Get familiar with your outdoor surroundings and find wonder in the smallest changes
The English writer Geoffrey Chaucer must have been having a bad day when he wrote “familiarity breeds contempt” back in the 1300s.
I can understand why. Life was tough in those times.
For me, familiarity breeds comfort, insight and the finding of one’s own sense of place.
Around the house, I’m familiar with the old robe I wear nightly; with the Lab of Ornithology coffee mug showing chickadees nestled in spruces. I’m familiar with slippers, as you are, I’m guessing. They slip on and then comfort ensues.
Outside, on a forest walk, all the trees, nests and rocks look familiar. Not boring, not repetitive, not lacking in interest, but inspiring with every encounter.
As for nests, I’m familiar with where they get built. In the crotch of a red oak some 50 feet high, a bulky stick nest has fledged sharp-shinned hawks over the years.
Not far away, hidden high in a hemlock, a basketball-sized nest of leaves harbors gray squirrels in summer.
More: The sound of robins chirping is a telltale sign: Spring is in the air
Knothole nesters are also familiar. I’m a perpetual cavity snooper.
That craggy red maple boasts a knothole where chickadees nest. That snag atop a gray birch trunk holds a great-crested flycatcher nest. For several springs now, I have watched it as parents bring mouthfuls of spiders for nestlings inside to gulp down.
Before I forget, I will mention a huge plus in perceiving these woods as familiar. Without knowing what’s out there in place every day, new things wouldn’t grab my attention. Grabbing on a recent foray were new turkey tail fungi on a dead standing trembling aspen; then a buck rub I missed until now on a smooth goosefoot maple.
That’s new over there: a blowdown from last night’s thunderstorm, exposing a massive oak’s upturned root system. Dark-eyed juncos may nest in its dark, tangled depths come the spring.
And that’s just the beginning. Familiar and wonderful treasures await in the snow. I follow the tracks of a fox trotting down a truck trail it negotiates nightly. They stop at a mouse’s front door. I know this abode in a hole at the base of a tree. The deer mouse inhabitant leaves its own tiny tracks, going out in the dark and returning to home before dawn.
Along the trail I’m on now, a stone wall we made serves our gray squirrels well. They race down its length as a highway.
Several flat-topped stumps along the route provide dining room tables, each one littered with acorn bits and pieces.
Our path takes a left and I face a white pine. I know this tree well, you could call it a friend.
At its base, soft pine needles have created a mattress where a guy can lie down and look up. That’s when the familiar becomes most inspiring: gazing upward through forest green needles and resinous cones.
Beyond them the sky. It shines brilliant bright blue. I’m inspired to make the best of this early March day in late winter.
Email Rick at rmarsi@stny.rr.com
This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Forests are always changing. How to keep track of subtle alterations
