Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

A nature hike with kids at Comanche Trails Park in Odessa
July 3, 2002

“Let’s go take a walk in the forest!” Yes, you can actually say that to your child, here on the “treeless” Llano Estacado. Comanche Trails Park at the southern edge of Odessa has a wonderful paved trail running for a mile along Monahans Draw. The seeds of Siberian Elms, Osage Orange, Fruiting Mulberry, and Honey Locust washed down the streets of town and floated to the draw during gully-washing thunderstorms. Hackberry and Soapberry are native there. Over the years, a fascinating riparian biotic community has developed. Morning glories, four-o-clocks, hollyhocks and other garden flower seeds have also been dispersed at the site and germinate when and where conditions are right. Over two hundred species of grass, wildflowers and weeds have been identified there as well.

For years the staff of the Sibley Nature Center has met with children from the public and private schools of Odessa for guided field trips at the “forest.” One morning recently I met a small group of kids for an “educational play party,” as the mother phrased it. Somehow, she persuaded seven kids to wake up early on a summer day and be ready to roll at 8 a.m. I brought along insect nets, baby food jars in which to store our “catch,” old pillowcases in which to put lizards and snakes, a shovel, a crowbar, a small field microscope, some identification books, and several thirty-gallon trash bags. I also carried seven old pairs of binoculars that people have donated to the Nature Center.

Since lots of folks were out enjoying their morning walks, briskly striding along the paved trail, we decided to take our adventure off trail. After going only fifty feet we could no longer see the walkers, and after a hundred feet we could not even hear them. We found a place where rushing water had cut a channel into the soil. Tree roots stuck out into the foot-deep and four-foot-wide gully. The bottom was paved with gravel (which probably was swept in from the streets by rushing water.) We sat in a circle, criss-cross-applesauce style.

The kids were hyper, wanting to run around and explore, excited about being “out in the wilderness.”

“What do you mean when you call this a wilderness?” I asked them.

“There is nobody here.”

“It is sort of scary!”

“What do you mean? What are you scared of?”

“There is danger here!”

We talked about the dangers, listing snakes first, then the fear of a creepy, weird person lurking in the bushes. I added the possibility of black widow spiders and maybe brown recluse spiders. The mother mentioned fire ants as an additional painful annoyance.

“What is nice about this place?”

“All the shade!”

“All the green!”

“You can hear birds singing, too.”

“Anybody know the names of the birds singing?” Nobody answered my query. “Everybody should know that song – the one that goes ‘dickey-bird, dickey-bird.’” They laughed at the phrase. “I know it sounds silly, but that is the way to remember a bird’s song – make up a phrase that has the same rhythm as the bird song.”

The dickey-bird suddenly started singing a different tune. “It’s a mockingbird – they can sound like other birds!” the little boy in the No-Fear shirt shouted out.

Another bird began singing nearby. “The first part of the song seemed to end as if it were a question. The last part seemed like an answer.” This observation came from a boy with a t-shirt that said “Got Blood?” below a picture of a giant mosquito.

“That is a Bell’s Vireo. They have not nested in Ector County since the 1950’s. They only come here during a drought that lasts at least five years.”

As each bird sang we figured out a way to know the song. Ten minutes went by quickly. Finally a tiny Bewick’s Wren dropped into the mini-arroyo just fifteen feet from us. “Just watch, don’t say a word,” I told them. The wren twitched his tail up and down as it inspected us, then it dropped to the gravel. It hopped to the wall, underneath a large root. It hopped up, straining its neck up and opened and closed its bill quickly. For a few seconds it tilted its head to one side, then the other, examining the underside of the root. Again it jumped, and seemed to catch something.

The girl in the Backstreet Boys t-shirt blurted out, “It’s picking things out of a spider web!” The wren repeated the same series of behaviors.

“How come it doesn’t mind us talking – shouldn’t that scare it?” The mother had put her hand on the girl’s arm as if to tell her to speak in a quieter voice.

“It knows we are here, and has decided we are not a threat. If one of us stood, that would change the non-verbal cues that animals rely on. It would fly if we moved quickly. Our voices are just part of the background.” I startled the kids, but not the bird, with a loud, “Hey!” I then stood, and the wren darted away.

We spent two hours catching critters. The diversity was impressive; we collected eight species of grasshoppers, twelve species of spiders (including a wolf spider with her babies on her back), two species of lizards, twelve species of beetles, a sepulgid, two scorpions, three small soil centipedes, hundreds of roly-polys, dozens of broken-top snails, six species of bees, four species of robber-flies, two species of syrphid flies and much, much more. All were released to live free once again. We also found three owl pellets and dissected them to find three different sizes of rodent bones. Despite turning over logs with the crowbar, no snakes were found. Using the shovel we attempted without success to find out what lived at the bottom of two different sized holes. Using the binoculars, the kids observed a mourning dove on his nest. At the end, we spent five minutes picking up two bags of trash.