By Allen Batt, Nature’s World

My neighbor Crandall stops by.

&8220;How are you doing?&8221; I ask.

&8220;I wonder if today was really necessary. It was so foggy this morning I couldn&8217;t see the fog. Then the waitress messed up my order. I ordered one egg scrambled and one fried sunny side up.

She scrambled the wrong one. I can&8217;t smoke in the cafe anymore. I have to go outside to have a cigar. Smoking has become an outdoor sport. My dog had an accident on the carpet. He&8217;s going through rug rehab.

It was the same rug that the cat is always crawling under. The feline has carpet-tunnel syndrome. I had a handle on life, but it broke. I am young enough to run a footrace, but I am too old to win.&8221;

&8220;The cartoon bubble of you running just formed over my head. It&8217;s disturbing,&8221; I say.

&8220;You know what is disturbing? I&8217;ll tell you what is disturbing. It was when you couldn&8217;t think of the right answer when the teacher called the roll. I&8217;m going to put vanity license plates on my Yugo.&8221;

&8220;What will they read?&8221; I ask.

&8220;&8217;Not Mine.&8217;&8221;

&8220;Say, is that a piece of spaghetti on your chin?&8221; I query.

&8220;It sure is.&8221;

&8220;Doesn&8217;t that bother you?&8221; I ask.

&8220;It sure does. I can&8217;t remember the last time I had spaghetti.&8221;

Larry Stone

It was my great pleasure to attend the Friends of the J. C. Hormel Nature Center Annual Meeting recently. The speaker was a friend of mine named Larry Stone. Larry was a writer for the Des Moines Register for 25 years.

Larry&8217;s talk was titled, &8220;The Amazement Connection.&8221; Larry addressed issues in conservation and the possibility that we may be losing the battle to protect our environment. Larry theorized that the problem might be that we do not connect with the Earth like we used to. He wondered if we have lost our ability to be amazed.

Sylvan Runkel, the late Iowa naturalist, was amazing because he could amaze others. He could do that because he was amazed. We need to take the time to be amazed.

Albert Einstein said, &8220;The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious &8212; the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.&8221; Rachel Carson said, If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Carson added, &8220;Protecting our planet is our finest form of patriotism.&8221;

A study in Michigan found that prisoners with a view of farmland had 24 percent fewer sick call visits than those without the view. A Pennsylvania study found that hospital patients with window views of trees had shorter stays and less need for medication than patients whose view was a brick wall.

In his book, &8220;Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder,&8221; by Richard Louv writes of the commodification of nature. I enjoy quoting John Burroughs, who wrote,

&8220;Knowledge without love will not stick.&8221; A connection to the earth is something we all have in common.

I find amazement in a chickadee that alights upon my feeder. I am a lucky man.

The big nest

I had the privilege of joining a friend, Mark Sorenson, as we looked at a large raptor nest.

Red-tailed hawks build bulky nests that are 2 to 2.5 feet in diameter and sometimes 2 feet high. Their nests are from 35 to 90 feet high in the tree, situated anywhere where the branches would support the nest, but most commonly on branches near the main trunk. The nest is made of sticks and twigs with the lining formed from bark of grapevine, moss or sprigs of evergreen. They normally nest in deciduous trees like maple and cottonwood, but will use evergreens. The trees are usually on the edge of a woodland overlooking a field, meadow, edge of highway or other open land.

A bald eagle nest is 5 to 8 feet in diameter, located 30 to 90 feet high in a nest tree tending to be larger than the surrounding trees. The nest will lie in a fork near the crown, at least in the top quarter of the tree. It will be a pile of sticks, cornstalks or cattails lined with grasses, moss, twigs, sod and weeds.

Typically the nest will be located near a lake or river. An eagle may carry a stick for its nest from as far as a mile away.

The hawk nest would tend to be flatter and shallower than the eagle nest. The eagle would use bigger sticks than would the hawk, with some sticks being as long as 5 feet.

Walden revisited

Mark Sorenson and I had the pleasure of visiting Paul Goodnature. Paul has constructed a near-replica of the one-room shack in which Henry David Thoreau lived, in 1845. A naturalist, political activist and speaker in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau is famous for authoring Walden and an essay titled, &8220;Civil Disobedience.&8221;

He wrote in the small house, with none of the luxuries of the modern life of those times, near Walden Pond on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau wrote, &8220;I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.&8221;

A plaque on the wall of Paul Goodnature&8217;s wonderful shack quotes Thoreau thusly, &8220;It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.&8221;

Q and A

&8220;Do pheasants roost in trees?&8221; Pheasants are ground birds that can fly very fast for a short distance.

Pheasants roost in heavy cover and sometimes in trees &8212; particularly coniferous trees.

Pheasants hide in thickets and marshes during the winter. Overhead cover such as cattails and rows of trees give pheasants protection from flying predators.

&8220;How is snowfall measured?&8221; The National Weather Service measures it in liquid equivalents because the density of water in its liquid form is constant while the density of frozen precipitation can vary significantly. Amounts are determined by taking the snow from the collecting gauge, melting it and measuring it.

Alaska cruise

On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape key.

Please join me on a cruise to Alaska in July. For more information, please call 373-3455 or 1-800-657-4449. There is no better time than right now to be happy.

Thanks for stopping by

&8220;We&8217;re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day to day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it&8217;s all gone.&8221; &8212; Robert M. Pirsig

&8220;When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.&8221; &8212; Samuel Goldwyn

DO GOOD.

Al Batt of Hartland is a member of the Albert Lea Audubon Society. E-mail him at SnoEowl@aol.com.