Several weeks in to the course, this is my first entry in my nature journal assignment. That’s not laziness--that is, it’s not just laziness. I have been thinking, in the back of my mind, that I will begin my nature journalling once spring arrives. Once it gets warmer. Once nature comes out and provides me with material to write about. Right now there’s just snow and cold. I find little spiritual in that.
It’s a fallacy, believing nature only exists in the warmer months. And a tragedy, maybe, that I don’t even look for beauty, or for any moment of connection with the earth, in the cold and snow. I know from experience that if I look, I will find something. Some years ago I took an environmental studies course in college where we had a similar assignment, to keep a nature journal. One day I trudged across the soccer fields to the woods that border the Eel River--or, to use its Indian name, the Kenapocomoco--at the eastern of Manchester College’s property. The ground was covered by as much as a foot of snow, crispy at the top and, before me, not yet disturbed by human footsteps. I observed the crisscrossing tracks of several animals--rabbit, deer, and what looked to be a rather large dog.
The next day I asked my professor if maybe those were coyote prints, given their size and the fact that they were located away from most human paths. He told me they probably were, that it was their mating season, and that if I went into the woods at night and played a recording of a wounded rabbit I might even see one.
I know (now) that no human has been killed by a coyote in thirty years, and that Indiana is hardly home to dangerous predators, but I still wasn’t raised to consider going into the woods at night and sounding like a wounded animal smart, so instead of doing it I repeatedly re-told this story.
It’s a fallacy, believing nature only exists in the warmer months. And a tragedy, maybe, that I don’t even look for beauty, or for any moment of connection with the earth, in the cold and snow. I know from experience that if I look, I will find something. Some years ago I took an environmental studies course in college where we had a similar assignment, to keep a nature journal. One day I trudged across the soccer fields to the woods that border the Eel River--or, to use its Indian name, the Kenapocomoco--at the eastern of Manchester College’s property. The ground was covered by as much as a foot of snow, crispy at the top and, before me, not yet disturbed by human footsteps. I observed the crisscrossing tracks of several animals--rabbit, deer, and what looked to be a rather large dog.
The next day I asked my professor if maybe those were coyote prints, given their size and the fact that they were located away from most human paths. He told me they probably were, that it was their mating season, and that if I went into the woods at night and played a recording of a wounded rabbit I might even see one.
I know (now) that no human has been killed by a coyote in thirty years, and that Indiana is hardly home to dangerous predators, but I still wasn’t raised to consider going into the woods at night and sounding like a wounded animal smart, so instead of doing it I repeatedly re-told this story.
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