A Child in the Woods

(Three-minute read)

For Easter this year, my three-year-old grandson, Myles, received a pint-sized pair of binoculars from his other grandma. A few days later, I received a photograph of him holding them expertly to his eyes and peering intently into the distance. My heart skipped a beat!

Indeed, I, the bird nerd grandma, had been biding my time, wondering when I might begin teaching Myles about nature. Now I could charge full-speed ahead. Myles had binoculars and he liked them!

Myles likes many things, including picture books, puzzles, and his miniature set of golf clubs. But his true passion is the agile superhero Spiderman. Myles knows how to plant his feet firmly on the ground, turn over and extend his right arm, fold his two middle fingers back, and “shoot web” out of his wrist to ensnare the “baddies.”  He has Spiderman action figures, blankets, pajamas, socks, and books. And guess which costume he chose for Halloween?

I’ve wondered how forays in nature could compete with action-packed superhero adventures, not to mention the bells and whistles on the electronic tablet Myles just got for his birthday. Yet, on a recent family hike in the woods, I discovered that they can.

With his new binoculars swinging from his neck, Myles charged ahead of us down the shaded trail, sometimes stopping to finger a rock or find a stick, which he brandished like a sword and then used to probe the brown, crackly leaf litter. With equal focus, he examined a cluster of tiny bluets growing amid a patch of soft moss. Crouching down and eyeing them through his binoculars, Myles—brilliantly—announced that they were “X flowers” because their petals look like the letter X.

Myles also used his eye gear to examine a real spider web woven between two tree trunks and a lightning bug wiggling its antennae as it crawled across a broad, green leaf. He heard the calling and drumming of a red-bellied woodpecker (hear them here: ML222792521 – Red-bellied Woodpecker – Macaulay Library), a bird we then sighted on a snag high above our heads. Later, Myles spied eight freshwater turtles sunning themselves peacefully on dead branches poking out of a pond.

When it was time to go home, Myles was in no hurry to leave the woods. At naptime, he curled up amid his soft Spiderman blankets and slept for hours.

In Last Child in the Woods, author Richard Louv writes that “A growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health to our association with nature—in positive ways. … As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.”

Though he is only three years old, Myles can already identify an American robin and a Northern cardinal. He knows what a woodpecker looks like too.  And while he may never have pajamas emblazoned with birds, he’ll never outgrow the connection he feels to them, or the understanding that the natural world is there for him, for adventure, peace, and solitude, whenever he needs it.