Learning to Sit and Observe in Nature

Jean MacGregor, The Evergreen State College

1. Adopt the discipline of getting to know one place very well. The Wilderness Awareness School in Snohomish County teaches its participants to find your secret spot and visit it over and over so you come to know it intimately. This place need not be in the wilderness. It could be in your backyard garden, a city park with some trees and shrubs or somewhere in the Evergreen forest. It is valuable to find a place where you have a view; if you are nestled too deep in the bushes, you may not see much. An edge between communities is often rich (a pond edge, a forest edge). Camouflage isnt necessary but wearing darker clothing helps. Take something to sit on (a cushion or stool) to be comfortable for periods of time.

2. Learn to become still enough that the living things around you are no longer alarmed or
anxious that you are there, and take up their regular patterns again. Strive to be still in your body and tranquil in mind. Body stillness Do some stretching before you set out. Sit in a symmetrical position. If your neck and shoulders are tense, rub them or exercise them to relax. Have a watch and a notepad nearby. Breathe slowly: concentrate on long exhalations, and breathing slowly and quietly enough so that people near you cannot hear you breathing. Practice diaphragmatic breathing to fill your lungs fully. Mind stillness There are many possible strategies here. Practice all of them for a while and then choose what works for you. Many of these are the same strategies that are used in teaching biofeedback or in practices of meditation to achieve the alpha brain-wave state, one of calm and repose. Ways of quieting the roof chatter in your head include: Breath-and-rock sufi style. Breath quietly and repeat a mantra (Hah-dee which means tranquility). Focus on all your senses and wide angle awareness. Listen outward, focusing on the sounds close by to the sounds further away. Imagine that you are a tree (especially if you are leaning against one!) Adopt an attitude of calm gratitude and tranquil thanksgiving. Your thoughts will wander. Thats okay, just bring your thoughts back to your surroundings and the present. You might write down the issues that are distracting you so that you can return to them later.

3. Develop deep sensory awareness: Work at tuning up your senses, and adopt a wide-angle way of looking at the world around you (hold arms out to the side with thumbs upsee if you can bring both thumbs into your widest-angle vision.)

Experiment with different movie camera angles: wide angle, close-ups (using binoculars); unfocussed squinting; listen with eyes closed; lie down and look up. Sometimes even watching an animal (and making direct eye contact) will frighten it. Sometimes soft focus watching will help, or looking downward. Make note of how your watching of the animal or not watching it directly, will influence the animals behavioral response. 4. Record your observations: Make brief notes about what you are seeing. Later, for your journal work, you may want to describe in depth and map what you saw. A Wilderness Awareness School technique: Set up your observing in 10-minute intervals. Record your observations in the first ten minutes, then the next 10 minutes, and then the next.The rationale for this is that you can learn how long it takes for birds around you to settle down and begin to go about their regular activity. Most importantly, it helps you recall all the things that you observed, in their sequence. 5. Learn from these experiences. Ask yourself nothing at all and wait for insight to emerge. Or ask yourself some questions: What am I seeing? What is this telling me? What is this teaching me? = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = Some notes about bird calls: Bird vocalization is ubiquitous. As you become more observant in the natural world, work to understand why and what birds are communicatingas you observe birds you will come to recognize that they vocalize in different ways for different purposes. See how many vocalizations from your fall quarter sight list you can identify 1. Songs. What we know as bird songs repeated calls, mostly by male birds to attract mates, mark territory, and communicate with and stimulate their mate. 2. Alarm calls. A variety of calls that birds make to sound alarms. Be aware that mammals and other birds know these alarm calls very well and are influenced by them. With some birds, the cessation of singing or companion calls is the alarm. 3. Male-to-male aggression callswhen males tussle over territory. 4. Companion calls: many birds twitter (such as kinglets, chickadees, juncos) to their companions as they feed or move through trees. Ducks and geese communicate in flight. The corvid family (jays, crows) has elaborate vocalizations among their family groups. 5. Young birds begging callsthese can be little soft chirps in the nest or whining calls by birds who have fledged but still expect food from parents. These calls can make young birds very vulnerable, for hawk and owl predators are always listening for these vocalizations! (Dont expect these during the winter months.) Many mammals vocalize also. Deer snort when alarmed. Squirrels and chipmunks have alarm calls which are often mistaken for bird calls. In the mountains, marmots whistle and picas give off a nasal, squeaky peent.