Saturday, November 7, 2015

Fox-Walking and Deer-Listening

In The Little Green Schoolhouse, we've started reading pieces from Jon Young's What the Robin Knows: How Birds reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (published by Mariner Books in 2013).  As a scientist who grew up studying wilderness skills with Tom Brown, Jr., Young offers fascinating insights not only into the world of birds, but into the interconnections between the birds and everyone else.  The information and skills he discusses offer ways to learn the language of the birds.  Through that language, we can come to understand more of what is happening out there beyond our human-placed limits of perception.  Learning how birds communicate with each other and other animals provides we domesticated humans with a path back to where we can take a walk on our wild side.

In chapter four of the book, Young provides training in how to "fox-walk," gain "owl vision," and learn how to listen like a deer.  One recent afternoon, we set off to our sit-spots to try the fox-walk and listening like a deer.

Young says the fox-walk "changes your body language and your impact on the local birds and animals" (61) thus allowing you to walk into the woods with a lower level of disturbance.  Other animals depend on the birds to raise alarms about intruders.  If you "fox-walk" skillfully enough, you won't alarm the birds and the bird won't alarm the other animals.  In this way, you have an opportunity to get closer to wildlife.

To fox-walk, Young  writes "instead of swinging and stomping, raise one foot off the ground and let it hang there comfortably.  Then slowly lower the foot to the ground, wherever it naturally falls.  Don't lean forward.  When the foot touches down, the other leg is still bearing all your weight.  After the first foot is on the ground, shift your weight, still without leaning forward.  Keep your head up...Repeat the process.  With very little practice, you will find yourself treading softly, taking shorter steps" (61).

This is a perfect exercise to try with all ages.  It's like a game - can you walk like a fox?  Will anyone be the first to raise the bird alarm?  Or will we all achieve our goal and get to our sit spots without ruffling a feather?

Although I can't say whether or not I'm walking as a fox should, I did find it easier to suggest we walk like we had rocks in our back pockets.  It helped keep us from leaning forward and dropping our weight too heavily.

Once at our sit-spots (sit-spots themselves another topic for another blog), we sat and put on our deer ears.  Unfortunately, the neighboring farm had a tractor idling.  At first I though this would blow away our whole experiment, but it actually offered an interesting lesson.  When you "put your deer ears on," you find your hearing is not necessarily dominated by the loudest sound.  Instead, with your deer ears on, you listen forward, backward, to the left, and to the right.  We found that even with the bulldozer going, we could isolate that noise to only a part of our hearing range while honing in on sounds being made in different directions.  So, though we had to strain to hear them, we could still pick out the chickadees and other birds by focusing on the area of the woods their calls were coming from.  However, it was still a relief when the motor was switched off and the normal sounds of the forest could come clearly through.

Sitting at our sit spots for even twenty minutes brought a whole new perspective to the land I've been on for over 10 years.  It made its wildness deeper.  The deer ears made you not only listen to, say, the sound of the wind, but also how it varied in sound as it blew through the spruce, or over the dried goldenrod, or through the leafless hardwoods.  Squirrels chrrr-ing were no longer a wall of sound coming vaguely from the woods.  Rather, the strength of the sound revealed the chrrr-ing as layers of calls coming throughout the forest.  We sat so quietly, a blue jay flew right overhead without once wavering on her course.  Indeed, a squirrel nearly ended up in my lap, but yet he acted as if things were not quite as safe as they were at first appearing to him.  He was, in other words, suspicious that something was there after all although it wasn't acting as it normally did.  When I had to get up to leave, I got a sound round of scolding from him as I left my sit-spot rather noisily.  I imagine he felt rather smug after the initial adrenaline rush of fear - he just knew something was out of place, and he had been proven right. 

The fox-walking and deer-listening were awesome lessons.  They are definitely becoming an integral part of our curriculum.  As soon as we get a chance, we're going to begin on developing our "owl vision" too.  Looking forward to it!  (Hee hee - no pun intended.  ;) ).