Over the month of September I spent an hour outside each week taking in what I saw. One week I stepped outside of my dorm and into the woods behind the building, sitting down noting everything I saw, felt, and smelled. There was a cool breeze that day and made the hour very comfortable under the shade of the trees above me. I saw so many small insects walking around the ground. Ants, spiders, beetles all sorts of insects that I wouldn’t usually see without stopping and looking. The session that left the biggest impression on me, though was when I went back to my home town of San Antonio and spent my hour at McAllister Park.
During the weekend of September 19th my mom picked me up from St Edward’s and I spent the weekend at home. I took this opportunity to do my nature observing in San Antonio. I thought about where the best place to go to do my observing would be and I decided on McAllister Park. Mcallister Park is a local park some what near my house. It is home to a number of public soccer fields and playgrounds as well as park trails through thick woods filled with all sorts of wildlife. While walking through the park I came across a venue (the name for a group) of vultures picking apart a dead deer about half a mile into the trail. The vultures didn’t seem to mind me walking by and didn’t pay me much attention as they ate their meal. I saw all sorts of insects including a large yellow spider spinning it’s web. Near the center of the web was a small insect stuck onto the trap the spider had spun.
A little further down the trail I heard a bird call in the branches above me but could never see the bird that was making the noise. The whole walk had been relatively uneventful until a little further down the track I heard some rustling in the bush. I stopped and watched as a fez (a group) of armadillos crossed the track. It surprised me because it was the first time I had seen that many armadillos in a single group in my entire life. As I finished my walk I drove out of the park towards my house thinking about what I had just seen. As I was driving home I saw a dead armadillo, laying dead in the road.
Seeing the dead armadillo really took me back. I had just seen a group of them alive and then I saw this one, run over in the middle of a concrete road by a 3 ton vehicle. Seeing this made me think about how much damage man has done to the Earth and the complete disregard we’ve all had to it. Aldo Leopold said it best when he said, “The modern dogma is comfort at any cost”.
