I am joining Chrisy at Living A Good North Coast Life for her "Reconnecting With Nature" series. As we bloggers sit around connected to our computers, it is a great way to force us to step outside and maybe notice something new in the natural world or just appreciate something that we see every day. Read more about the Reconnect with Nature - one photograph at a time idea here.
This past weekend we visited the local nature center for their Maple Harvest Festival. They serve pancakes, have bird of prey demonstrations, and have educational displays about maple syrup - how it was collected throughout history, identification of maple trees, the extraction process, etc. It is a pretty neat event. Though the little babe is too small to actually learn anything about the maple syrup harvesting process, she had a great time walking around, looking at the people, and exploring. She did a lot of real, physical connecting with nature.
These are larch cones. I love their round shape and texture - perfect for little hands!
At the insistence of my little babe, my husband also connected with nature.
We also saw some beautiful birds of prey. The nature center takes care of wild animals that were injured and cannot survive on their own. Volunteers were walking around with several of the birds and owls - really cool!
A Great Horned Owl
A Barn Owl
A co-worker of my husband is really into birds. He keeps a lifetime birding list and goes birding whenever he has the chance. He even recently quit his job and is spending a month and a half doing a "hawk watch". For $50 per day, he will be sitting outside in one spot, 6 days a week, to observe and record any raptor activity that he sees. He is doing this on the top of a mountain, about halfway between our house and this nature center. Apparently it is a real hot spot for hawks. I wonder what kind of experience he had with nature as a child, to have such a great love for birds instilled in him. I hope that by exposing my little babe to these things now, even at such a young age, or more importantly, because she is seeing them at such a young age, that she will appreciate and care for the natural world when she is older.
Do you have a favorite childhood memory of experiencing nature?