The Apostle Paul’s description of himself as “One born out of time” or not born at the proper time, has for years struck me as a label for my own dilemma. Born in the middle of the baby boom generation, at mid-century, I belonged to a much earlier era, one which walked for recreation and still found enjoyment and exhilaration in the flight of a mosquito or the whirling wing-notes of a nighthawk knifing through the summer dusk.

Lorus and Margery Milne, who I called my aunt and uncle, though they were slightly more removed than this, were both model and mentor to me from the time I was six. A brief stay at our house shortly before I turned seven resulted in a lifelong bent towards nature and classifying. Lorus, carrying me on his 6’4” shoulders, helped me catch my first butterfly on our driveway gate, but more importantly, how to kill, relax, and mount it so that I still have that beauty 46 years later.

The Milne’s had come to Hollywood in 1957, the heyday of the travelogue, to film an episode of the then popular Jack Douglas’s Seven League Boots. Black and white television was still all one could watch, semi-amateur filming could still be shown, and people were still amazed by travels to Africa or the wilds of Borneo. By 1960 they could already boast of having traveled more than 330,000 miles in search of wild creation, this in a time long-before either frequent flyer miles, or the commonness of jet travel, or even jets.

Soon after their visit I began to pester my dad to go exploring in some wild area: we settled on the undeveloped area at the top of the hill we lived on the side of, soon to become one of the first shopping centers in California. An hour wandering around with my dad’s WWII rucksack was quite sufficient.

Two years later, in 1959, my parents gave me a membership in the National Audubon Society, and thus began a lifelong attraction to, and willingness to travel for, birds, and more generally, any chance to be away from the city.

I was soon taken under the wing of a number of older ladies, or so they seemed at the time, who went on Audubon field trips. It was on these trips that I began to learn about a wider appreciation for the natural world that I was growing up in the middle of.

Birding became one of the things that set me apart from all the other kids I knew, like the Scottish dancing I did for several years, or the ballet I took to improve my dancing. With interests like these, who needed enemies?

I birded around southern California all my teenage years, acquiring the rare bird bug about 1966, and chasing rare species all over the state for several years. But gradually poetry, and the desire to be loved, began to crowd out birding trips, and I only picked up my binoculars sporadically during college.

By my final year in college, at the University of California in Berkeley, I was still enthralled by nature, but doing much little birding. I went camping, snow shoeing, rock climbing, and wrote more and more. My life began to revolve around words, and on a spiritual quest that covered every road but the right one.

Finally understanding who Jesus Christ was and what He wanted from me came at the end of five years of disjointed and distressing journeys. Moving from diligent teenage church attender, singing in the choir and being an alter boy, though rejecting Christianity as useless, embracing first atheism, then various eastern religions, astrology, and Buddhism, I finally was found by God in a little counter-cultural Four Square Gospel church a woman I had once been engaged to took me to. But that is another story.

Married to my only wife Becky in 1975, our travels ended in Dallas in 1978. We settled in the Lochwood Park area in 1982, and have lived in the same house ever since.

From the time I was perhaps eleven or twelve, I have been enthralled by the idea of knowing everything about some little spot. I often thought of taking just one square foot of ground and trying to exhaustively understand everything that was taking place in that little microcosm of earth. I knew that this would extend many feet down, and include more things that I could not see with the naked eye than the large organisms we notice. This fed into a passion to be able to give names to things, and a life-long passion to find books that would tell me the names of the things I saw.

I started collecting bird books from the time I was twelve, but by the end of college I began adding field guides to more and more areas, until now I have over 150 field guides to everything from snow crystals to minerals, mammals to butterflies, trees to lichens, and of course, birds all over the world.

Once I moved to the Lochwood area, I began to tramp around the flood control areas along the streams that bracket the Lochwood subdivision, along Sinclair and Lippitt. Even in this small area, I was often amazed at the diversity of living things, and began to think what a project it would be to write a book about the natural history of these little bits of forest in the middle of suburban Dallas. But who would publish such a book, and who would buy it? Ever the dreamer and planner not the doer, those ideas joined many other in the limbo of “wouldn’t it be fun to . . .” land.

By the usual strange and unorthodox chain of events, I became a web master in 1998, knowing little about what I was doing when I began. But as few people seemed to know much more, I had lots of time to study, both what was being done, and trying to think about what could be done that wasn’t being implemented. I spent hours looking at web sites across the whole web of the world.

Alongside seeing a sameness between websites that still exists, I started to find unusual niche sites, coving some small area that was vastly interesting to someone, someone who would spend hours adding material about knitting needles, or ant lions, or some area they loved. In 1999 a teenage birder, Derek Hill, told me about his site telling the world about the wonders of Spring Creek Forest Preserve. I visited his site and was hooked.

One entry in the Spring Creek Forest site spoke of trout lilies being in bloom. I had no idea what trout lilies were, and did a search on the web. One of the sites that turned up was that of Zen Sutherland, about his beautiful western North Carolina. A short clip from his page hints at who he is:

I have no credentials for what i do on this webpage other than my deep appreciation and thankfulness for the beautiful place that i live. I do not apologize for my amateurish ways, nor do i care to explain why i do not capitalize the word 'i' when not at the beginning of a sentence.

Ok, ok... too many people have mentioned my 'misspelling' of the word 'I', and so i will hint at the problem. In the big scheme of things, 'i' am no better/worse than 'he' or 'she', so why capitalize it? It seems like an ego-boo to me, and i don't even capitalize the word 'he' when referring to a http://www.main.nc.us/naturenotebook/contactme.html

As I looked at these sites, and began to think about what the web might be capable of doing, it seemed the answer to my two questions earlier about who would publish a book about the Lochwood Park area, and who would buy it were both answered by the same thing: the web was free publishing, and people who were interested would find it. And I could do it over a period of time, unlike a book, which must be finished, and once published, is unlikely to be redone.

I had been writing observations about the natural history of this area since we moved here in 1982, but the pages were sparsely populated, and very incomplete. But they seemed like a place to begin. At the same time, an old passion was being reborn. In June of 2000 I bought my first digital camera.

I had taken pictures all my life, but other than pictures of our kids, I had done little with a camera for 20 years. Digital images would change that in an exhilarating and life-changing way.

My first pictures on the first day I had the camera were of plants, and I rapidly began taking pictures of everything I could find in Lochwood Park and the rest of the neighborhood. With no film costs, and instant feedback on whether one got the shot or not, digital imagery was like being given an unlimited budget to create a movie. The only limits were time and patience. Which are both serious limits.

I have progressed through three digital cameras now, and much of my day-to-day work is now with digital images, and traveling to other parts of the world to take those images. But this has also allowed me to acquire wonderful equipment to use in picturing Lochwood Park on this site. If you want to know about the equipment I am now using you can go to this page.

So, after thirty-five years of thinking about it, this site is the beginning of trying to show what lives in one small part of this wonderful creation we live in the midst of, and seldom notice. Enjoy it.