I am pleased to offer the 16th of my new GBH Brief Form Posts to my website (Less than three minutes to read!). I tend to get a bit long-winded with my routine Posts. I don’t want my enthusiasm for thoroughness and detail to discourage readers. So I will publish these brief Posts regularly.

Brief-Form Post on My Timid Re-Venture (post-surgery) into Forever Wild’s Shoal Creek Preserve Near Florence, Alabama!

August 18, 2018, while in Florence, Alabama taking photographs in preparation for my October 13, 2023 presentation at the city’s 27th Annual Horticulture and Tree Conference, I stopped by the nearby Forever Wild Shoal Creek Nature Preserve, my first “wildland” venture since triple bypass surgery eight weeks prior. I admit to a bit of trepidation as I wandered from the trailhead. I didn’t penetrate the 298 acres for much more than 15 minutes, turning around well short of Shoal Creek, my future destination once I return to greater strength and confidence…in cooler fall weather.

I had no expectation of what my tentative ramblings would reveal. I had not been here before. Henry David Thoreau’s sage wisdom accompanied me: It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see. I wanted to accept whatever Nature revealed in my short venture. Watch for a future longer Post. I concluded that even a brief trip into Nature’s out there can inform, inspire, and stimulate observations and reflection.

A Condensed Portfolio of Things Worth Seeing

I found a nice trailhead sign, made all the more impressive back-dropped by a cerulean sky patterned with a handful of slight cumulus. I also liked the idea of an adobe red information marquis roof.

The trail enters a meadow that appears to be occasionally mowed, once every summer, to maintain its open condition.

Partridge pea provided late summer color…American goldfinch color!

A meadow several hundred yards deeper is inexorably converting to forest. Bushy eastern cedar as large as 25-feet tall and wide are already claiming territory, while an admixture of herbs, woody brush, and tree seedlings is gaining purchase. A forest will emerge, heavy at first to early successional pioneer species, then in time to longer lived upland hardwood.

I recorded this 0:17 video of the active conversion without narrative.

I accept the challenge of distilling these Brief-Form Posts to a single distinct reflection, a task far more elusive than assembling a dozen pithy statements. Sometimes, I borrow a distinct reflection from the truly great minds of conservation and environmental antiquity, but for this one I simply offer my own simple reflection:

• I learned to manage my expectations, accepting the ordinary as special when events recently curtailed my health, strength, and endurance.

NOTE: I place 3-5 short videos (15-seconds to three minutes) on my Steve Jones Great Blue Heron YouTube channel weekly. All relate to Nature-Inspired Life and Living. I encourage you to SUBSCRIBE! It’s FREE. Having more subscribers helps me spread my message of Informed and Responsible Earth Stewardship…locally and globally!

I am pleased to offer the 15th of my new GBH Brief Form Posts to my website (Less than three-minutes to read!) I tend to get a bit long-winded with my routine Posts. I don’t want my enthusiasm for thoroughness and detail to discourage readers. So I will publish these brief Posts regularly.

Brief-Form Post on Spring Wildflower Delights at Wheeler NWR

March 11, 2023, I returned to the east-central arm of Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge, fifteen miles south of my Madison, Alabama residence. It’s my place of observation, reflection, and discovery. I journeyed there with no particular purpose in mind beyond inhaling Nature’s spring elixir. I’ll publish a future Post offering a wider taste of what I experienced. For this Brief-Form Post I restrict my focus and observations to the glory of a few special spring wildflowers that greeted me.

Spring Wildflower Menagerie

The forest canopy remains nearly wide open during the second week of March, drawing me to her this time of year. The canopy is awakening even as the spring ephemeral ground vegetation is already wide awake, with the spring sun kissing the forest floor full-lipped. Sweet Betsy trillium are in full flower, a delight I will never tire of seeing each spring, whether one or dozens lie ahead.

John Muir recognized that Nature’s beauty, magic, wonder, and awe touch us deeply:

The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls.

Woodland phlox (right) and bulbous cress revel in the seasonal forest floor sunlight. They’ll be long gone after the canopy closes. Their seasonal life-window closes before the frenzied hordes of mosquitoes greet me when I return during the early summer.

Native deciduous mountain azalea is another of my lifetime favorites. It always sparks treasured memories of my three college-summer employment positions with the Maryland Forest Service in the central Appalachians. Some of my best memories involve work or recreation in forest ecosystems. I recall wise advisors who urged me, “Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life.”

I’ve been blessed to do just that. Sure, I recall days when pressures and stress mounted, yet my positive recollections brighten the darker memories, driving shadows deep into crevices. Life is good when I can see red buckeye heavy with its spiked red blossoms, torches of crimson held high in the spring understory.

Other wildflowers greeted me. These few allstars will suffice.

I accept the challenge of distilling these Brief-Form Posts to a single distinct reflection, a task far more elusive than assembling a dozen pithy statements. Sometimes, I borrow a distinct reflection from the truly great minds of antiquity, for no matter how hard I try I am unable to best those whom I have followed and revered across my seven-plus decades. In this case, it is John Muir who captured the essence of Nature’s elixir 120 years ago:

• The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls.

NOTE: I place 3-5 short videos (15-seconds to three minutes) on my Steve Jones Great Blue Heron YouTube channel weekly. All relate to Nature-Inspired Life and Living. I encourage you to SUBSCRIBE! It’s FREE. Having more subscribers helps me spread my message of Informed and Responsible Earth Stewardship…locally and globally!

March 16, 2023 I co-led (with Mike Ezell, AL State Parks Naturalist Emeritus) a Nature walk at Joe Wheeler State Park for members of the Huntsville LearningQuest class that had just completed a seven-week course on the State Parks of North Alabama. I sauntered the woods for an additional two hours after the formal field excursion. This Post presents some of the miscellaneous delights I encountered.

Miscellaneous Delights

And a fine/vine day it was! Like so much of the forest buffering Lake Wheeler, acquired by the Corps of Engineers and TVA during the early 1930s, the Joe Wheeler State Park forests we hiked had either been in active agriculture or had recently been abandoned as a consequence of the Great Depression. Grape vine thickets developed as a result of natural succession and forest regeneration. The vines, equal in age to the hardwood main canopy, remain a major component in the maturing second growth forest.

Mike is the consummate naturalist and educator, demonstrating his passion and joy of teaching and learning, holding everyone’s rapt attention and leading them into a forest of discovery and learning!

Every tree and stand has a story to tell. Bent and bowed, this ten-inch diameter tree bore the brunt of a falling neighbor, not decaying on the ground. The blow permanently brought the still-living stem to near horizontal, now shaded heavily by the intact canopy above. How long will it survive? It’s entered the beginning of its end. It will not survive the low energy light reaching its leaf-factories.

Nature’s magic and mystery draws my attention, often generating mental word play as I contemplate what I see. I wondered as I admired the deeply-furrowed and warty complexion of the hackberry at left how its bark compares to the bite of the nearby sugar maple! I often encounter sign-consuming trees. Nathing in Nature is static! Trees grow around fences, signs, and nails. Many a sawyer at a sawmill leaner the hard way that consumed steel can ruin a well-sharpened saw!

Several times hotter than the surface of the sun, thunderstorm lightning bolt can scar even a mighty oak. This white oak shows a vertical seam that reaches from the ground to its top. I’ve seen other trees shattered by such a strike, blown apart and instantly killed. This individual remains alive, vigor reduced, yet still producing acorns and performing its most essential evolutionary function — procreation, albeit with diminished carbohydrate production.

I love tree form oddities and curiosities. The hickory at left and the white oak grew clubbed branches…anomolies that few through-hikers would have observed. I see such phenomenon because I look! Normally a tree rejects a dead branch at the main stem. For some reason not clear to me the trees continued to sustain bark and wood production to the stubs.

My four-acre home lot in New Hampshire supported an ancient northern hardwood forest, including some very large American beech, yellow birch, and sugar maple. However, here in northern ALabama I did not expect to encounter a four-foot diameter sugar maple. I am sure there is a rich story with this one!

Loblolly Pine Curiosity

I’ve written previously about finding circumferential bark redges on loblolly pine. I’m convinced that they result from yellow-bellied sapsucker bird-peck and resultant microbial action generating the ridging.

I recorded this 3:08 video to add depth and a fuller visual image.

Without additional observations and reflections, here are more images of this fascinating phenomenon.

I had photographed other examples at Chapman Mountain Nature Preserve.

And at Monte Sano State Park.

I shall always remain an enthusiast for tree form oddities and curiosities!

Alabama State Parks Foundation

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

• Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. (Albert Einstein)
• And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. (John Muir)
• Nature’s delights lie hidden in plain sight wherever I enter her forested domain!

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied untold orders of magnitude:

Steve’s Three Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), and Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

• I love hiking and exploring in Nature
• I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
• I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
• I don’t play golf!
• I actually do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
• Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grand kids, and all the unborn generations beyond
• And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future

All three of my books (Nature Based Leadership; Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading; Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) present compilations of personal experiences expressing my (and co-author Dr. Wilhoit for Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) deep passion for Nature. All three books offer observations and reflections on my relationship to the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any and all from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

Big Cove Creek and the Hays Preserve

April 13, 2023 I visited Huntsville, Alabama’s Hays Nature Preserve, focusing my limited wanderings near where Big Cove Creek enters the Flint River. Big Cove Creek flows south (left) in a channel evidencing historic linearization, appearing more like a canal than a natural, winding stream. The creek enters the Flint River (right) with an accommodating inflection downstream, a natural signature of stream/river confluences across the globe.

Some photos require little interpretation, observations, and reflections. I snapped the above photos from the footbridge (below left) from downstream, looking north (above left) and southwest (above right). The view below right looks northeast across the creek from above the bridge. All four images show the rich reflective stream surface.

This fifth image shows the creek entering the Flint from the right. The Hays Greenway bridge crosses the Flint 500 feet downstream (lower center photo through the trees).

The Greenway bridge is necessarily sturdy. The Flint flushes frequently and savagely. This northerly view places the Flint’s downstream to the left, where within ten miles it meets the Tennessee River.

Greenways and Sewer Lines

The same view from a few steps back, offers some important signage. This past spring semester I co-taught The Streams (and Sewers) of Madison County with colleague Jim Chamberlain. We combined streams and sewers for reasons that may not be apparent at first glance. First, across the US, our streams throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th were, in reality, our sewers. The ‘solution to pollution was dilution.’ Only with extensive federal regulations in the latter half of the 20th century did we begin widespread sewage treatment.

The greenway passing south through the Hays Preserve is a sewer line right-of-way. The sign here, looking north across the Flint River, warns of the treated water outfall on the far side. Decades ago, Big Cove Creek served as the sewer. The day I visited, the treated water was much clearer than the still somewhat turbid water of the Flint River.

I’m reminded of a mid-20th century clarion call of conservation warning from Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac). He worried whether we would ever awaken to the need to identify, protect, and preserve wildness:

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

Leopold, I am grateful, proved overly pessimistic. He wrote those words when sewage clogged our streams, a condition we’ve remedied. Today, we are managing a level of wildness within Huntsville, Alabama, America’s Rocket City!

The Flint is a delightful river; its mood varying with rainfall patterns. Here are the bridge views east (upstream) and west (downstream). Darkening sky, fresh spring greens, and perfect afternoon light brought the scene to life!

As I’ve observed frequently, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video raises the return yet another order of magnitude! Here’s my 2:08 video of views up- and downstream.

Expanding on the sewer line element, the photo below left shows the actual outflow point (lower left open water). The image below right looks south over the same ‘candy cane’ vent pipe to the river.

Two-tenths of a mile to the north, another telltale vent pipe reminds me that many of our local greenways follow sewer lines (in this case, treated water).

Match Stick Forest: A Special Feature

This special riparian forest feature sits just west of the parking lot where Big Cove Creek enters the Flint River. I can only speculate how it earned its moniker. The grove is densely populated with sweetgum and oak, perhaps ten to fifteen years ago bringing to mind a forest of slender matches (or pencils). Today, the stand is rapidly self-thinning, looking less and less like matchsticks. I’ll continue to watch it develop.

I recorded this 1:44 video to once again provide a clearer depiction of a special place.

Hays is indeed a special place, made all the more endearing by its rich history, a location in the state’s fastest growing metropolitan area, and by its diverse and dynamic ecosystem elements.

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

• If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. Aldo Leopold
• All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish. Leopold
• Every parcel of land (whether back Forty or urban Nature Preserve) has its own story to tell.

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied untold orders of magnitude:

Steve’s Three Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), and Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

• I love hiking and exploring in Nature
• I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
• I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
• I don’t play golf!
• I actually do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
• Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grand kids, and all the unborn generations beyond
• And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future

All three of my books (Nature Based Leadership; Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading; Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) present compilations of personal experiences expressing my (and co-author Dr. Wilhoit for Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) deep passion for Nature. All three books offer observations and reflections on my relationship to the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any and all from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

April 19, 2023 I arrived about noon at Alabama’s Lake Lurleen State Park, then departed April 20 after a morning meeting of the Alabama State Parks Foundation Board. I focus this Post on the splendor of the lake the first afternoon and snippets I captured at sunrise the next morning during a quick encounter lakeside before my departure.

The lake did not disappoint, a seamless drape of sky and water.

My hollow words sometimes add little incremental value to my photographs and videos. Such is clearly the case with the cerulean sky, rippled water, and scenic shoreline. My two-minute noon video speaks volumes.

The chattering barn swallows surging from their nests under the dock add a celebratory touch to the scene.

Every view along the lakeside trail is framed by shoreline trees.

The water and sky offer a perfect complementary match!

My 1:48 video captures the lakeside beauty, magic, wonder, awe, and inspiration of Lake Lurleen State Park.

Never one to miss a dawn in Nature, I found another day of joy at 7:15 AM. One lovely day simply transitioned to another. No, perfect weather is not the rule at any of our parks, yet one should never be surprised when perfection make a repeat performance. John Muir expressed the day’s radiance:

The sun shines not on us but in us.

My 1:36 sunrise video simply amplified the ambience.

Wisps of morning mist rose from the still-spring-cool water (below right). A single swallow, among the many greeting the morning, is silhouetted against the sky (below right).

Edward Abbey likewise appreciated the magic of brilliant sunshine:

There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

I suppose the domestic grey geese, cavorting noisily near the park headquarters, likewise saw value in the new day.

My 30-second video captured their new day welcome.

My Lake Lurleen Post offers little ecological insight, explores no wildland mystery, nor reveals any deep forest secrets. Instead, it highlights the special delights of a brief late spring amble lakeside at Lake Lurleen State Park, a west-central Alabama gem.

Alabama State Parks Foundation

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

• There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere. (Edward Abbey)
• The sun shines not on us but in us. (John Muir)
• Nothing exceeds the magic, inspiration, and sacred spirit of a placid lake surrounded by forest.

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied untold orders of magnitude:

Steve’s Three Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), and Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

• I love hiking and exploring in Nature
• I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
• I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
• I don’t play golf!
• I actually do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
• Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grand kids, and all the unborn generations beyond
• And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future

All three of my books (Nature Based Leadership; Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading; Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) present compilations of personal experiences expressing my (and co-author Dr. Wilhoit for Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) deep passion for Nature. All three books offer observations and reflections on my relationship to the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any and all from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.