The story below is an excerpt from our March/April 2018 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
A boy in the woods with his parents is not thinking about trying to call a bird or identify a flower. No, years must ripen to allow such appreciations.
What I remember is being in the woods, which was fun, except that all the people around me were at least as old as my parents and in many cases much older.
I do not remember my precise age, but it was less than 10. What I do recall precisely is that every so often, one of those old people would put one of his or her hands up to his or her mouth and then, on the side of a loose fist, place the lips upon the roundish spot formed when you tighten your thumb and forefinger against each other and, I figured out, suck with pursed lips.
Pretty odd behavior, I thought, making a squeaky little lips-on-flesh sucking noise when you were supposed to be a grown-up. I could make lots of different noises with my mouth and hands, or even just my mouth, but they all ran the risk of being told to stop that and act my age.
What they were doing, of course, was bird-calling, though if you Google such these days, what you find is the technique of putting your thumbs parallel to each other, putting a blade of grass between them and blowing hard, with the grass blade stretched taut between the thumbs.
Heck, I learned that trick too, also around age 10, but the good strong screech I produced would scare away birds for miles, or so I thought.
The other thing I remember from the woods at somewhere around that age was my mother making me pause and look down at these tiny blue flowers along the side of the trail. I did not remember that experience until decades later, soon after The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All and I began going into the woods to hike every weekend, becoming some on-steroids version of my parents. As well as, of course, old.
Gail was determined, during our first and a few ensuing springs, to learn all the wildflowers we saw. This was that first spring, along the connector trail between the War Spur Loop Trail parking lot and the Appalachian Trail near Mountain Lake, Virginia, and Gail pointed out these tiny blue flowers, and out of my mouth came, without fore-knowledge that it would, “those are bluets.”
You love to impress your girl, even when it’s identifying a wildflower. And while I have never summoned a bird with my hands and mouth, nor any other way, we have had memorable bird views too on those years of hikes, perhaps most notably a male scarlet tanager that put on a flit-and-fly show for us one lunch on the western side of Mount Pleasant, east of Buena Vista, Virginia.
This issue, the second of our year-long 30th Anniversary Celebration, presents some of the very best of the experience of both wildflowers and birds, appreciation for which seems, yes, to deepen with age. Leonard Adkins’ picks for his favorite Appalachian Trail wildflowers begins on page 34. And Angela Minor’s guide to great birding in great state parks starts on page 40.
Happy springtime-in-the-woods!
