Perhaps the best days I spent with my father were when we hunted ruffed grouse along the Snake and Knife rivers in Kanabec County.
Shooting grouse — that's how I became a serious birder.
The thing about hunting is you have to see. Not just look, but see. You have to pay attention.
This was my teen years, on Saturdays in the fall. We'd stop now and then to rest, my dad smoking. The smell of smoke in cold fall air is a sharp memory. There were the piercing cries of blue jays, my first great horned owl, the soft rap of woodpeckers when snow muffled our steps.
I fell in love with woods and rivers and fields and everything in them.
I had a great-aunt in Mora who fed birds, outside her kitchen window a feeder holding blue and yellow birds. She drove me to Crex Meadows, the wildlife area just across the Wisconsin line, to watch deer graze in the twilight.
So those people — my father, an old-lady aunt, an occasional uncle — were the gateway to where I am now. I still try to see, birds, of course, and, well, everything. A few years ago I discovered a slime mold growing on a tree in our neighborhood. You just have to be looking.
Kids need gateways to nature. That's the point.
