Where the Wild Things Are

AMC Outdoors, March 2008

A guide to discovering what's flying, creeping, or wiggling near you

It turns out bull moose don’t have moose breath after all. At least this one didn’t. We met one autumn during a rainstorm on the Appalachian Trail, a few miles from Maine’s Saddleback Mountain. I was hiking south, contemplating the rainwater flooding my boots. The moose was trotting north, contemplating, well, I have no idea what, but it probably had something to do with a female moose. In any event, we simultaneously turned a corner in the path and nearly collided. He issued a steamy grunt, whirled, and galloped about 40 yards down the trail before vanishing into the spruce and fir. I nearly wet my pants.

Our best encounters with wildlife are often accidental, little more than a convergence of a nice place and dumb luck. But add to your outdoor adventures a bit of wisdom and planning, even a heightened sense of yourself outside, and your wildlife encounters will advance beyond bumping into a bird or a moose now and then. Whether you are backpacking or on your customary neighborhood walk with the kids, here is a basic guide to watching more of the wild around us, an opportunity to discover what flies, flutters, darts, jumps, scampers, walks, crawls, slithers, swims, or even just sits there beside life’s long, green path.

Distance, Dress, and Disposition
First do no harm. Our goal is to watch–not to participate. It begins with maintaining a respectful distance. And keeping it respectful depends on what you are watching. Take courtship and breeding, for example, which present abundant wildlife watching opportunities. I tactfully approach to within inches of the Northeast’s rarest butterflies and dragonflies while they are mating (and almost certainly distracted) and to within a few feet of amphibians during their vernal adventures. Birds demand more distance, of course, no matter what they are doing, which is why we have binoculars. And it is a bad idea to approach moose, particularly during their fall mating season. “Most people know when they’ve crossed the line from watching into harassing,” says Nicky Pizzo, senior interpretive naturalist at AMC’s Pinkham Notch Visitor Center in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range. “Most animals tend to give you signs that they’ve had enough.”

Your own appearance and demeanor also matter. White T-shirts and bright colors are fashion violations. The well-dressed wildlife watcher wears muted greens, tans and browns, even camouflage. And please slow down and stop now and then. Skilled wildlife watchers have a particular way of being outside, an acute sense of themselves: it is calm yet alert, with a soft, quiet step, a critical ease of movement. Nothing is more effective at scaring away birds, insects, and other wildlife than sudden motion, even a quick lift of your binoculars. While joining in the search for ivory-billed woodpeckers in Arkansas swampland two years ago, dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, I would often stop during each full day of walking and paddling to sit quietly for an hour or two against a large oak or bald cypress. Winter wrens and orange-crowned warblers would flutter to within a few feet; white-tailed deer and opossums would wander by unaware.

An array of toys and tools can aid the wildlife watcher. Binoculars that magnify seven or eight times (7x or 8x) are best. Make sure they can focus on objects as close as five or six feet for watching insects nearby. Spend as much as you can afford. And unless you absolutely must conserve weight and space, avoid compact models, which generally offer reduced performance and are hard to use while wearing gloves. And do not forget the small stuff. A 10-power hand lens, or loupe, will allow you to discover a kingdom of little things, from flowers to insects. Spend a lifetime exploring the woods with a hand lens and you will learn but a fraction of its natural secrets. Similarly, plastic jars with magnifying-glass lids and butterfly nets make insects more accessible to kids (and to the kid within us). And, finally, field guides are available these days for most any watchable organism.

Wildlife’s Countless Seasons
OK, enough classroom. Let us get out into the green, or into the brown or the white, as the case may be. One convenient method is to let the seasons be your guide to watching. Yet any naturalist knows that spring, summer, fall, and winter are but crude approximations for the rhythms of wildlife. Animals offer us innumerable seasons. The warming days in March, for example, inaugurate the season of jumping snow-fleas and rocketing American woodcocks. Rains in April stir lascivious amphibians from their underground slumbers, followed soon by black bears and their cubs. Warm winds in May bring waves of migrating songbirds. In June, at night, our fields and wet meadows glow with flashes of soft yellow and green as lightning bugs take flight for their own season of courtship. You get the idea. Pick a date and go outside.

For now, however, the vernal equinox shall be our starting point on a tour of but a few watchable wildlife highlights through the year. This is, after all, the season of exploding wildlife desire. So set your compass in the direction of comical clucking and raucous peeping. The vernal and the carnal are now comingling in a woodland pond near you. Vernal pools, fed by snowmelt and rainwater, offer critical habitat for an unusual community of wet critters–frogs, salamanders, turtles, fairy shrimp, fingernail clams, and various elegant insects.

Wood frogs (the clucking) and spring peepers (the peeping) are in these pools for courtship and breeding. Nope, that male wood frog is not locked in a perpetual Heimlich maneuver with (and apparently drowning) that female; he only wants to be near her when she releases her eggs so that his sperm gets to them first. Undaunted by all the commotion, and a celebrity in these ponds, is the spotted salamander, slick black with highway-paint-yellow spots. These “mole salamanders” migrate on rainy nights from underground burrows to vernal pools. So stay up late, get wet, and shine your flashlight judiciously.

Where the Wild Things Are, cont'd >>