Hi Tweets,

First, Quinn, never fear: give your daughter a few more years, and she'll probably be into the swifts again. I'm 28 now and clearly remember going through a surly stage from 15-17.

My story...I can't tell you what specifically got me into nature, but my earliest up-close encounters with birds happened at a tiny wildlife rescue clinic in Snohomish. As a 15 year-old, I had a barred owl get its talons entangled in my hair (note to self: do not flip head upside down to get owl off your crown); I nurtured more crows than I can count; I watched birds live and die and be released. Which remain with me? All do, but a few stand out: pounding on a pneumatic pigeon's back to help it breathe (it worked); slowly rehabilitating a ferriginous hawk who'd been shot seven times for "fun." She recovered, but we never could release her - so I can't help but feel that "recovery" is a relative term. Holding a temporarily blind juvenile bald eagle on my lap (!) to feed it salmon chunks, and nearly losing an eye when the bird missed the food. Watching a heron dwindle away in the back of its crate: I've never seen the look of the wild so clearly as I did then, when I saw in its eyes something coursing and inimitable, a spirit that preferred death to captivity. Our resident crows and jays, the blind great-horned owl, our cranktastic barn owl, the fledgling starlings we cursed constantly but fed anyway...it was an incredible place to spend my high school years, and it only fueled the deep, personal, and constantly unfolding relationship I have with nature. As I go off to Arizona later this month to get inner city kids out into the national parks, I'll have my binoculars in hand and a detailed lesson plan on how springtime birds are just like high school kids - maybe I can spark that same sense of connectivity and passion in one of them.

Meg Matthews
Communications Specialist
(T/Th/afternoons on Fridays)
UW Botanic Gardens
206-543-2608
gavigan at u dot washington dot edu

Celebrating 75 years of the Washington Park Arboretum in 2009