Featured Articles on the Wilderness in (y)our Backyard!!
Bad Habits by Jessica Dawson
Sitting on a fence: A lesson from the Junco
I will be the first to tell you that I have a few bad habits. I bite my bottom lip, I don’t take multi-vitamins and I over analyze certain situations. Recently though, I’ve started noticing one particularly bad habit that doesn’t make me very eco-friendly.
I have the television on constantly. It’s on when I come downstairs in the morning for breakfast and it’s still on when I’m having lunch, all the way through dinner and into the evening when I’m just hanging out on Facebook. I guess it’s comforting or something having the background noise.
I admit there are actually shows I will watch throughout the week. Those are:
NCIS (1 hour)
Modern Family (1/2 hour)
And I like to watch these if I’m not busy:
The Big Bang Theory (1/2 hour)
Chuck (1 hour)
The Simpsons (if it’s a slow day I’ll watch two episodes which will equal 1 hour)
PBS show like Nova if the topic is interesting (1 hour)
That’s only 5 hours where I’m genuinely watching something and actually engaged in a show. If my T.V. is on from 8am and until around 11…that means my TV is running 15 hours per day and 75 hours if it’s on Mon-Fri (when I’m home the most). If we subtract the 5 hours when I’m truly watching a show it comes down to 70 hours a week that the TV is on unnecessarily. 70 hours! That’s really eye opening and honestly a little embarrassing.
Well we all know that it’s a waste of electricity. But that’s not the only effect it has had in the last few weeks. I’ve stopped connecting as much with my family as much as I feel I should be. I’ve gotten soft, preferring to stay inside on a cold day in front of the “warm glowing, glowing warmth” of the television than doing something active.
Last week when the blizzard hit, our house experienced some fuzzy T.V. reception. We decided to click off the set since it wasn’t an interesting show anyway. Silence fell over the house. Then, it was interrupted as quickly as it came. What was that commotion going on outside? We went to the window and discovered it was all the birds flying and chirping around our yard. Since our house has the most bird feeders on our block and with the aftermath of the blizzard, the birds were all congregating in our backyard. It was like cruise ship passengers all crowding around for the midnight buffet (complete with ice sculptures). My parents and I, too, crowded around the kitchen window enjoying and connecting over the birds. We laughed as a squirrel desperately extended its body from the tree in an attempt to grab the birdfeeder, which it ended up doing.
This moment of bird watching even sparked a morning long quest for my dad and I to identify a dark bird never seen before in the backyard. It turned out to be a Dark-Eyed Junco. As it turns out, the male Dark-Eyed Juncos are darker in color and migrate farther south in the winter than their female counterparts.
So just how important was our birdfeeder? What other investigations could this inspire me to undertake with regards to our natural world? I was excited over a bird. The excitement of the morning birds spread throughout the family and we all came to have a bit more understanding about the natural world. It was contagious. It was something different and exciting from the everyday rut we’d gotten ourselves into. It brought happiness to a day otherwise marked with struggle and stress trying to “recover” after the snow storm.
And just how important is our connection to nature? Just a hunch, but probably more important than that re-run we’ve seen 10 times already.
-JD
I have the television on constantly. It’s on when I come downstairs in the morning for breakfast and it’s still on when I’m having lunch, all the way through dinner and into the evening when I’m just hanging out on Facebook. I guess it’s comforting or something having the background noise.
I admit there are actually shows I will watch throughout the week. Those are:
NCIS (1 hour)
Modern Family (1/2 hour)
And I like to watch these if I’m not busy:
The Big Bang Theory (1/2 hour)
Chuck (1 hour)
The Simpsons (if it’s a slow day I’ll watch two episodes which will equal 1 hour)
PBS show like Nova if the topic is interesting (1 hour)
That’s only 5 hours where I’m genuinely watching something and actually engaged in a show. If my T.V. is on from 8am and until around 11…that means my TV is running 15 hours per day and 75 hours if it’s on Mon-Fri (when I’m home the most). If we subtract the 5 hours when I’m truly watching a show it comes down to 70 hours a week that the TV is on unnecessarily. 70 hours! That’s really eye opening and honestly a little embarrassing.
Well we all know that it’s a waste of electricity. But that’s not the only effect it has had in the last few weeks. I’ve stopped connecting as much with my family as much as I feel I should be. I’ve gotten soft, preferring to stay inside on a cold day in front of the “warm glowing, glowing warmth” of the television than doing something active.
Last week when the blizzard hit, our house experienced some fuzzy T.V. reception. We decided to click off the set since it wasn’t an interesting show anyway. Silence fell over the house. Then, it was interrupted as quickly as it came. What was that commotion going on outside? We went to the window and discovered it was all the birds flying and chirping around our yard. Since our house has the most bird feeders on our block and with the aftermath of the blizzard, the birds were all congregating in our backyard. It was like cruise ship passengers all crowding around for the midnight buffet (complete with ice sculptures). My parents and I, too, crowded around the kitchen window enjoying and connecting over the birds. We laughed as a squirrel desperately extended its body from the tree in an attempt to grab the birdfeeder, which it ended up doing.
This moment of bird watching even sparked a morning long quest for my dad and I to identify a dark bird never seen before in the backyard. It turned out to be a Dark-Eyed Junco. As it turns out, the male Dark-Eyed Juncos are darker in color and migrate farther south in the winter than their female counterparts.
So just how important was our birdfeeder? What other investigations could this inspire me to undertake with regards to our natural world? I was excited over a bird. The excitement of the morning birds spread throughout the family and we all came to have a bit more understanding about the natural world. It was contagious. It was something different and exciting from the everyday rut we’d gotten ourselves into. It brought happiness to a day otherwise marked with struggle and stress trying to “recover” after the snow storm.
And just how important is our connection to nature? Just a hunch, but probably more important than that re-run we’ve seen 10 times already.
-JD