I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say how much I love your page. Signs and Seasons is my favorite Burroughs book. The authors you mention and quote from are some of my all time favorites. (What about Edwin Way Teale). I really enjoy your journal, I have kept a nature journal for many years and find taking notes during or right after my walks helps me to really focus on the natural world. I have been messing with a creation of my own web site, and was overjoyed to find yours with such a similar philosophy. Please keep up the page, it did my heart good to come across (and bookmark it naturually) I will be back soon.

Bryan Isaac

Hello Jim - I haven't finished reading your interesting site, but I find it far from boring. If I were to tell you my philosophy on nature, it might take up a book. In short, I feel that the world would be a far better place if there were more of an educational emphasis on nature and animals. A child who has learned to love and care for a sick bird or who has learned to plant and care for a flower, will not be likely to abuse his fellow men or throw beer cans out the car window. Just my own thoughts. I know it worked for our sons.

I found your site on an Alta Vista search on geese. I have a goose story and a goose question, and I haven't found any people locally who are willing to help or offer information. We have purchased a foreclosed property with a pond on it. We have been fixing it up for four years. We were supposed to move a year ago, but the contractor has walked off. At any rate, each year we have about one family of geese who stay by the pond and raise a family.

This past spring we had a family of six geese. We had carefully befriended the mom and dad with bits of bread, taking care not to feed them to the point of being dependent on us - just a few crumbs to say hello. Never-the-less, when the babies hatched, the parents let us touch them without being upset. They knew my call and would answer me back when I announced my arrival from the cliff 70 feet above the pond. We watched them grow and saw how the young ones finally learned to hiss at us when we approached, although they were still eager to have their daily treat. We saw them spread their wings and practice jumping off small landings and then one day when we arrived, they were gone. We were sad not to have witnessed the first flight and wished we had been able to say good by. We have a tenant in a small cottage on the premises. One evening, as we were leaving and talking to the tenant, a group of geese flew overhead. I said, I wonder if those are our 6 geese, as if any group of 6 geese naturally had to be ours. At any rate, I called to them. There was such a commotion and the group changed it's course and flew around and landed on the pond. We ran down with our bread and they came ashore and greeted us. After that day I called to small groups of geese flying overhead in the evening, and about 6 times it was our group and they came down to the pond. One time there was a group of about 15 geese but i called anyway. Six of the geese left the group and came down while the others flew off. The next day the entire group paid ua a visit. Our geese visited less and less frequenty and they became more cautious and shy and, thankfully, still wild. They have gone, I think, for the winter.

But we are left with one lonely guest that I haven't mentioned. It is a goose who was there all summer. He has a broken wing and can't fly away. He was very shy and would never come near us. I have tried to coax him up the hill to a barnyard area where there is a shed, but he only goes so far and turns back to the safety of the pond. He now eats wild duck food from my hand, but I wake up at night now that the temperature is getting below freezing (I'm in the New York area),and I wonder what will happen when it snows and we can no longer get down the hill to the pond with food. There is still some grass and I have been letting him eat that, but soon that will be gone or covered with snow.

I wonder if you have any suggestions or will I have to face the inevitable and let nature take it's course. I appreciate any help you could give me. ---Elizabeth

Hi Jim

I'm Peter, from South Africa.

Got to your page via a search for literary sites, but I am extremely interested in nature, environment, etc.

I am just about to launch a kiddies' page I've put together and I'd like your permission to link to your page. The kids may not ALL appreciate you now, but let's expose them to some healthy stuff and, perhaps, it'll seep in and lie there dormant for a few years.

Your page reminded me of a naturalist-storyteller who enthralled me the last time I was in the Drakensberg. His speciality is the Bushmen (San people) and he's spent many years with them and acquiring interesting artefacts (all presented to him by tribe members, he refuses to "take" anything) and he had me crying and, alternately, laughing as he recounted tales that took me back to my childhood, spent very close to nature.

Thanks for an enjoyable visit.

I'd appreciate a critique of my kids' page, if you could.

You'll have to change the address in your "Location" bar, there's no direct link, as I'm busy redoing my whole site.

My entry (home) page is :

http://home.global.co.za/~peterbi/index.html

and that of the unlaunched page is :

http://home.global.co.za/~peterbi/kidsites.html

I liked your home page. I didn't find it boring at all. I read quite a bit of your journal, I'll have to come back to finish. I consider myself an amateur naturalist. I'm involved with restoring & enhancing the marsh on our property. My wife and I try to give a love of nature to our children. My wife also trys to pass it on to other children too. Both as a teacher and 4-H leader (natural resources). Nice talking to you :-)

Carl

Hi Jim,

I just stumbled across your page while following the nettle trail. I teach wild plant classes in Alaska and write about the herbs. I have two books out currently... Discovering Wild Plants and Alaska's Wild Plants. And actually a third (self-published, for kids,)..The Alaska Story. Plants (and all of nature) is my passion, so your page wasn't boring. And I salute the work you're doing with earth awareness. Maybe someday your kids will realize how lucky they are.

Numbers at gatherings aren't a reliable measure of "success"... so keep up the plerk (play/work combo, coined by Barry Stevens of Don't Push the River.) Keep sharing what you love!

I just got asked to do a little book on nettle and dandelion... two of my favorite wild plants. Can I quote your story on dandelion? Should I attribute it to you?

thanks. and happy holidays.

Janice Schofield, Gardensong Herbs herbscho@alaska.net

Subject: trees

"Woodman, spare the tree!

Touch not a single bough!

In youth it sheltered me,

And I'll protect it now."

-George Pope Morris, 1830.

"Without the colorful splendor of Nature, windows would lose their meaning."

-H. Harrison Fairbank

From GWoodr7970@aol.com

Francis Bacon once said "Gardens are the purest of human pleasures." Within this statement lies a truth about nature and the natural experience that is often overlooked.

One late August weekend as a child my family and I mounted our trusty Volvo and headed off to Monticello. It was early morning when we left our home in Faquier County, Virginia, and the morning sun was just beginning to cast its first fingers of light through the crooked branches of great-grandad's oak. I dozed in and out of consciousness as our auto rose up and down over the roaling Virginia roads, seldom awakening, yet when awakening only to realize we were off on another one of our 'supposed' boring family trips. I could only hope that this trip would not turn out like the one last summer that had taken us all the way down to Uncle Seth and Aunt Maggie's hog farm in West Virginia. To my suprise, it didn't smell like the pig farm, no as a-matter-of-fact it didn't look like it either. Instead, as our weary car coasted onto the smooth asphalt of the Monticello entrance, I saw instead a large, rolling carpet of green extending beyond the red-brick of the white pillared house, back to the thick wall of green at the edge of the garden. The vast lawn speckeled with the occasional tree once carried man mounted steeds, today a boy. Not off to a political ball but off to a gardening dream-land where one can get intangled in the moment, like a bird bath in the invasive tendrils of a lush ivy vine. As I entered the tall arching hedge that formed the gateway to this wonderland, I could not have emagined the transformation I would undergo. The sounds, the smells all so familiar yet so foreign. I gazed transfixed by the deep emeralds of the towering arborvitae backdrop, and the brilliant gold blanket of friendly black-eyed susan. That day I experienced nature, as wild as a midwest prairie, yet controled in an ancient garden of colonial time. My eyes were open to all the wonder and mystique encased in one plot of land, a plot of land with no boundaries, a plot of land that would soon take me home to grandad's oak tree. And from that oak tree I could now discover the purest form of human pleasure.

GWoodr7970@aol.com