Since we're into life histories, I'll add to Stuart MacKay's comments that
my father was an avid hunter and fisher and took me out with him just about
as soon as I could walk. I can't imagine that that didn't have a lasting
effect. Nature was so neat that I couldn't get enough of it, always
walking or biking to the nearest empty lot or wooded city park anywhere I
lived as I was growing up. And I was kind of an odd little kid who
couldn't care less whether what he did was uncool (although I can relate
very well to Al Jaramillo's comments about this).

When I moved from Chicago to Miami at the tender age of 12, it really was
as if I'd died and gone to heaven! Frigatebirds and Bald Eagles flew over
our apartment building, there were Clapper Rails in a nearby remnant
mangrove swamp, and a few blocks away Least Terns nested on a land fill
that had just been pumped up to make more of Miami. Frogs, lizards, and
snakes of several kinds could be found within a few blocks. RIght there
near my home I could swim in Biscayne Bay with mask and snorkel and see
coral-reef fishes and manatees! I'm sure all this exposure hooked me
deeply and thoroughly, so that when puberty came it was added on top of
this commitment rather than substituted for it (this made me rather busy,
and I don't think it's subsided yet). The world has changed much in the
few (on a cosmic scale) years since.

Without having seen the study he mentioned, I agree with Chris Hill's
posting that the suburbs may produce more nature-lovers. Inner city people
don't see it at all, country people take it for granted (just ask a
resident at the door of his hut at the edge of a bird-filled jungle in some
third-world tropical country, "isn't nature grand?"). We suburbanites see
just enough of it around us to want more. And I really do feel that
because of the decline in opportunities for kids to see nature around them
for a lot of reasons, we'll have fewer naturalists in the future.

As several have written, it should be on of our major goals to get kids so
hooked on nature (forget about birding per se) that their interest will
hold through life and will be translated into not only voting for the
environment but leading others in the never-ending battle to save it.

Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416