Another Encounter with Nature -- Part 2

       It was actually several months ago, but I would like to remember the fact that I had an encounter with deer in a suburban setting, on the outskirts of a town part, similar to the above photograph.
     I was actually driving along, in a part of town that skirts around "Wildwood" Park, when I noticed something starting to move, off to the side of the road. It was actually an adult deer and three smaller deer, at least two of them with the visible white spots of a fawn. Mother and children were getting ready to cross the road, and it was still daylight out, though later in the afternoon. I've spoken to a local person about this, Becky at "Curves,"and she pointed out her daughter recently moved to a more remote town, Snowville, and she's actually had a black bear right in her yard!
     Are we encroaching more and more on wild animal habitat (or could it be the other way around)? Running between natural wilderness corridors, I suppose that makes it more possible to see deer in town. I hear in some places they vote to get rid of deer by extending the hunting season, because they think they are becoming pests in their gardens. I don't have a woods around me (so no big animals in the garden), but my neighbor has complained of rabbits in hers. I did see deer one night as I was driving home from work, and they looked like they were headed to the cemetery. What, to visit a friend? There are big trees at the nearest cemetery, too high I think for them to reach the branches, but maybe they were going to eat some grass and shrubs instead. Deer seem to be amazingly fearless, until you start moving toward them. They are the gentle creatures of the woods and we should appreciate their presence, because they are a reminder we still have nature quite close to our door, if we would but let it in.

Some Glimpses of Nature Part 1

     It-- he or she, traveling so fast I couldn't tell which -- stared straight at me as I cracked open the front door of the house to let the cat in. Sammie -- our cat, named after Samantha Brady of "Days of Our Lives" TV fame -- didn't seem to notice that barely above the hedges partly in front of the walkway in front of the house and slightly above my eye level was (gosh)  a hummingbird (we're talking back in July, not now in January). It was a female, a ruby throated hummingbird (many birds being dimorphic) looking at me. She was in her helicopterlike position, as though she were waiting for me to throw her some bread crumbs. Close to my front door is also a tall, gangly rose bush. Maybe she had tried for some nectar from those red flowers before it decided to just hover by my front door? I couldn't tell. But in 15 seconds she suddenly "zipped" away. Too bad we didn't have a feeder out front.
     Our neighbors had a tree of Sharon and a sugar water hummingbird feeder out front, but I believe they were in the process of cutting it down. After that I didn't see any more hummingbirds. They are very fast wing flappers and one wonders how they keep their energy up, especially in winter, when most of them do travel south to warmer climes. As long as we have "sugar" feeders and deep, nectar filled birds the hummingbirds will survive, though I'm also told, like other birds, they will wolf down tiny insects too. The early bird literally "does" catch the worm, and eat it too!

Wonderful trees and nature on Radford University campus

                               

                               Tulip Tree

    It was extremely sunny and bright, the light blue sky almost cloudless. I told my college class, in order to have a "Zen" in the moment experience, that they needed to turn off their cell phones and just experience things then and there. And I think most of them did.
    We first parked ourselves in the Alumni garden. This is a good place to sit and relax, I tell them. I point out the "purple leaf" plum tree, which has tiny little fruits, the tiny, peeling, paper bark maple, and that there are many sayings on the wall that enclose this garden, such as Keats' "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" quote. We sit among some meadow sage with its smelly, almost minty scent. I pull off a piece and pass it around for them to smell. The red and white begonias (the school colors) surround an old, black bell in front of us.
    But the class (as it turned out for those who wrote about this) was more entranced by the koi and goldfish pond across the way, where the fish casually swim about and there are benches nearby they can sit on and watch them on. A kind of murky little waterfall goes into this pond, and they tell me they'd never been here before.
    At one point I take these heavy guidebooks out of the backpack I've got on (I'm usually carrying my papers in a laptop sized briefcase) and hand them out. I point out a tree with round, heart shaped leaves and ask them, based on the guidebook, what tree it is. "I'll give you a hint -- it has pink flowers?"
    "Redbud?" Michael asks.
    "Right!" Mostly, though, they didn't know ANY of the trees on campus, not the unusual Bald Cypress (a swamp tree in the middle of campus), not the Dawn/Don redwood (with the reddish bark), not the hemlock or tulip tree.
    With different groups you get different reactions to taking this kind of walk. I think "both" groups I took seemed to hang back behind me, like 15, 20 feet (!) like I bite or something. I'm sure they thought me an odd duck with all my "nature" stuff, and some of them STILL had their cell phones, on, the addicts!

Pandapas Pond, Meditate weeding

                                              Pandapas Pond, Virginia (woods around it)

    So a few weeks ago I did a little volunteering at "Pandapas Pond". It is called "Pandapas" as it is named after James Pandapas, local industrialist with some money who used it for his own private hunting grounds. Now it is part of the Jefferson National Forest (which I hope they don't ruin with anything like fracking), and has many Poverty Creek Trail system trails off of it.
     With the other Master naturalists in my group, we did some weeding in a "rain garden" area off of the butterfly garden that fellow member Barb Walker had started, a nice addition to something you can find along the trail, not too far from the pond and surrounding woods themselves. Butterflies are a unique addition to any habitat. For a delicate insect they can last a while (those born in October will fly all the way to Mexico and then overwinter there, come back in the spring and then mate, lay eggs and die). I learned a few things about them recently at the Virginia Tech Paula Hahn Horticulture Center.
    Some say weeding is a meditative process, a way of being one with the soil. You concentrate on this one action and things slip away; you forget about current entanglements and worries. And if your legs, as you get older, are getting weak, instead of bending over everything the whole time, you can get yourself a little stool to sit on (found this short, green plastic job in the garden dept. at Wal-Mart). That's what I did part of the time. Yes, the butterfly garden area is really coming along, and besides butterfly bush there are some unusual shrubs, like senna and a bit of ironwood too, I believe.

   

Garden did well

   Well, the square foot garden AND the traditional garden have produced a lot so far. Still have a lot of green tomatoes in the "gardens" and 3 big zucchini we will be using in sauces, salad and zucchini bread.
    The square foot garden was quite an expense and now the cucumber plants are drying up (we are getting less rain). The spouse thinks they are just spent, but I disagree. We should have added more compost to the sq. foot plot and watered it a bit more. And on the side of house are 3 sunflowers just beginning to head. I am looking forward to seeing them turn into real flowers. My "turtlehead" flower is attractive, yet small. I wish I had a big butterfly bush to attract hummingbirds with. Ah well.

More on Fairy Stone State Park, State Parks in General

    

    Thoreau said you can never have enough of nature. This is true if you have a very busy life, and even if you have a "not too busy" life, like those of us on break during the summer from school with not a lot of money in our pockets. Which makes visiting a state park a great value.
    Did you know there was a conference in the 1920s about making state parks a widespread ideal in the U. S.? In the 1930s I know six parks were developed, using CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) help in order to promote visiting nature in the state of Virginia. In the thirties the Smokies, a national park in Tennessee, was also built and promoted. President Roosevelt did his best to give people work (Obama "wants" to do this but the entrenched and negative Republican party now is not allowing it). But state parks serve an important function.
    State parks provide a place not too far from home where you can take your family to visit for part of a day or even a weekend, to imbibe in the fruits of the natural environment. When we went to Fairy Stone State Park we weren't totally certain what we would see. But a mother deer tried to make her pretty fawn twins invisible by setting them in high grass in an open area across from a picnic shelter we drove by on the way to our campground. And a squirrel tried to "sneak" around our tent as my spouse had tossed some empty pistachio nut shells in the leave litter near our campsite. Fairy Stone is interesting; in part one side of the camping area there is about a 20 foot drop down from the sites, then it "really" drops down! You don't see those with little kids camping on that side, but we did. And Mr. Squirrel came as close as the other side of the cooking pit with its grill turned up, putting his nose up for a sniff. But there was no food there so he finally decided to run away into the woods.
    We saw other bits of nature -- there was many yellow and black tiger swallowtails flitting about, and some gathered on some gravel near a shelter, as though they were sucking up some nutrients from it. At the beach we saw kids have a fun time on these huge, fiberglass (?) animals, beaver, frogs and logs, that little kids could ride on in shallow water. A park ranger said another park, Claytor Lake, had rejected these big toys so Fairy Stone said they would take them. So, they were 
"pretend" nature, but a place where they could splash around and watch birds fly overhead and soak up some sun for some needed vitamin D.
    State parks are much cheaper than motel and hotel rooms (unless you reserve an air conditioned cabin, which partly defeats the purpose of camping-- what, you don't want sand in your shoes, or water dripping into a corner of your tent from a continuous rain at night? Where is your sense of adventure). They provide a break from the daily routine, a chance to interact with nature, get away from technology (unless you are in an RV with an antenna-- so why bother to come to a campground), go at a slower pace. State parks are a real value. And our tax dollars should support them more. So go out and enjoy one near you.

The wonders of nature at Fairy Stone State Park

    Ah yes, the wonders of nature if you allow yourself time to enjoy them. I allowed myself that time when we stayed three nights at Fairy Stone State Park. So named for a creek bed nearby that legend says has cross shaped stones created by fairies (well, it's just a legend), the park also has a lot of other interesting things.
    If you sit at your campsite at night you'll hear a loud chorus of three year cicadas with their loud and then soft whirring buzz, and cricketlike like chirps, and am told the noises at night can be katydids too (or didn't they). At your site you can observe the robin or phoebe running along, or the squirrel sneaking up to your site if you happened to leave out some pistachio shells nearby. They say don't feed the animals, yet you feel compelled to leave something behind, while at the same time you take a souvenir or two (like American beech leaves and fairy stones from a nearby creek bed).
    As you sit in a circle and roast a "s'mores" (after one I don't think they want you to have more) the park ranger points out the park is where an old mining town used to be, but was flooded to create the man made lake. I'm sure the deer and tiger swallowtail butterflies, the people and birds all appreciate the effort to have a place away from the hustle and bustle of  civilization, if just for a while.