up close

Look at this happy little guy.

No, no, not the child.  The dragonfly.

He has the nicest smile.

Anthropomorphizing animals and insects is one of my favorite pastimes.  It's practically a school subject here. The childs and I can be a bit stalker-ish when it comes to wildlife.  At least wildlife that we do not have to leave the yard to see.

I have no particular need to see exotic species or rare ones, although it is exciting to spot a bear or a wolf while out in the mountains.  I'm more concerned with staying out of the way of the bigger wildlife and minimize our contact. 

The creatures that invite themselves into my realm, well, that is a little different.  Urban scavengers and pests, I just love them so much.

We have frequent visitors to our yard, crows, robins, jays, pigeons and a hawk that enjoys delicious crunchy pigeons.  We have all sorts of beetles and millipedes down by the compost under our stored browns.  Bees in the flowers, wasps that come check out our evening backyard meals, scads of spiders that hang off our lawn chairs and mailbox.  And the furry critters like squirrels, mice and this mama along with her four babies. 

Actually, this could be one of the babies, they've grown so fast and, unsurprisingly, we can't really tell them apart by their markings.  So we'll just call it the skunk that I snapped a quick photo of before it turned and ran at me and I screamed and slammed myself back into the house. 

The thrills never stop.

Into the urban backyard ecosystem is the volunteer plants (we have many, also known as weeds) and even our small attempts at cultivation, like our raspberries (once a couple sprigs, now a dense bush that is waiting for another year to produce that the skunks hide under), our sprawling strawberry field (in it's 12 by 3 foot box) and the carrots we plant to keep the boy happily noshing in the yard for an entire month.  We are a little careless and not so good at keeping things tidy, which works well for the critters who need cover and plants to live.  Every time I fail to clean up the leaves in my flower bed in the fall, I think of the hundreds of ladybugs who are going to have a snug winter under those leaves. 

Add in our two cats, who are starting to explore the outdoors for the first time in their fourteen years and our small family, who can take the time to flirt with skunk encounters and dragonflies.

This is how it should be.

The Man even swapped out the swings on our old play set and added a couple of swinging benches as our family viewing gallery.  The seats creek a bit when they swing, and I think Battle Cat hears them as a beacon to come get his pets, as he comes running for our laps every time we sit down for a (not so) quiet sit.

I would like to learn a bit more about what other bits of yard work I can avoid to encourage urban wildlife to move in.  Though we have a relatively large city lot (big yard, itty bitty house), I don't think we can support any deer but I think we could have a few more butterflies and birds.  And bugs.  We love the bugs.  Maybe a bat or two? 

I consider it a privilege to be able to be this close to wildlife, to observe them throughout their natural lives, to notice their arrivals and departures.  Though I make no special effort to provide them with food and shelter, excepting of the sunflower seeds we put out for the birds, but they are still able to find room in this yard with us and it is gratifying. 

I used to think observing the wildlife in our backyard as a way of reducing complexity, so that the childs could study biology and animal behavior up close and generalize to the rest of the world.  To some extent this is true and helpful in education.  But I'm finding that, as I look closer, the idea that these animals and insects are familiar and simplistic is turning out to be grossly naiveté. I think I know what a squirrel is, but spending a day trying to get one to come stand in a specific spot so you can take a sneaky picture will teach you that you really don't understand squirrels after all.  Extra hats off to Nancy Rose and her mad squirrel photo skills.

The goal for the next little while, for the childs and I, is to do a bit of documenting of the creatures we find in our yard, when and where.  It will be a bit of formalizing of a project that has been underway for years.  Then we can decide what sort of critters we would like to encourage more of and what adjustments we can make to our little habitat.

deer skull

 

I really like it when my home school resources doubles as my home décor.  It helps to enjoy natural  objects and biology aesthetically as well as intellectually.  Then resources and décor can be found inexpensively and just sort of, you know, lying around. 

Around here we love our skulls.  Sometimes we are given a beautifully prepared clean skull, such as the deer in these pictures, and sometimes are given a freshly decapitated head and must do the preparation itself.  (The later situation is why ants are bros.)  Some types of learning is messier than others.

In our home, our formal instruction time is quite minimal (each child has one subject that they absolutely must learn and absolutely hate to do, so a half hour of each day is dedicated to progress, no matter how small, in that subject) and the rest of the time the childs get to pursue what they are interested in.  So it's good to have some stuff about the house for the childs to get interested in.

In a perfect universe my home would be a large industrial space that could be temporarily partitioned into smaller human size work spaces, with insane amounts of tool/materials storage, ample heat and a fully stocked kitchen.  With bean bag chairs, cozy reading corners and ample electrical plug ins.  Basically it looks like an interactive science center, but with fewer toddlers.

In reality, I have a home about the size of the bathroom off of a large industrial space and if I put in a cozy little reading corner here, we'd have to move out the dining room table.  The storage is nearly non-existent.  If we have it, it's out in the open.  Everything must serve double duty.

Thus, having the interesting things about that the childs can get interested in is a tricky bit of curating and use of outside home resources.  But we are in luck there because between the woods and the library, we can get an amazing array of materials to work with.  And when we are done with it, it can go back to continue its natural lifecycle elsewhere.

Some items are keepers, though.  This deer skull came from friends, one had the head, one cleaned it, and it's beautiful.  I try not to over interpret our natural objects until the childs have developed a good amount of familiarity with it.  Labelling something with a value like interesting or ugly or morbid is limiting, whether that be for good or not, and I want them to explore it first before the label get slopped around on things.  My kids tend to be interested in anatomy and view dead animals as fascinating but I know that some visitors to our home have different views.  Like the friend of boy child's who plays a game called 'count the creepy heads' in our living room.

Anybody interested in cleaning and studying animals bones with their children may find Jakes's Bones website interesting and informative.  I know that if you wish to have more skulls in your life, you only need to let people know and they will shower you with boney gifts.  Skulls are one of those things that people find intriguing and beautiful yet somewhat disturbing.  They are hesitate to trash something lovely but do not necessarily want to keep it themselves.  Gifting it to a novice collector and science enthusiast uncomplicates the situation. So, go ahead, just ask about.  You will most likely become rich in bone.

Girl child in particular is a bit of a bone nerd, expanding her love of skulls to beyond the ones in our home out to studies of ossuaries (mostly European ones we've read about in books and on the Internet) and to human evolution and the changes in skull shape.  In fact, last week we were in a shop when she ran across a wooden carving of a homo erectus skull and she did a little fan girl squee.  You never know where the childs are going to take their passions.  So I'm just here, quietly curating our home, bringing as much of the world in as I can fit in these close quarters without bursting.