

When the game is over and we emerge from the woods into the bright sunshine of the north prairie, Lilly decides she’s really done, so we start walking back. Down the hillside, around the pond and past the sleeping raccoons, with her suggesting that she’s tired and I might have to carry her. She’s four, and every experience and state of mind or body is pretty intense.

And then we reach a part of the trail with some of that soft, beautiful sand from the constant weathering of the sandstone in this place. Sand can be a tactile wonderland if you don’t mind it sticking to your skin and getting in your hair and clothes. Lilly absolutely doesn’t mind!

And so she drops to her hands and knees and digs through the sand, scooping and raking and feeling the slight dampness beneath. She wants to lie in it – and so she does. On our adventure walks, experiencing nature can be immersive as long as it’s safe and won’t do any harm. And when is the idea of immersion any more powerful than when you’re very young? She experiments with touching her face to it, and comes away with a sandy nose. Next, her shoes come off. All thoughts of tiredness are gone!

The tiredness has disappeared to the point that, when we reach the car, she is ready for more. We stash the backpacks in the car and head for the south pond. Along the way, we pass some boulders and I remind her how she used to climb onto them and say she’s “on top of the world!” But the desire to stand on top of them seems to be pushed aside at the moment, and we walk down the sidewalk to the pond.

In the terraced seating area known as the “amphitheater” we find a grasshopper. Remembering some recent fun in the back yard in which she loved seeing and holding them, I catch this one and she is delighted with the little insect. She cups her hand and then covers it with the other, gently trapping the grasshopper inside.

Looking at the tan thorax, short antennae, and legs results in a couple of escapes but I am able to recapture the fugitive. I have to tell Lilly that we cannot take the little guy home.

“But I love him,” she protests. And then accepts that he needs to stay here, in his home. That our delight with him should not translate into harming him.

*The beloved grasshopper, a member of the family Acrididae (Short-horned Grasshoppers)*

We agreed that she could carry him some distance as we returned to the car. We see a couple of other grasshoppers, but she has hers and that is enough. And then it is time to release him and I ask her to pick a spot. She gives him a small toss toward some grasses, laughing as she sees him go.

I’m very grateful for these adventure walks, and I think she is, too.

Drenched In Humidity and Birdsong

May 25, 2025 / Michael Smith / Leave a comment

As I started on the trail this morning at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, I asked permission, so to speak. I said: “May I be here as one among many, neither greater nor less than. May I understand how I fit within this place and cause no harm.”

I expected no particular answer, but I did hear calls of Bewick’s Wren, Northern Cardinal, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Blue Jay, and Painted Bunting (identified by the Merlin app), and those calls felt welcoming. Low clouds covered most of the sky, and it was a little like being draped in a warm, wet blanket. Weather Underground said it was 81F and 76% humidity in the area.

On the trail I was submerged beneath the green canopies of oak trees and then emerged at a little open hillside where the spring rains are helping the Little Bluestem grasses look like they might take back the slope that has suffered erosion and drought.

At the pond, the roster of bird calls expanded to include White-eyed Vireo, Carolina Wren, and Carolina Chickadee. And while the Black Willows have taken over large sections of the bank, in one spot there was a beautiful patch of flowers. Chickory, Black-eyed Susan, and Bitterweed were scattered in different shades of yellow. And as I looked out over the water, a group of Blanchard’s Cricket Frogs set up a chorus of “grick-grick-grick” calls. Those calls are always surprisingly loud for a little frog that could easily sit on your thumb.

*An Eastern Pondhawk. Females of this species are bright green while males are blue*

I climbed uphill and away from the pond and walked upslope along the north prairie. Every part of this walk brought wonderful things into view, including Glen Rose Yuccas retaining some of their flowers, a few Indian Paintbrush among the grasses and Western Ragweed, Silverleaf Nightshade (a nettle with a beautiful name and lovely lavender flowers), and Texas Bull Nettle growing tall with their big leaves and white flowers.

And that brought me to the Old Man (Old Woman, if you like) of the preserve, a huge Post Oak that the Texas Tree Coalition designated as a Historic Texas Tree in 2019. It is called the “Caddo Oak,” in honor of the Caddo People who once lived here. After more than 200 years it continues to stand, with a huge trunk and massive branches stretching out like arms to embrace the sky.

This “Old Person” – oak trees have both male and female flowers so I shouldn’t assign them a gender – might give us a sense of a something ancient that presides over the place. There are a few other big oaks on the preserve, but probably none that were growing when Texas was part of Mexico, before independence or the battle at the Alamo. We are fortunate that it is still here, never in all those years cut down or burned.

From there I followed the trail as it turned south, taking me to where I could visit the yucca meadow, a big patch of deep, soft sand that supports Glen Rose Yucca, Lanceleaf Blanketflower, and other low plants. Some of the yuccas still had their flowers, though the cycle in which Yucca Moths pollinate the plant and lay eggs where the larvae will then eat some of the developing seeds (not too many) is probably winding down. That meadow is also home to the Comanche Harvester Ant, a species of what Texans call “big red ants” but this one requires deep sandy habitat with nearby oaks, and this limits where they may be found.

*The yucca meadow (I took this photo on May 8th)*

Continuing around the preserve, I found a tiny juvenile bush katydid with black-and-white banded antennae on the flower of a Lanceleaf Blanketflower, and then a Six-spotted Flower Longhorn Beetle crawling over a Black-eyed Susan flower. On a walk like this, the insects provide so many fascinating forms and colors.

I arrived within the woodland at the crown of the hill, and the clouds had broken up so that there was bright sunshine and lower humidity. At 11:20am I lay on my back and watched the low fragments of cloud drifting swiftly to the north. At the ground there was a good breeze. A Tiger Swallowtail fluttered through the area, perhaps visiting the Standing Cypress that are scattered wherever there is a small opening in the oak woods.

And the Standing Cypress is having such an amazing year at the preserve. You first see them in winter, growing as a delicate rosette of thin, fern-like leaves. But in spring the plant sends up a tall stem that can grow up to six feet, with a flower spike at the top that produces clusters of red, tubular flowers.

It was over two hours of delight, despite that warm blanket of humidity. After the first hour I was pretty well adapted anyway, or else all the wonderful stuff outweighed any discomfort. We are all lucky to be able to go and be part of this wild piece of Arlington.

Yuccas and Moths Need Each Other

May 12, 2025 / Michael Smith / 1 Comment

Saturday the 10th, a group of us took a walk at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve to find moths at sunset. They are very special moths that pollinate and in turn are fed by the Glen Rose Yuccas that live there. It’s a great example of biological mutualism, and it’s the subject of my most recent “Letter to Nature Folks.”

I hope you’ll visit the page with “letters” to you and download that May issue of Letters to Nature Folks – the one marked as “Yuccas and Yucca Moths.” And if it sounds like a good walk (it was a very good walk), thank John and Grace Darling for leading it and telling us the story of how the yuccas and moths completely depend on each other. And thank the Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve for offering this and other great activities. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of that Friends group, but I’m not the one to thank for the walk.)

A Small Restoration

March 1, 2025 / 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*

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.

Lilly’s Adventure Walks

January 18, 2025January 18, 2025 / Michael Smith / 1 Comment

This post is also at “Rain Lilies,” a Substack that I started when I considered leaving the WordPress platform. While it was sitting unused but not deleted, my friend Dresden Graff (read what he writes at “Human and Learning” over there) recommended me to his readers. And that spurred me to write about Lilly’s and my walks in nature. I’m getting my thoughts together to possibly write a new book, this one for families of kids. I would talk about introducing kids to nature, supporting their nature interests, and I would draw on my psychology career to include some things about child development and how the human lives part of our lives in nature works. I may try out some ideas over at Rain Lilies, in case you’d like to have a look.

Tomorrow (January 17), I plan to take Lilly to the woods and the marsh. We took a walk there a couple of weeks ago, and she’d like to return and maybe see birds. On our last walk, we heard crows, and one of them flew in and loudly announced his presence from a nearby tree. What a wonderful, big black bird, like a druid of the woods with secret knowledge of who lives among the trees, some to welcome and others to chase away. Did he welcome Lilly and me? I don’t know, but I think Lilly welcomed him.

Lilly and I have been taking adventure walks since she was two, and now she is four. She loves climbing on boulders and looking at creatures we find. A little before her third birthday, she discovered a small, harmless DeKay’s brownsnake on the trail. She had nothing but gentle curiosity with this little animal, and with my guidance she was able to touch it and wish it good-bye as it disappeared into the leaves and grasses.

*Lilly’s first snake – a DeKay’s brownsnake at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge*

In that encounter, she embodied a significant issue for two-year-olds, as expressed by the famous psychoanalyst Erik Erikson as “holding on and letting go.” As they experiment with their increasing sense of what it is to have power, they may make demands, enjoy saying “no,” and become overwhelmed with the resulting emotion and have tantrums. Toddlers have to work out, with us big people, how to manage the impulse to be in charge of everything, to have and express choices while living within limits. A loving adult caregiver can be firm, yet reassuring, and help the child navigate the stage that Erikson called “autonomy vs. shame and doubt.”

Lilly seemed to get through that stage amazingly well, with a healthy wish to be independent along with an ability, most of the time, to negotiate shared control. She has what psychiatrists Chess and Thomas would describe as an easy temperament, meaning that she is pretty adaptable to changes and new situations, her mood is generally positive, she is active but not so much that it interferes with everyday situations, and so on. Child development researchers tell us that temperament styles are largely a part of who the child is (they are not taught by parents), though they can shift some with experience and parents can bring their own flexibility into play and work around some difficult temperament.

In one of our visits to Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve when she was still two, we looked at flowers of the tie vine (a kind of morning glory) where honeybees, bumblebees, and other bees were visiting. She was fearless but did not impulsively try to grab one (thankfully). We talked about just watching and not touching, and we had a good time. Her dad – my son Geoffrey – understands that the loving and careful grandpa is in charge of his own wild nature nerd impulses, and I’ve never brought her back with bee stings or other boo-boos. However, I encouraged and was proud of her fearlessness as we sat there.

*Watching bees at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve*

As a three-year-old, we’ve been to a number of parks and preserves, and sometimes she would walk along the top of a series of small boulders, enjoying her physical ability and coordination (and being up there as tall as papa). She has spent plenty of time sitting in the trail drawing in the dirt with fingers or sticks. As the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget would tell us, the typical child at age 3 can think about things that are not present and talk about them or make drawings of them. Sometimes she may have been drawing herself, but there were also times that it might have been the turtles we saw earlier or a bird she wished to see. Drawing in the dirt is an imprecise thing, and I often could not tell.

*Using a stick to draw, Oliver Nature Park*

For Lilly, an adventure walk is a learning walk, but hopefully not because I’m turning it into “school.” I try to check myself if I start saying “…and that tree over there is an oak.” Better to follow her lead, and then I will throw in the name of something or ask a question we can both wonder about. If she almost steps into a cactus, I’ll help her stop and say a couple of things about it being “pokey” but also some animals do eat them. If she asks a question, I’ll try to answer it, but if she is ready to move on, I’ll go with that. (I did start a game at one point by saying, “Let’s see how many cacti we can see,” and she walked along noticing each one: “Cactus!”)

An adventure walk is also a way for us to learn about each other and share with each other. We get better at understanding each other’s likes, abilities, and attention spans. And we experience the delight of a pond, and ants following a path across the trail, or a crow fussing at us from a tree. We open each other’s eyes to wonderful things that we might have missed.

Being a guide for a child’s becoming acquainted with nature is a privilege to be honored and taken seriously. I’m enormously grateful. And I’m ready to see that crow tomorrow!

This is a short follow-up to yesterday’s post about Lilly’s and my adventure walks. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we went to Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge today (January 17), so here’s what happened.

We arrived just after 2:00pm, when the clouds retreated and the sun warmed the afternoon. She had wanted to see birds, and we did see vultures as well as some sparrows (sorry, no specific ID) in the dead stalks and branches along the boardwalk. We wanted to get a photo of one of those turkey vultures, and I’m including one that Lilly took, with help with zoom and focus.

*Lilly’s photo of a couple of turkey vultures*

From a cloudy and cool morning, it was becoming a really wonderful day with beautiful clouds.

We walked the trail eastward, and after a short walkway across a low area the trail climbs up a little, overlooking the marsh. Lilly had decided that we were pirates, and that I was to tell her “aye, aye, cap’n,” which of course I did. She runs a very egalitarian ship, trading off periodically and making me the captain.

At a high spot along the shore there is a bench, and we stopped and had a drink. She dug for buried treasure in the gravel, and came up with some caps from acorns. We drank candy from these acorn cups, as pirates always do, and she even spoke in a harsh pirate voice.

And so it was a great walk on a very nice day, and she noticed turkey vultures as well as greenbrier (she really doesn’t want to get scratched, so she kept calling out “greenbrier” when she would see one). A nice combination of natural history and pretend play!

Our Lives In Nature

How nature supports, informs, and inspires our lives

Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve