diving ducks… called 'blue bills' by hunters,
greater scaup by ornthologists
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puddle ducks, blue-winged teal
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--> Once again it is the time of year for that age-old question… How do I keep squirrels out of my bird feeder? I have found that squirrels eating bird-seed have a much better flavor than those found eating acorns.
Here
are some nature questions you might find interesting. First, are there any
mammals that reproduce by laying eggs?
What color is a giraffes tongue, blue, pink, black, red or green? How do male giraffes fight, with their
horns, their feet, their necks or their teeth? True or false… some frogs in Africa swallow their eggs and
their young climb out through the adults mouth. There are more than 300 species
of humming birds somewhere… Where? Answers at the end of this column.
I
learned the answers to these questions by watching television. I hate to admit that. That skinny
little box is no doubt the devil’s most favored instrument, a place where you
can see as many advertisements per hour as robins on a spring day. It is
designed to ruin the minds and lives of millions of young people.
But
when I get in from a tiresome day in the woods in the winter, I set back in my
recliner and turn it on and usually go to sleep. I notice that Marie Osmond spends more time grinning and
talking about her stubborn belly fat than Matt Dillon does recovering from
gunshot wounds. Boy am I sick of
that woman!
The
companies which provide television channels do not have to tell you the truth,
or live up to anything they tell you. I called one and told them I do not watch television much, I
just need the old westerns, the nature channels, the Cardinal baseball games
and occasionally a news channel.
No problem, they said, “we’ll fix that all up for 40 bucks.”
So
I agreed and then I couldn’t get the Cardinal baseball games at all, but I had
about 80 channels I wouldn’t watch except at the point of a gun. To date, after
several months, nothing works right, and the first bill was a hundred and two
dollars. I called several times
trying to get someone to fix a problem, and each time I got someone with a
foreign accent I couldn’t understand.
So
I asked to get it all unhooked and finally an English speaking employee decide
to talk to me. She apologized and got the Cardinal baseball channel added. But
she couldn’t remove the trashy stuff channels I had no interest in. She told me that even though I only
watch and ask for a dozen channels, I have to get all the others, and after one
year the price will go up. I told
her to pass on to the main people at her company that when that happens, they
can come and get the whole mess, because I won’t be paying them anymore.
I
won’t miss the stuff most people watch television for, the slanted, biased and
useless news mixed in with the advertisements which take up hours of viewing
time. But I will miss the nature
channels. With the Animal Planet
channel, National Geographic, Discovery, the Travel Channel and British Broadcasting,
I have often been fascinated and made aware of a natural world in the ocean, in
the Arctic, in New Zealand and Australia and Africa.
When
those programs about history or geography or nature come on, I don’t drift off
to sleep. I don’t have words to describe my amazement. The wonder of it, the
beauty and peace found in those wild places where those cameramen I envy so
much get to go, taking me to a world I could never have seen otherwise.
Take my advice and spend some time with those channels. It
is mesmerizing, photography that is mind-boggling. It makes me think often of that first line or two of the
song.. How Great Thou Art. Indeed
what a great Creator God is.
If
you are a hiker, this is the time of year to get out and see what the
trail-followers do not see. Strike
out across the forests of south Missouri and north Arkansas where others do not
go. Go alone and stay off those
beaten trails. Take the bare
necessities for a long day and see what others have not, from high promontories
or along rocky creek bottoms, finding and exploring a cave here and there, finding
a gushing spring, a rushing waterfall, trees that are two centuries old because
they grow where the loggers cannot get them.
Just
last week a lady wrote me a letter, talking about being a member of a group
of “Master Naturalists” in a
Missouri city not far from this wooded ridge I live on. It made me think of a man at a sports
show years ago who proudly announced himself as such in a boastful way.
I
pushed one of my magazines before him and asked him if he knew what species of
duck that was on the cover, and what it did that other puddle ducks did not. He just looked at it with a bewildered
look… had no idea what it was, knew nothing about it. The cover showed a baldpate, or widgeon, a puddle duck that
likes to hang around diving ducks and steal food. Divers go way down deep to
bring up vegetative matter that the widgeon can’t get to.
Can
you name ten puddle ducks, and a half dozen divers? Any real naturalist can do that off the cuff. That Master
Naturalist really got mad when I told him that true naturalists do not live in
suburbs, they love the natural world so much they find a way to live close to
it, far from the traffic jams which consume so much of his life.
I
worked for more than ten years as a PAID naturalist. I spent a couple of years just out of college as the Chief
Naturalist for Arkansas State Parks, giving hundreds of programs in those
parks, conducting daily hikes with park visitors to teach them all I could
about nature and conservation, and the web of life found in unaltered natural
places.
Then
for a couple of years or so, I worked as a paid national park naturalist at Buffalo
National River. During winter
months I explored the Ouachita and Ozark mountains of Arkansas for the state’s
Natural Heritage Commission, going into the wildest areas of the state to find
and report on significant natural features, and plant and wildlife species I
found there. Again, I wasn’t there
as an amateur, I was a paid naturalist.
For
fifty years I have written about nature and the outdoors. I sell those articles to
newspapers and magazines because they believe I have been there and done
that. I do not write about what I
read out of some book, but what I see and hear and experience in wild, remote
places.
AND
WITH ALL THAT, I NEVER WAS A MASTER NATURALIST. I never knew anyone who was! Every trip outdoors then, and
every trip now, I learned more and more.
I have studied the lives of great naturalist like Leopold, Muir,
Audubon, Miner and Peterson. Not
one of those men would have accepted the term “Master Naturalist”.
There
are indeed Master Electricians, Master Plumbers, Master Musicians, because they
can learn all there is to know about what they do. Naturalists cannot. Calling yourself that makes it obvious
you haven’t spent enough time wearing out boot soles in far off wild places. You haven’t been out there alone where bobcats
bounce from tree limbs to rocky ledges as you slip close late in the evening,
and a barred owl answers your call at mid-day. Bobcats and barred owls do not
live in the suburbs. Neither do
naturalists.
The giraffe has a black tongue, they fight with their
necks, whipping with tremendous force at the body of their opponent. There are 18 species of hummingbirds in
North America, 308 species in South America. In Africa, a species of frog
incubates eggs inside the stomach and the babies crawl out the mouth. One mammal
lays eggs, from which her young hatches.
A Platypus!