PEPIN

“I got a peaceful easy feeling, and I know you won’t let me down, ‘cuz I’m already standing on the ground,” – Jack Tempchin

Hikes and other adventures in nature are often based on exploration and discovery.

Finding, researching, visiting, seeing, experiencing and enjoying new places can provide us with fun, learning and memories of those occasions that can sometimes last a lifetime.

For me, just reading or thinking about great explorers, like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, is enough to inspire me to take a wilderness hike or explore territory previously unknown to me.

In my earliest years, my parents took me on nature rides or outdoors to do things.

Other times, it’s curiosity, desire to learn and urges to discover and explore in my own blood that prompt me to get outside.

When outside experiencing these activities, we often find things that we pick up to inspect for reuse, monetary or other value. This finding can be fun, interesting and amusing or weird and creepy.

In my nature study and observation, I have enjoyed watching animals find things too. When I was a kid, we used to make chipmunk traps and watch and wait for the chipmunks to find and explore them.

A 7-year-old I know got me interested in watching “Hamster Maze” videos on YouTube that follow hamsters as they explore human-created mazes of all sorts.

I am intrigued by animal responses to finding objects.

Recently, we had 11 chicken eggs from a school experiment that were no longer viable for hatching. We placed the eggs on the grass underneath our bird feeder to watch what would happen to them.

The first day, it got dark without anything occurring. The next morning, I noticed that four of the eggs were missing without a trace.

My guess was that a red fox or maybe a raccoon, had picked up the eggs individually and ran off with them overnight. We had both of those animals in our yard overnight before.

Returning from work that day, two more eggs had gone missing, this time in broad daylight. In addition, one of the eggs was broken and only the brown shell remained.

The four eggs left on the ground underneath the bird feeders were still there the following morning. I sat and worked at our dining room table near the window that day.

I kept one eye watching through my peripheral vision, while wondering what had taken the eggs on those previous occasions.

At about noon, I noticed a red-bellied woodpecker land on the ground underneath the bird feeders a few feet away from the eggs. These woodpeckers love the suet at our feeders and sometimes also enjoy seeds from cakes we keep in feeder cages.

I have not seen them on the ground before.

This female bird hopped over to the egg closest to her. She cocked her head sideways and then poked her beak through the eggshell. She pulled it back out and repeated the action, making another hole.

This time, after she pulled her bill out, she tipped her head back and swallowed the white and yoke. She then flew away.

The next morning, all the eggs had disappeared, including the cracked shell and the one that the woodpecker had poked holes through. I never had the opportunity to see any animal take them.

We’ll have to repeat the experiment to see what else we can determine.

Things that I have found on recent hikes or other nature outings, include a dead coyote curled up along the side of the road. Deer skeletons, in much the same condition, with their rib cages visible and bones bared.

I found a very curious sight in our front yard as the snow was melting over several days. I saw an American toad, which looked almost black, sitting atop a pile of snow. It looked as though the snow had melted around the toad and exposed it.

I touched the back of the toad, and it was ice cold. The skin was loose and moved easily. Unfortunately, this toad was dead.

Its position on top at least a foot of snow was very strange to me. It was as if it had missed the normal hibernation time and showed up too late to dig into a burrow or other warm place before the temperatures dropped.

Maybe it came out of its hibernation during one of the recent warm spells we’ve had and then was exposed to the cold conditions when the snow returned – like the massive blizzard that dumped 3 feet of snow after a couple days of warm and rainy conditions.

Whatever happened, I’ll never know for sure.

On a drive out west, my buddy and I stopped out in the desert and walked around a bit, looking to see what we might see. We eventually found the skeleton of a horse that had fallen into a then dried riverbed and died. The drop was a good 10 feet or so.

I had never seen a dead horse before.

I have found all kinds of interesting things over the years out in nature, from vernal ponds packed with frog eggs, to migrating and spawning suckers and salmon, birds blown way off their migration paths or far from their typical geographic ranges, rare plants and so much more.

On a recent drive home from Minnesota, I noticed a flash of white at the side of the road ahead of us. It was an adult bald eagle that had chased a sandhill crane across five traffic lanes, trying to grab its snakelike neck.

It flew off after the failed attempt.

We once found a baby belted kingfisher that had emerged from a nest hole in the bank of a dirt road out in the woods. It was a strange place for the nest.

When I was a kid, on a nature drive with my parents, we found a dead snowy egret in a flooded backwoods marsh along the road. Those birds are not commonly seen here, dead or alive.

I’ve found deer antlers. When I was a kid, my dad had a moose tooth hanging from his rearview mirror that he’d found before moose were reintroduced to the region from Canada. I’ve found all kinds of cool driftwood, cool rocks and the skins of dragonflies and snakes.

Unfortunately, too many of the things I’ve found in the woods can be regarded as garbage, left there intentionally by humans.

Most of these items – like fast food wrappers and beer cans – are thrown from passing vehicles by people who are inconsiderate of the potential dangers they create for wildlife or the pollution they are producing for wetlands, forests, fields, deserts, mountains and more.

Hunters leave a lot of empty shotgun shells out there on the ground and anglers leave fishing line, old worm containers and lure wrappers along the riverbanks and lakeshores.

There are also people who dump full pick-up truck loads of trash into the woods, down hillsides, behind buildings or into waterways. This is so sickening.

Once, near Venice Beach in California, I found $20 on the ground as I was stepping out of a vehicle. When I was a kid, I was left outside in the car while my parents went into the home improvement store. I was walking around the parking lot edge, looking for rocks and grasshoppers, when I found a checkbook lost by a customer. We were able to return it to them.

I’ve also found small change, old and interesting bottles and glass utility pole insulators. I even found old cups, plates and saucers at a World War II prison camp.

However, the best things I have ever found on outings outdoors were the peace and quiet, relaxation, fun, time and clarity of mind to think and abundant senses of wonder, discovery, understanding, rest and recovery that I can’t seem to find elsewhere in ample amounts.

These are the things I need desperately and search for as often as possible.

Nature is the answer to so many human-related questions and problems.

Recurring note to self: Find more time to get outside.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.