Stalking the wild pawpaw

This is my mom.

Lately I've piqued her interest in the nature at our own doorstep, in our own backyard. So we go on walks sometimes here in the 12 acres of forest that is our backyard.

Home to a healthy and blase deer herd, wild turkey, a family of red fox, beavers, raccoons, opposums, cottontails and maybe even bob cats. Refuge to mallard and wood duck, great blue herons, red tailed hawks, kingfishers, giant pileated woodpeckers, and innumerable songbirds. Cut by streams and marshes that bloom wildflowers and weeds hiding box turtles, tree frogs, and blacksnakes. It is like a wildlife refuge back here.

It is all bottomland hardwood forest, swampy in places draining to a creek. Speckled with oaks, maples, beeches, and pine. Along the rich creek bed soils are black walnut, spice bush, sycamore, poplar, and even wild pawpaws like these I've pointed out to my mom to contemplate.

I like the idea of discovering "wildness" in our own backyards. Aldo Leopold, the poetic naturalist and father of ecology often wrote about this concept. He talked about our relationship to the land in great depth. He believed instead of searching for wildness in national parks and far off protected places, Americans needed to look more closely to home to discover nature in our own backyards. In our own lives.