Winter will be here soon, offering, hopefully, a blanket of snow and ice to all the puddles. In the meantime we head north, up into Canada where the temperature is below zero. OK, that’s in Celsius, but it sure feels good to be in winter where at least there is a small layer of snow and ice. We are in Toronto visiting family, and our visit takes us into some of Toronto’s parks.

Apparently there is a wonderful custom here in Toronto’s parks where visitors come equipped with a bag of birdseed and/or nuts, strategically leaving these offerings along the trails and throughout the park. As a result, birds and squirrels are everywhere, and upon close examination, I believe you may even see them smiling. When I return home, I think I will arm my day pack with a ziplock baggie with an assortment of seed and nuts to offer along the next trail.

In the meantime, as we walk the trails and watch the birds and squirrels, large frozen puddles of ice clearly and quietly call to the children - ages 4 to 16. The landscape is riddled with these and the kids run between all of them, sliding and dancing across each in joy.

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Seems I’ve been all work and no play of late. Sometimes those lines are blurred a bit for me. Yesterday was the Holiday Open House at the Buttinger Nature Center of the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association. Though I was “working” yesterday, it included a morning bird walk and, during the Open House, a family nature walk. It always brings me joy to share nature with people, particularly children.

 Even at my busiest, I always have a chance to share nature with my youngest at bedtime. Bedtime stories are the perfect wind down to the day, a way to bond with your child and weave a little dreamwork as well. Tonight is no different.

One of our favorite books of late has almost no real text. Zoo-ology by Joelle Jolivet is an oversized book full of colorful paintings of animals strange and familiar. Each animal is named and arranged in the book by simple themes that tell you something basic about them: Hot, Cold, Feathered, Horned, Freshwater, In the Trees, In the Seas, Underground, On the Seabed, At Night, Black and White, Spots and Strips, Large and Small, and Close to Us All. As a naturalist, I know at least a little about most of these animals here

and it took quite a while before I realized that the last pages of the book, Secrets of the Animals, shares something about each.

 We proceed through the book admiring each fascinating creature. Emerson directs the process, asking questions, or telling me what he thinks about each of them. Sometimes he gets a little wound-up in the process, not what I was looking for at bedtime.  “Guess which one is my favorite” he asks excitedly. He then proceeds to point to one creature after another, naming them as he goes along, until, I think, the lure of the next page becomes too much and he stops so I will turn the page. “Do you know what one I would really like to see, Daddy?” “Yes” I say to myself, “All of them.”

I went to a dinosaur museum today without any kids! Well, that’s not completely true. I took our environmental education staff from the Buttinger Nature Center. Yes, we are all adults, but the kid in each of us still thrives!

So off we went to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia - America’s oldest science research institution and museum.  This museum is an easy drive from central New Jersey and offers a nice assortment of natural history for the young and old. It is not far from the Franklin Institute and the IMAX theater.

Our first stop in the museum was Dinosaur Hall. I quickly flashed-back to my childhood and my visit to see dinosaurs at the New York World’s Fair. I realized that my youngest, Emerson, would LOVE this hall. He is at that dinosaur age - he often plays with a huge assortment of toy dinosaurs and his bedtime stories frequently include one of his many dinosaur books. I watched the older school children marvel at the assortment of skeletons on display, eyes wide with awe. Read the rest of this entry »

For many years now, I have referred to the Friday after Thanksgiving as Green Friday, not as Black Friday. Rather than head out on a buying spree to get the best bargains of the Holiday shopping season, it seems more fitting to go OUTDOORS to celebrate our connection to the wild.

Thanksgiving is a time to remember where we come from, to celebrate and embrace the deep connections we have with family and friends. With gratitude we acknowledge the most basic of human needs - family, friends, food, and health. It is a time, also, to honor with gratitude our relationship with the natural world.  

 Before I started hosting a Thanksgiving dinner, I always spent a part of the day reveling in the natural world. I remember long walks to the Stony Brook on the Watershed Reserve before we would hustle out to take part in two family Thanksgiving celebrations. Max would enjoy shuffling through the leaves, looking for birds and watching the deer. There is intense beauty in the stillness of an autumn day.

Now that we spend much of Thanksgiving in preparation for celebration, we honor our relationship with nature on Green Friday. Today was no different. Due to a timely phone call from our friend Kevin, he joined the whole family - teenagers included - for an afternoon hike. Our walk included adventure - stream crossing and tree climbing, meandering trails, hawks, great blue herons, and white-tailed deer. We enjoyed the crunch of crisp autumn leaves and the beautiful cacophony of a huge flock of geese. We discovered deer tracks, fox scat, and lightning struck trees. Emerson moved down the trail with pure excitement, setting the tone for the rest of us. We all felt like we were a part of nature, not apart from nature. We were reminded again that we are of this earth. For this we are grateful. �

I realize that I have so much more to write about television.  Like most people, I watched a lot of television as a child. I have fond memories of a wide variety of entertainment from my childhood, of characters such as Captain Kangaroo, Gilligan, the Brady family, Johnny Quest, even James West. The family often rallied around the television for educational fare such as Jacques Cousteau, National Geographic specials, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. They seem like such simple times - there weren’t that many choices on the television at any given moment.

Many of the shows I watched were mindless, maybe harmless entertainment and that was the attraction. It is also the danger. While I was sitting inside being “fed”, other options were being neglected - stomping in puddles, climbing another tree, finding nesting birds, catching insects, building forts, plotting invasions. Those options, which are a normal and important part of growth and development, challenged my mother in numerous ways. She often didn’t know where I was, she couldn’t keep up with the laundry from my adventures, and she never had enough Bandaids. Time in front of the television seemed safe to her.

Today it seems there are endless choices for viewing on the television. I cannot even begin to fathom this. Check out Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information. In this informative and entertaining book he examines the endless array of “information” offered 24/7 on television in direct contrast with the “information” provided by “another real world”, the world of nature. It is very sobering to contemplate the tradeoffs we are making when viewing television.

This is why we do not have “television” in our house. Yes, we have the appliance - we just watched the IMAX film on the Nile River last night - but we are not wired into the television world. We missed the Olympics. I missed the presidential election returns. The Phillies won the World Series!! But we are truly richer for it. We studied, outdoors,  singing insects. We captured snakes. We conversed with screech owls. I continue to perfect my stone skipping.

One last thought for you. Here’s a book to share with your child, particularly if they are “hooked” on television. Read Fred’s TV by Clive Dobson. It is a telling tale of television’s addictive grip with a clever twist. Check out Fred’s Birdovision.

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I will confess right now that I could wax eloquently, or otherwise, for some great length of time about television but I won’t do that here. At least not now. I won’t write about television as a time-robber, a tranquilizer or a pacifier. Our family has been without a television, at least in the traditional sense (we do watch rented movies), since our inception.   So for now, I will write about one of the many entertaining and educational alternatives - bird-o-vision!

Bird-o-vision? That’s right, set up a bird feeding station near your house and you will discover the magic and universal appeal of birds. We have several feeders at home and many at our nature center, the Buttinger Nature Center of the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association in Hopewell Township. Birds flock to the free food and make themselves subject to all kinds of observational research opportunities. What markings help distinguish one type of bird from another? What birds eat which type of food? What birds are most common at your feeder? When are the feeders most active? How do the birds behave?

At home we have a window feeder offering mixed seed, a thistle feeder for the finches and a suet feeder, the favorite of the neighborhood woodpeckers. We host a wide variety of birds - juncos feeding beneath our feeders; finches in flocks visiting the window or thistle feeders; and chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers and even a brown creeper feeding on our suet. Emerson loves the nuthatch, a bird who sounds like he’s laughing as he scoots upside-down the trunk of the tree to the suet feeder. Read the rest of this entry »