Many people these days are stuck in cities, where there is a limited amount of nature that they can see. Granted, there are still lots of spiders, insects, birds, and a few mammals that are typically found in cities, but the ambiance is not quite the same as being out in the woods or a mountain meadow in the middle of nowhere.
Some of the flavor of being lost in nature can be captured through programs on TV. But TV provides the sights, and not the smells, the feel of the wind in your face, the taste of rain on your tongue.
When I told my parents that I was going to spend more than half a year in Africa studying the behavior of hyraxes, my mother’s response was, why are you going there when you can see the same thing on TV? She was right that I could see some video clips of hyraxes on TV, but she was wrong about the whole experience.
Being in the wilds of Kenya was a completely different experience from watching it on TV. A TV program cannot capture the different sensory inputs: the constant smell of wood smoke from cooking fires, the raucous chatter of baboons, the bell-like trumpeting of elephants, the slithering sound of black mambas on a rocky surface, the high-pitched buzz of African honeybee foragers hovering in front of your face, the cacophony of sound from the dawn chorus of birds, the roars of lions, the bellowing of hippos, the feel of Anopheles mosquitoes biting your arm. While there, I practiced the principles discussed in my website, www.reconnectwithnature.com.
Even though these things have to be experienced in person, an alternative is to read nature blogs on the internet. Although the blogs cannot provide the sensory input, they can provide some commentary that gives a sense of what a place is like, or a sense of what some animals are doing.
Two of my favorite nature blogs are Camera Trap Codger and BunyipCo. Camera Trap Codger is a blog written by Chris Wemmer, who is an eminent conservation biologist. Wemmer uses a camera trap to photograph a variety of animals in the foothills of the California Sierra Nevada mountains, and discusses the habits of the animals and the general environment. A recent post comments on the smoke from a nearby wildfire, and the memories that the smoke evokes of previous places visited around the world by Wemmer. BunyipCo is a blog written by Dave Rentz, an eminent orthopterist. Rentz lives in the rainforest of Queensland, Australia, and discusses some of the animals that can be found in the immediate vicinity. A recent post discusses the sounds made by the call of the Australian Riflebird and by the feathers as the bird flies.
Both blogs present a flavor of what it is like to be with nature. They present the sights and sounds and feelings of the places that are discussed.
If you feel that you need to get out into nature, you can’t go wrong by getting out into nature through either of these blogs.
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