Hiking for paw paws

I had no idea what a wild paw paw was before today, but it was a hike to look for exactly those crazy fruits that was led by our county parks naturalists this morning. The weather was fabulous, the colors were just starting to come out, so we decided to drive the half hour south to join in the looking.

We'd never been to this particular wildlife preserve before today. Being a preserve, as opposed to a park, it is very wonderfully wild, and there was something very Jungle-Book-esque fabulous about hiking through undergrowth and mud and shaking trees while protecting your head in case of dropping paw paws. We actually didn't find any on the trees. Our guide said it was likely someone had already come through and harvested them, seeing as that it's public land, but we weren't entirely disappointed because, after shaking tree after tree, we were still rewarded with a taste of a nearby farmer's paw paws, and some Zingerman's Creamery Paw Paw Gelato brought by our wonderful guide.

Plus it's hard to be disappointed by a hike that, although not productive as far as fruit goes, produced much in the way of wildlife. We saw lots of animal houses—crayfish, woodchuck, snake, raccoon?—plus several wood frogs, a flicker, two praying mantises, a snail, and skippers, butterflies, bees, yadda yadda. We tried wild berries and roots, and identified a variety of native plants and trees, some of which had been stumping me for a while.

These programs are mainly designed for adults: a few miles, lots of climbing in and out of scrubby and wet areas, lots of quiet listening, looking, appreciating, and discussing. The children's programs are shorter and less physically demanding, plus they usually come with stickers and coloring pages, but Calvin enjoys both equally as well. We've been taking him on the adult hikes for about two years now, carrying him when he was still too small, but making sure that he was part of the event. To us nature is interesting for itself, not for the coloring pages, and we've wanted to share that wonder and awe with our son from day one and have included him accordingly. I will never get tired of the looks we get from some adult hikers when we show up for these events with our pint-sized hiker, and then their utter amazement when they realize that not only is he up to the challenge, he usually knows almost as much as they do about the natural world around him.

In his words:

Nature Thursdays—hiking Dolph Park

The county parks Nature Thursdays program is over, but we did nature today, and it's Thursday, so...

Beautiful weather called us outside. We did the usual first, like vacuuming, laundry, straightening, some math, lots of reading, and a little piano, but the afternoon was meant to be spent outside, and that's where we went.

There are several parks in the area that we intended to explore this summer, but heat and other activities got in our way, so we are exploring them this fall instead. We stuck relatively close to home today, stopping by after running errands and only an hour or so before time to get dinner going, and spent an hour exploring trails right in the city. The last time I hiked this location was when Calvin was only a year or so old; he was riding in the backpack, and we found a fawn hidden by his mother in the dappled sunlight under the trees. Magical. Today we saw swans, dragonflies, and plenty of mosquitoes that made me glad for the long clothing and bug spray. Calvin's nature eyes are getting more practiced and he found two snakes and several patches of fungus all by himself. Our only disappointment was a lack of frogs, but two snakes just about make up for it.

The pet on our porch

When Jon and I let the dogs out before bedtime last night (that being our bedtime, hours after Calvin's), we found a new inhabitant on our front porch. It was cold last night, and I think most people would have gotten a laugh out of the two of us standing on the front porch in our pajamas, moving this way and that in order to see the mantis move his head to follow us. Hopefully at one o-clock in the morning most of our neighbors were in bed.

This morning the same guy was in the same place. Strange, because mantids are supposed to be masters of disguise, and this one was certainly not hard to spot. He spent most of the day with us, too, disappearing for an hour in the afternoon and returning before dinner (our dinner, that is). I haven't checked on him since but my guess is that he won't stay. There's only so much door opening and staring that one bug can take, after all.

What was cool about him being there morning, noon and night (aside from Calvin getting to see him since we obviously didn't wake him in those chilly wee hours) was getting to see the change in his eyes. Woah! That's a night and day difference! We did a little digging and found very little information, but we did learn that some insects with low light adaptations have a light-absorbing, protective pigment covering for their eyes that they engage in bright light situations. If that's the case, then the pigment takes time to engage, because he didn't respond to the porch light at all in the ten minutes we spent antagonizing him, but during the day he clearly changed something! We also learned that he is mostly a diurnal hunter and was likely just spending the night at our hotel. I wonder if he made reservations for tonight, too.

Zoo picture day

Cormorants in the pond

Peeking duck

Fishing Great Blue Heron (just watch him get that fish!)

The duck family outing (but how will they reach the ticket window???)

Chimpanzees

Psssst... (cinereous vultures or lovebirds?)

Riding the train, engineer style

Check out those two new crazy engineers...

And this is why we came...to take Jon through Dinosauria

T. rex photo bomb

Oh hi

There's really a lot I could say today, and probably should, but we had a wonderful and busy day and now my book is calling me. I will say that I'm already pleased with the fundamental changes we are making—I think we all are—and the results are already notable. If I wasn't so tired, after hours spent un-shelving, sorting, and re-shelving books, I think I would turn my face toward the future and feel elated. Instead I'm going to sink into my reading chair and dive into my current eye-candy book, The Golden Compass.