Cover photo courtesy of Ammi Midstokke

I recently picked up Henry David Thoreau’s classic naturalist philosophy book, “Walden.” I suspect that most outdoors folks, knowing the transcendentalism of Thoreau is basically a rite of passage for any serious claimant of nature loving or minimalism, at least pretend to have read it.  

I wasn’t sure if I had, which is to say I probably had read enough meaningful quotes to pass. If I had read it, the meat of the matter had altogether escaped me, whether by my youthful inexperience at the time or a lapse in memory. Or perhaps Thoreau’s heady use of now-antiquated English lost me in the first paragraphs, much like the time I tried to read “The Federalist Papers.” (It was an ambitious response to the days of Covid, when Hamilton became the soundtrack of my life.)  

The summary of “Walden” is that contentment and meaning can be found in the mere act of survival. Thoreau was righteous in his arguments for such a life, considering volitional poverty a kind of freedom, but it was his deep connection to nature and his surroundings that brought him joy. For the two years he spent on the shores of Walden Pond, he wallowed in the simple pleasures of a well-made jacket, tending to his bean crop and the lost art of contemplation.  

Perhaps that is what’s wrong with the world: We aren’t spending enough time observing it or thinking about it. Which is decidedly different from consuming it through our usual means of bludgeoning by roadside advertisement, curated media feeds, and all the ways in which society screams our inadequacies at us with a relentless cacophony of not-enough.  

Which brings me to ask: Does anything bring us deeper satisfaction, connection or understanding than stepping out of that fabricated world and into the natural world? If we know this in our bones, why don’t we do more of it? What beliefs do we have that justify our collective suffering and destruction of the planet? 

Realizing this after a morning of busyness that mostly achieved nothing beyond a painful awareness of my vapid existence, I went outside to find my dinner and commune with nature. 

I spent the afternoon picking my way through the undergrowth in search of mushrooms. I found them, along with gratitude for the abundance of wilderness, and hundreds of new and independent thoughts that had been lurking just behind all the “productivity” of my morning. I discovered edible mushrooms growing along animal tracks, then discovered the paths of the forest creatures and their favorite places: fields of ferns and sun-kissed slopes, shaded ravines lush with moss, stony clutches turned by the curious snouts of boar. I felt a kindredness to them, a bittersweet reminder that we, too, are of nature. Only, too often, too far removed. 

Back home, the mushrooms were cleaned and baked in oil with herbs from the garden. They tasted of the complexities of the forest: millennia of soil and weather, the metallic tang of mineral, something earthy and rich and buttery. And as I put another log on the fire and watched it twist and dance, as if to call heat up from the Earth’s core in some ancient ceremony, I knew Thoreau was right. All we really need is food and shelter. The rest is superfluous at best. 

Ammi Midstokke lives mostly in North Idaho, where there are in fact no wild boars. Sometimes, she retreats to a stone cottage in the mountains of Greece to live off the land and practice contemplative knitting. 

The post The Lost Art of Contemplation  appeared first on Out There Venture.

It’s easy for us to pick sides and rest on the laurels of our conviction. And if that doesn’t make us feel good enough about ourselves, we can join the ranks of the one-uppers: vegans who don’t eat honey, homeschool parents who teach their kids Latin, and misanthropic conservationists. 

Mitch Friedman was some kind or another of that in his youth, following the then-popular trend of monkeywrenching and civil disobedience as guerrilla conservation tactics, and generally rousing rabble toward industries that were perceived threats to nature, particularly to old-growth forests. He’s got an arrest rap sheet that reads like a Greatest Hits list. 

I’m glad we have these people—those who chain themselves to trees, live in them, sit on the roads and try with all their gentle might to slow the seemingly inevitable destruction of our planet. Only it doesn’t seem to be working as a singular tactic. 

That shared observation is what I found refreshing in Friedman’s new book “Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to More Effective Activism.” Friedman takes a long, hard look at conservation efforts past and stares into the necessities for the future.

 

After pissing off enough police to reconsider his methods, Friedman became one of the West’s most effective conservationists through what was then the unlikely and underused approach of collaboration. This requires other lost forms of art, such as empathy and listening, to gain perspective. When it comes to land management and the preservation of wildlife habitat in the face of progress, our only option is to make room for each other.  

As Friedman discusses in his book, balancing the needs of ranch owners with the habits of roaming wolves requires deep listening and problem solving, and sometimes the culling of a wolf. When we exist in a space of all-or-nothing, we cannot come to a solution, only blame. Allowing wolves to roam and cattle to range means the occasional lost cattle or lost wolf. So how do we collaborate to minimize both and live in some realm of … let’s not call it harmony … but sustainability? (I hear someone in the back whispering, “tofu.”) 

It’s not just the wolves. It’s who uses our trails and how they are used. I’m a fan of seeing an e-bike make nature more accessible to a recently-replaced knee. Are they appropriate everywhere? If we want private landowners to place land in conservation, how do we uphold their personal values and needs to support that? If we want logging to stop mowing down old-growth and essential ecology, where should our timber mills source the wood products we all use? If we want to keep driving our cars at highway speeds around the clock, how do we protect animals (and drivers) from the harm of collision—not to mention interruption to essential wildlife travel paths? 

The breakneck pace of development in the western world has come with a blind sense of abundance that has scarred landscapes and dramatically reduced native wildlife populations. We can do better, are obliged to do better, but we cannot do it by taking sides. Rather, we must do it by listening to all sides. And this must include the voices of the trees, the rivers, the flora and fauna of our precious planet.  

Ammi Midstokke has allocated her garden as a spider-habitat and established a spider corridor from her kitchen to the outdoors. Some spiders even make it there alive. 

The post Mitch Friedman’s Conservation Confidential: Finding Empathy and Collaboration in Modern Conservation appeared first on Out There Venture.

By Ammi Midstokke 

Once, my friend Larry told me that if I want to be a good writer, I must learn to read poetry. But we all know Larry is crazy, and so after I stumbled through a few New Yorker poems like a kid trying to sprint through tires in gym class, I set them aside and declared myself an aficionado of complete (if not run-on) sentences. 

Then I went to Oahu and I listened to some poems by the very souls who wrote them, and it was as though the broad gates to an unapologetic world of perspectives flung open and invited me in. I sat rapt and wrapped in their words as my head and heart filled with stories of birds, of battles, of battered ecologies and the oppressed, and the dead-and-dying languages, and I fell asleep that night with whispers of them all in my dreams. 

I sipped, like hot tea, the poems of “Green Leaves” by Eric Paul Shaffer, stuck in one titled “Whales at Sunset.” Shaffer carried me through a sunset, the sound of waves, the distant viewing of whales—things written about as often as they have happened, but somehow individual, precious in their uniqueness. I am on the beach, I hear the waves, I see the whales. “Centuries ago, the sea seethed / with the play of whales. Now the ocean blackens with night,” Shaffer writes. 

I feel the loss, the rage, the hopeless resignation to the truth that humanity is as humanity does and because I am reading a poem, I too am human. The only balm to this tragedy is the beauty we occasionally, accidentally, impermanently produce. But the animals and trees and oceans cannot read our poems.  

Back in the Northwest, I see the world in a different kind of broken prose and pause. Each observation has a new depth and curiosity to it, as though perhaps we don’t need as much context to understand the complexity of a wondrous thing. It is spring and will become summer and I am watching nature in the punctuated, spaced lines of poetry. 

It brings a childlike curiosity to my observation of flowers, the shades of green in different flora, and suddenly I am so careful, so careful to not tread on the yarrow or the lupine as I weave my way between the shade-crowded pines and find safe soil on which to step. In a world where we are losing tolerance for anything longer than a TikTok, poetry may save us from ourselves, guide our return to the senses and sensible. 

It is more forgiving than trying to drag my ass through “The Overstory” or “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” which I have only read because they are a social-literary rite of passage and cause to nod knowingly at parties with conservationists, but not because I particularly liked them.  

Ah, but poetry! If you’ve ever met a poet, you know they are in a sophisticate class of their own, a group of people who love being misunderstood as much as they love being understood. The message they all share, the one imperative we learn—whether we understand the allusions or not—is to slow…the…eff…down…and pay attention. 

If we were a world of poets, surely we’d find more commonalities than disagreements. We’d argue over comma scarcity perhaps, and the only harm that would come would be a forced reading of William McGonagall and overconsumption of herbal teas. 

As for me, I’ll take another stab at it. (Reading, that is, for the true scourge of humanity would be proven should I ever try to write the stuff.) The poets of today are activist troubadours on pages, with messages so powerful we can only take them in tiny doses. It is a medicine in which we are of desperate need. 

Ammi Midstokke will spend her summer seeking the poetry of the people, from the indigenous wise ones to the biologists, the broken hearted to the proud, from Frost to Vuong and beyond. 

The post Reading Is Activism  appeared first on Out There Venture.

Cover photo courtesy of Bri Loveall

Recently, a sad day had me feeling profoundly robbed of my sense of agency and rather disappointed in humanity. On such a day, even being human feels a shameful thing.  

Then I happened across a forester named Ethan Tapper using a vocabulary of optimism I’d long discarded. He talked about our ability to cohabitate with nature and restore forests, all while wearing a presumably naïve smile and petting plants like he was some botany version of Mr. Rogers. Whatever pine needle tea or wild ginger this guy was consuming, I needed to get my hands on it.  

So I asked him for a copy of his book, “How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World.” 

Really, what I wanted to know was how to restore my hope. I thought I knew how to love forests, but somewhere between my soft-hearted conservationism and my use of paper towels, there is a dissonance. Somewhere between my dedication to organic growing and the dogged immortality of tansy is a dream of a backpack full of herbicide. 

In Tapper’s book, he tells a story of buying 175 acres of logged decimation—probably for like twelve dollars, because it’s in Vermont and appears to be beneath a power line and next to a highway and all the good trees are gone. Invasive species have crept in. The deer are over-populated and chewing off the hopeful tree shoots. Various blights and plagues of generations are ever-present in the trees. The broad and lasting impacts of settlement in this country are evident even on his razed lands: in the plants, the animals, the way the soil responds to rains, what is resilient and what is no longer.  

Tapper sets about restoring it with tenderness, education, and humility. He even uses *gasp* weed killer. He admits that what is an accepted best practice today might be disproven tomorrow. He knows that his tiny plot of land is less than a drop in the bucket, but it is more than nothing.  

While I now feel compelled to go to forestry school because I suspect that loving a forest relies on a certain bit of education, what I am most inspired to do is more than nothing.  

There’s this cedar tree in my yard that has three extra trunks coming off the bottom of it, slowly sucking the life from the primary tree, and I cannot bring myself to fire up the chainsaw. I have anthropomorphized nature. I don’t want these spindly trunks to get their feelings hurt. The Ponderosas, though… they are the bullies of my coniferous world and I readily cut them down so the firs can recover. I know I must do the same to my cedar. And tansy, I’m coming for you…by whatever means necessary. 

At times, Tapper’s use of the word “legacy” felt redundant until I paused to understand the importance of it: the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past, or of a person’s life. It is not about having a library named after oneself. It’s about the seeds we plant, figurative or literal, and what they in turn grow to become. 

This is an agency we all have. Whether we become backyard radicals by replacing our lawns with something more meaningful than manicured, or we add flowers on our patios for bees to pollinate, or we put swaths of land in conservation: We can contribute to the hope of restoration. And that is something.  

Ammi Midstokke lives in the woods. This spring, she’ll be learning how to better love the little piece of forest she stewards.  

The post How to Love a Forest  appeared first on Out There Venture.

I have loved a great many asses in my lifetime, but never a donkey. This is what I’m thinking one evening, curled up beneath layers of a comforter, obscenely bright light reflecting off a wall in an attempt to cast a softer glow on the pages of my book.  

I’m reading the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez because I once read a line of his describing how his donkey, Platero, with his cotton-soft lips disturbs the reflection of the full moon in a puddle as he drinks, his thick eyelashes lowering to watch the watery moon ripple away. My hesitation in reading this particular collection of prose, “Platero y yo” (Platero and I), came merely from this reality: It would solidify the conviction in my belief that I need a donkey. Also, some of those fainting goats seem like a good idea. 

I cannot put Jiménez down at night, and each evening I look forward to reading and re-reading his lines. It is not his love of Platero that brings me back or has me sighing wistfully and returning to the beginning of the sentence. It is in how he brings loss to life, the ache of love to one’s chest. It is in how he sees the natural world, then pulls from it the colors of a painting, the smells of a pine copse on a wet night, the insect clamor of late summer, and sets them upon paper to be deliciously supped by one’s hungering mind.  

And trust me, my mind is hungry right now. It needs the literary reminders of a world in which every sunset is magical and marvelously different. There are dozens of descriptions of sunsets by Jiménez, each one more remarkably visceral or amber or purple or glowing copper than the next and they never, ever get redundant.  

This is the reminder I need right now: Sunsets will continue happening. People are trying to live their lives to the best of their ability. We should observe with respect and awe. We are surrounded by beauty and wonders and loves that are temporal and fleeting. We should pay attention. 

This is not my impulse right now. Indeed, I want to bury my head in the sand for the next four years like half the nation buried theirs in their asses for the last four (speaking of donkeys). While a fair amount of ignorance may be necessary to support our mental health as humanity navigates some big-picture problems, I am determined to distract myself with connection rather than dissociation, to remain curious and open-hearted. To explore a world larger than mine and breathe deeply the minutia of my tiny, self-absorbed one.  

It will take poetry and art and hiking. And conversations and questions and listening. And reading. More reading.  

I do not mean headlines, newsfeeds, or social media. Pick up a copy of Hofstadter’s “Anti-intellectualism in American Life.” Read Thoreau and Whitman. Read Du Bois and Chesnutt. Read Edward Abbey, try to tolerate the misogyny for the other gifts, then read him again. Don’t forget Amanda Gorman and Thich Nhat Hanh. 

When the throbbing of your head matches the pulse of your heart, take a break with Ocean Vuong. Read, my friends. Read about other lives and other perspectives. Read about ideas you disagree with. Read enough to contemplate the possibility of changing your mind. Read about sunsets that make you weep and sunrises that give you hope.  

Then go outside and find both.  

Ammi Midstokke is currently reading her HOA rules about owning livestock. She will spend her winter buried in books as she prepares for the great, misled hope of gardening season.  

The post Reading is the Panacea  appeared first on Out There Venture.

I don’t know when I stopped paying attention to the night sky. Maybe smoke season and crisp autumn blues have me swinging between anxiety and bliss during daylight, and forgetting the night altogether. Maybe it’s because I’m in bed with my lenses out by nightfall in the summer. Maybe it is because the night sky is fading into the ominous sherbert glow of progress, urban sprawl, and those billboards advertising adult stores and flu shots. Or I’ve lost my ability to see at night. Certainly, we as a species have lost our connection to darkness and the stars, one streetlamp at a time. 

What I didn’t realize is… how much we’re missing.  

I have a memory of climbing in the Tatoosh Range on the south side of Rainier some years ago. My journey began with an evening schlepp to a lake’s edge where I pitched my tent in the dark. The night was so still, the water did not even make a sound. All around me, only a thick black ribbon of jagged mountains could be seen separating the cosmos above from its reflection on the lake. It felt like I could drink the stars. 

A friend told me once about sailing on the open sea in the Mediterranean on a starry night, the boat moving in no direction, just settled as the only object between sea and sky. Stars above, stars below, he spent the night in a magical disorientation, floating within the Milky Way and sensing for the only time in his life his presence within it.  

Just north of Ketchum, Idaho, deep in the Sawtooth Mountains, is the nation’s first Dark Sky Preserve. It is the result of a collection of communities, organizations, and landowners. It is also the result of a need to reduce light pollution and preserve the night sky. That is to say, we cannot see a thing we are surrounded by, having lost touch with this ethereal and primal part of our natural existence, and must now go to a place far, far away to really see the night. 

I’ve been reading Paul Bogard’s book, “The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.” I had the honor of meeting Paul in the Sawtooth Mountains, of standing under those very stars and staring through a telescope at spiral galaxies and distant nebula. Of all the ways to be humbled by our insignificance, this is by far the most wonderful.  

It’s not often that we pick up a book that gives us both a sense of awe and hope. We’re reading books about how roads are ruining animal migration, sound is changing birdsong, logging is ruining the livelihood and lives of indigenous peoples, the Paleo Diet is increasing greenhouse gasses. With the exception of Jane Goodall, we’re feeling disparate and hopeless about problems we don’t have solutions to. Or solutions that feel too complex to implement. Mostly I feel guilty about being born a parasite and owning a series of iPhones. 

In Bogard’s book he says there was a time when the Milky Way left us casting our shadows on the ground, and that time was not so long ago. The night, and darkness, is when so many things are their most animated, most alive. It is an essential, critical, part of the health of our little globe. And restoring this natural sky-scape is also achievable, a thing that does not have to go extinct, a memory that we can still make and offer generations to come. 

I am grateful for the reminder to reconnect to nature and my own biological integrity in ways I’ve neglected—like moving around in the dark, pausing between my car and the front door at night to look up, and finding pockets of wilderness that are less ravaged by humanity. 

These are the things that can fill us with hope again, empower us to be part of a positive change. Sometimes all it takes is turning off our lights.  

Ammi Midstokke has always been afraid of the dark, but only because she spends too much of it inside.  

The post In Search of Darkness  appeared first on Out There Venture.

As someone whose spirituality is primarily limited to the worship of coffee, it may seem out of place that I’m convinced trees have souls.  

I’m sure there is a more scientific explanation: tree pheromones and tree communication through root systems and diseases and parasites that make them droop and dry out as though they were as broken hearted about climate change as we are. The scientists and authors who delve into the complexities of trees are tiny flesh apostles using the vocabulary of understanding to save the forests through the persuasion of connection. We should listen to them. 

For all the time us outdoor folks spend among the trees, most of us know embarrassingly little about them. We crave their shade in the summer heat, appreciate the way their roots hold the soil of our slopes in place, hear the music of wind in their boughs when camping, use the alpine ghosts of them to hang our bear bags. How do we reciprocate? 

I’m not actually sure what a tree’s love language is beyond Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree, who was arguably in an unhealthy co-dependent situation. Poor Shel has probably been cancelled for the promotion of the blatant exploitation of unwittingly generous trees. I have tried various attempts at affection toward trees I have planted with limited results (suggesting they are less fond of Robert Frost and more fond of a good watering). I suspect like many of us, the trees would just like to be seen and heard. 

I think of Peter Wohlleben and The Hidden Life of Trees, who touched us with his anthropomorphizing of the forests. “When a tree falls in the forest,” he wrote, “there are other trees listening.” He gave trees emotions and generational relationships, not because he presumed trees have feelings, but because we humans cannot seem to appreciate anything we cannot understand through our own myopic means. For us to relate to the trees, we have to make them more like us.  

As a forest, we can assign them value: commercial, environmental, visual. But reading the works of those who try to speak for the trees, I wonder if we oughtn’t develop interpersonal relationships with them as individuals. If my tree could have a conversation with me, what would it say? We would certainly commiserate about the raucous of those unruly squirrels and perhaps judge the neighbors for all their mounted game cameras. (Why not just ask the trees who has been by?) 

As I peruse my new neighborhood of trees, I realize I don’t even know what kind of trees they are, not to mention their needs. They seem to be growing too close together and those ponderosas are always like overachieving middle children: Hogging all the sunlight and growing faster than everyone else. The scraggly runts stuck below them are malnourished, unseen. The arborist says I need to thin them, but I cannot bring myself to choose who deserves to live. I am certain they each have a story. 

The prolific author, Anthony Fredericks, just released a new book titled In Search of the Old Ones, in which he explores and exposes the history of some of our oldest trees and groves. What does a tree know when it has stood for fifteen centuries? What stories are in its bark? What miracles and sorrows has it witnessed?  

I stand beneath a broad pine in my own forest. Before I lived here, high-schoolers came and drank Pabst in secret campouts. The tree watched their shenanigans, probably in silent prayer that they didn’t leave a cigarette butt burning. Before that, this one escaped logging for no reason other than a generous selection process. Long before that, its seed washed here in the Missoula floods. It is the grandchild of eons of migration.  

I imagine how deep its roots crawl, what tangled family gatherings it has beneath the soil. I wonder what it whispers to other trees with the scents of warning: Change your smell, the beetles are coming. I think it might be a good idea to name it, because it is harder to slaughter a named thing. What name is good enough for a tree? 

We should read the books of those who speak for the trees. If we learned about the trees the way we learn about civics and math, about computer science and debate, maybe we’d learn the importance of saving them. Maybe we’d recognize we have much in common (such as sharing the same planet). 

A woman comes to see my new home, tucked in a small clearing of this unmanaged mayhem of forest I prune with small clippers and scissors. From the right angle and the right height, one can see a glimpse of the distant river. She dances around the patio to peer between the towering pines. 

“Are you going to cut some trees for a view?” she asks. 

“The trees are my view,” I say. 

Having survived a years-long project of building a house, Ammi Midstokke now finds herself enjoying literature that is less about carpentry technique and more about the world beyond power tools. 

The post Stories of Trees  appeared first on Out There Venture.

The first time I was given a book written by Nikos Kazantzakis, I’d never heard of the nine-time Nobel nominee or even been to Greece. I did, however, have a Greek lover (as I recommend all people do at least one time in their life) who was trying to help me understand the great burden of being a Greek man.  

In a country famous for producing the historically impactful (Plato, Socrates, Alexander the Great, El Greco, to name a few), the pressure to be the next prodigal son is apparently high. Also, olive harvesting is hard work, goats can climb trees, and you can yell at your priest if you apologize afterwards with an Ouzo. Or several. 

Thus, I was gifted a copy of “Zorba the Greek,” followed by “The Last Temptation” and then “Report to Greco” as a sort of advanced coursework in understanding, as Zorba himself would say, “the whole catastrophe of life.” From a Greek’s perspective, that is. 

The thing about perspective is that we’re really only granted our own unless we venture out to participate actively in that of the other. Even when we travel, we filter through our own lens as not just Americans (or whatever we are), but relatively privileged persons. We miss out on the nuances of a lived experience other than our own. 

I believe everyone should read “Zorba,” because the wayward miner and lover of women and wine and, allegedly, hard work, brings with him a number of life’s wisdoms and charms. When he asks God for a sign of His existence, the almond trees blossom, as they always do. Until I smelled the trees in full bloom myself, I only vaguely grasped the cognitive experience. But being in a place offers a visceral one otherwise inaccessible, and breathing in the perfumed nectar of those blossoms added complexity and depth to my understanding that would have otherwise evaded me. 

This is my pitch to read when you travel—to read the local writers, the naturalists of the area, those who have written of how a place was and is and may someday be. Those who tease from the language the unique beauty of a place, its changing dialects, its dying flora and evolving fauna. When you go to the Everglades, read Marjory Stonemason Douglas. If you find yourself in Poland, read Olga Tokarczuk so you can feel the chill of wind coming off the beech trees and over the frozen hills while you slip into the rhythm of a small village and a cynical vegan. In Turkey, Orhan Pamuk will serenade you on historical politics or the art of hand-digging a well in the native soils. Either way, the olives will taste better. 

Read the naturalists when you’re in nature, read the stories of the Indigenous Peoples because you live on their land, read the poems of a linguist who tried to save a language (Frederic Mistral in France and Joy Harjo of the Muscagee Nation when you’re in Tulsa, though she writes from many places).  

What I learned most from reading local literature was that the imperative to read from the places we visit and the places we live is rather a moral obligation. It is also how we can expand our perspectives beyond our otherwise solipsistic experience. It opens our hearts and senses to the overlooked, lifts veils we do not know exist, and ultimately deepens our understanding of each other.  

How much we need that right now…  

Ammi Midstokke’s adventures this year have led her to literature gold from Coeur d’Alene to Thessaloniki, from Spokane to Istanbul. Her late summer reading list includes Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings and a neglected copy of “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” 

The post Read Where You Are  appeared first on Out There Venture.

I heard nothing, no beating of wings of warning of other birds, just that soft sound wind makes when you’ve climbed beyond the tree line and the wind is heard from below rather than above. After the third shadow-casting, I stopped to wait for friends and watch for the curious but clandestine fowl.  

Within moments, an enormous owl appeared in the blue sky, suspended between treetops, then swooping in large circles overhead. I didn’t know what kind of owl, because I’m embarrassingly unfamiliar with the native inhabitants of most places I go. But one doesn’t see an owl in broad daylight without assigning it some kind of mythical significance or anthropomorphized relationship. 

What was this owl trying to tell me? Was it symbolic of something? Do white women of European decent and urban birth have spirit animals?  

I had no answers, though I assumed the latter was, “Yes, multiple domesticated cats.” 

I didn’t even know why an owl would be out in broad daylight, though I was fairly certain the thing was getting a good look at me. Or maybe riding the wind? I rarely to never see owls when I’m about, but then again, I’m always looking down. And owls are incredibly good at hiding, I have since learned. 

They are also playful and territorial and have been known to sink their talons deep into the skulls of runners and hikers and researchers on many occasions. I learned this and much more by greedily reading Jennifer Ackerman’s new book “What an Owl Knows.” That being said, I also learned much about people who study owls and one might argue they are equally, if not more, fascinating. 

And owls are definitely fascinating. They are also vicious killers. They even eat other birds! They fly essentially silent, having evolved wings with particular feather architecture. Their hearing is so acute, scientists suspect it is connected to the visual part of their brain allowing them to “see” what they hear in the dark of the night. And they hear everything. A mouse walking across leaves is an easy target.  

The thing about owls and so many of the creatures of the forest is that we often underestimate their ubiquitousness. They are everywhere—or at least everywhere we haven’t decimated their habitat. Some owls love to nest in tree snarls. Some love the top of a broken-off trunk. Some nest in the ground. All of them appear particular about their needs for breeding. Yet most of us are unaware of their presence, and in my case, just about everything else about owls.  

There is a way our consumption of nature as recreation fosters a kind of obliviousness to it. We rally on our mountain bikes and take pictures for our Instagram. We log miles of trail and tell harrowing tails of epic adventure, but are we really paying attention to what we are witnessing?  

After consuming much owl literature, I worriedly told my husband to stop cleaning up the snarled trees on our property. “We have to check them for nests first!” I pleaded, pointing out a broken-off ponderosa. “That is a perfect owl nest right there!”  

It is only with a deeper understanding of nature that we can contribute to the preservation of it. We can read books, of course, but we can also just pause to observe the wonders when we find ourselves within it. Maybe you’ll even see the owl watching you. 

Ammi Midstokke is searching her property for owl sign this spring and hoping to find a few bird condominiums in her dead standing pines. Next issue, she’ll be dispatching from the shores of the Aegean Sea or the summit of Mount Olympus. 

The post Looking Around, and Up  appeared first on Out There Venture.