Geocaching

I went geocaching yesterday with the grand kids and my son Jay. It was a lot of fun and we actually found some of the items we were looking for. We didn't find one item we were searching for, however. It was supposedly at a bus stop where there were four large planters with heavy vines and lattice work. We searched all through the planters and though we did find a pair of blue jeans just lying there, we never found the nano-magnet we were looking for. But what we did find was a tiny, baby tree frog. He was hiding on one of the vines and we almost missed him. He was brown and blended in so well with the vine that if we weren't truly searching we never would have seen him.

And that got me thinking. We drive or walk by hundreds of bus stops and other places every day and never see the little critters who make their homes in the trees, vines, ponds and canals around us. Finding this little guy was a treat, much better than finding the nano-thingy or whatever it was we were looking for. It was fun to see something wild in nature, even if it is only a lowly tree frog. Naturally, we pointed out our discovery to the kids who delighted in seeing something wild in nature too. Usually when they are looking at wild animals they are sitting on bleachers in some theme park somewhere. 

One of the places we went to on our journey was a pond where the geocache hint warned us about a resident alligator in the pond. We were wary since we did have three little kids with us, but there was a part of me that was really hoping to see the alligator. 

There is life all around us. When I look out over the sea and watch the waves, or gaze at a storm rolling in from the east over the ocean, I think about all the life that is teeming below. There are so many species in the sea that there are some we haven't discovered yet. When I look at the sky I think about all the birds who fly there. Sometimes, I see a lone duck flying across the sky and I feel sad because I know ducks have mates and I wonder if that duck's mate was shot down by a hunter. 

I've been accused of filtering everything I say and do and see and hear through my love for animals, which is so central to my life. I guess there are worse things to be accused of.  I admit it, when I am not reading about animals or writing about them, I am researching facts about them or watching documentaries, but not all documentaries. 

My husband is the type that likes to flip around the tv stations using the remote. Sometimes he'll stop on a nature program, thinking that maybe I would enjoy it. But I don't like those programs. They always, always start out by telling you how wonderful this critter or that critter is, how remarkable or talented they are. Then WHAM BAM, they hit you with some sobering, sad, tragic statistic about how we are killing them all and wiping out a whole species. This keeps me up for nights on end until I can't stand it anymore and have to cope by either settling down for the night with my buddy Capt. Morgan or stuffing my face with Twizzlers. 

The last such program I saw was on public broadcasting and was truly disturbing. It was about this really cool cave in Borneo that's home to millions of animals. Bats live there, and so do swifts, little black birds. The bats "hang out" during the day when the swifts are out doing their thing, and the swifts inhabit it during the nighttime when the bats are out eating mosquitoes. The swifts build amazing little nests using their own saliva and bits and pieces of whatever they can find. These nests adhere to the side of the cave, like tiny balconies hanging off the walls. It takes months of painstaking work for these little swifts to build their nests so they can lay eggs and raise their young. The nests are a stunning pearlized off-white that has a glow to it when illuminated by artificial light.

Of course, then the film took a turn for the worse. I knew it was coming when the narrator (why are they always so British?) said "The only known enemy for these little birds is man" as they show these Borneo bozos rappelling down the side of the cave and stealing the nests by the bushel. They take all the nests because they sell them for a delicacy called Bird's Nest Soup. Naturally, the fucking Asians are behind this epicurean nightmare, just like they are with Shark Fin soup and bear bile. So these little swifts who have been living side by side with bats and building their little homes for several millennium are being threatened with extinction for the sake of the palates of some assholes who can't see the forest for the trees.

I wish I could change the world, but I can't and all the Captain Morgan and Twizzlers in the world won't ever be enough to drown my depression about the state of affairs for animals in the world. Anyway geocaching just may be my new hobby. But it's more about just being in nature and seeing things I miss when I am in my car than it is about finding nano-magnets.I better enjoy the tree frogs before someone decides that eating them cures insomnia and they are wiped off the face of the earth.