Nature

I just returned from my vacation on Padre Island. I took my digital camera and to my amazement I took more pictures of sea birds than I did of people. That got me to thinking.

When I was a young child I was fascinated by nature. By the time I became a teenager I stopped looking and became involved more with the social side of life. When I was in my 30’s and had small children of my own, I became more interested because I had these wonderful children who were amazed and delighted with bugs, ants, spiders, frogs, etc. I would go to the library and check out books on whatever bug or reptile my children were interested in and we would learn all about them. Then my children became teenagers and lost interest and so did I.

I stopped paying attention to the nature around me until I was in my late fifties. I wonder if that is because I was so busy with other parts of my life…job, children, family. Now I am finding that I am a complete dunce about the nature surrounding my life. I am finding now that I want to know what kind of birds are around me, what kind of trees are in my yard, what happened to all the butterflies, where have all the fireflies gone?

As a young child I watched spiders building webs, screamed when I saw tarantulas, snakes, lizards and horned toads. Somewhere along the line I forgot about all that. Now, here I am at 63 years old and a lot of those creatures that I found so fascinating as I child have just disappeared. I have begun to look for them and cannot find them. I live in the desert of New Mexico. I used to see horned toads daily. Now, I have not seen one in several years. I used to see brightly colored butterflies and now I see a few small yellow ones and small white ones, but that is about all.

When I was about 8 years old my family moved to south Texas and I spent a lot of time at the beach on South Padre Island. I remember the sea gulls as being whitish gray and swooping along the beach, begging people to throw bread at them. This last trip there was a new gull, at least new to me. The other gulls were there but the new ones appeared to outnumber them by about 15 to 1. So now I have a quest. I need to find out where and when these new gulls began appearing and more importantly, why?