Naturalist hikes in Dallas

I should put a bag of them in the bathroom for in case the night light fails.

😂

A really cheap pyrotechnic show. Hard on the teeth, though

Lightless night hikes became very popular. One aspect of the hike was observing the night sky. If there was an overcast, you were out of luck, but in the summer the skies were usually clear. In the city there was light pollution, which drastically reduced the visible stars, but that was sort of an advantage because you could concentrate on certain things like the importance of the north star, and finding the planets and the ecliptic and a few constellations, and getting oriented using the stars.

You could find the ecliptic by finding two planets and lining them up or finding two constellations of the zodiac and lining them up. It wasn't that difficult. People have little knowledge about the night sky, and the they responded because they wanted to learn, and it was important to me also. If you're going to teach you have to have some knowledge, and it inspired me to to learn quite a bit about the night sky.

An important thing to learn during a night hike is how to use your night vision. I first heard about that while I was in the Army during basic training.

Night vision is seeing with very little light. It really is poor, but it is better than nothing when you don't have a flashlight. Instead of looking straightforward, you look off to the side, either side or above and below where you want to see. You're using your peripheral vision, and it's difficult to get used to.

In the center of the retina are cones used for day vision in color, and it requires a sufficient amount of light. So you look directly ahead to see something. That goes without saying.

For night vision, rods are located in a little circle around the center of the retina, so you can only see off to the side. It requires very little light, in fact too much light will disable it. When you start using your night vision, you realize how really poor it is, and it must be a vestige of a better eye for night vision.

Owls, for example, have relatively large eyes packed with rods, and they can see very well at night. But they can also see during the daytime because I have see them flying. And I always wondered why the area surrounded the owl eye is concave like a dish.

I always thought it had something to do with improving their vision, but that wasn't true. It turns out that the concavity is merely to collect sound and direct it towards the ear opening at the edge of the concavity. It's sort of like cupping your ears. That's another thing to try to bring in distant or weak sounds.

Amazingly enough, the owl can locate something, center it as well as judge the distance on a vertical plane as well as a horizontal plane with their ears because one ear opening is higher than the other.
We can do that somewhat by tilting our heads. But an owl can locate something fairly precisely, such as a mouse, just by hearing it move.

On night hikes with flashlights, one can think of the group trudging along the trail as being a train with lights blazing, not only from the front but also from the sides, oblivious to anything but that which intercepts it's terrible eye beans. It doesn't hear, smell, or feel because it's trying to transform the night into day, where the sense of sight, thought, and memory are so dominating. And from the point of view of the plants and animals, we must seem like a huge, scary, obtrusive machine thundering through their home.

Now, if we walk without flashlights, the whole relationship is changed. We become a giant metaphorical snake wending its way along the trail. The snake uses all its senses to their fullest: It's day and night vision; its keen sense of hearing; its sense of smell to grasp the various odors of plants, flowers, and the soil; and its skin to feel the subtle changes of temperature, humidity, wind, and pressure. Unlike the daytime, when vision and thought prevail, sensing and feeling are qualities of the night.

"Naturalist hikes in Dallas"

And, I thought you were talking about taking hikes nude 😎 When mentioning hiking with no flashlights, it started to make real sense 😅