Growing up with Mother Nature

I grew up in Maryland on a large property that included a dark, cluttered, dusty tractor shed and nearby woods. My family often came across black widow spiders, whose poisonous bite can cause severe abdominal pain, nausea, difficulty breathing, high blood pressure and fever. My brother and I knew to be wary of where we stuck our hands.

But Mom isn't one of those overprotective parents who tell their kids, "Don't bring that in here!" She thinks we can learn something from nature, so often she beats us to it.

One day, Mom decided to trap her latest black widow find in a jar. She placed it on top of the kitchen cabinets. By standing on a chair, my brother and I could see the dainty, glistening black spider spinning its new web.

Later that week, Mom realized that our new pet had produced a large egg sac, so she carried the jar outside and quickly put an end to the whole episode. The risk of scores of black widows roaming the household was the line between studying nature and getting out the bug spray.

In the shark tank

That's a pretty good indicator of where Mom stands on the animal-appreciation spectrum. Over the years, our household pets included mice, a guinea pig, hermit crabs, a cat, parakeets, a cockatiel, a nest of starlings, betta fish, several dogs, a python and a bearded dragon.

A few years ago, I got a newspaper assignment to write about the shark tank in Camden's Adventure Aquarium -- from under the water. I knew just whom to invite. The sharks were curious and swam past Mom and me in a looping parade, their black pupils cocking toward us as they slid by.

It probably wasn't the first time I've been close to a shark. In a lifetime of summers on the South Jersey shore, barring bad weather, my parents never kept us out of the ocean. Who knows how many sand tiger sharks cruised by, beyond the breakers, while we splashed near the shore?

(To be sure, once in the Virgin Islands my parents did hound us kids out of the water because a five-foot barracuda was moving in.)

A startled crab

Some adults are afraid to jump in the ocean, but thanks to my childhood exposure, I don't complain when startled crabs pinch my toes. I understand that it's my fault for intruding on their space.

Once during my childhood, I was paddling alone in a giant North Carolina ocean tidal pool. Deep in the murky green water, my foot must have come down on a flounder. There's no sensation like accidentally stepping on a live fish.

A few years later on Florida's Gulf Coast, I took a leisurely swim while Dad fished on the beach. His figure grew small as I paddled farther and farther out -- until a dark, glistening, triangular fin slid out of the water about four feet from my face.

I doubt Michael Phelps could have beaten me back to the beach. I can still see that graceful fin in my mind's eye -- though now I'm sure it was a dolphin.

Rescuing a tarantula

Another time, in a small pool at a resort in the Virgin Islands, my parents asked the man cleaning the pool to rescue a drowned tarantula with his skimmer. When the tarantula surprised us by un-crumpling its long, brown, hairy legs, we trapped it in a large snack container, stuffed it deep into our luggage, and brought the spider home.

We had to sneak our new friend past the customs officers who asked whether we had any animals in our bags. Popular phobias about tarantulas notwithstanding, years later I read that most tarantula bites cause no greater harm to people than bee stings, and that tarantulas carry no major diseases.

We fixed up a terrarium for the spider and fed it a steady stream of fat black crickets. I can only imagine what our new pet must have been thinking. "I've died and gone to heaven," maybe?

Befriending a raccoon

My parents told our cousins that if they wanted to see some animals, they should stick close to my brother and me, who seemed to discover creatures wherever we went.

And I don't think I'll ever stop noticing animals. When my husband and I first spotted our resident raccoon, raiding the dumpster outside our suburban apartment complex, we named him Gilbert -- Gilly for short -- because we had just returned from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

Last year, I surprised Gilly one night as I was putting out my garbage bag. He looked at me and froze, except for his front left paw, which he slowly withdrew from a discarded canister like a hand from a cookie jar.

Two summers ago, I found a ten-inch red-eared slider turtle scrambling through the bush outside our apartment -- no doubt abandoned by its thoughtless owner, since the sliders aren't native to the Philadelphia region. The turtle munched vegetables in our bathtub for several days before I found someone who could take it.

Even in the middle of Philadelphia, nature is always waiting, if you'll look. A few years ago, while I was standing on Fairmount Avenue, a hawk whizzed over my left shoulder to grab a mouse on the sidewalk.

Wounded bird

These memories were prompted by my discovery last week of a bird on Walnut Street, outside Broad Street Review's building. I'd never seen one like it before -- of medium size with long pink toes and intricate bars of black and brown on its back, interrupted by soft grey streaks. Its wide black eyes rode high on either side of its domed head, and its long, sturdy pink beak jutted like a sandpiper's.

I snapped a picture and later determined that it was an American woodcock (also known as a timberdoodle). Who knows what it was doing flying through Center City?

A man in a business suit hovered over the wounded bird. He said he had seen it fly into the side of a nearby trashcan and land upside down on the pavement. He had picked it up and set it on its feet, but it seemed stunned.

It was the tail end of rush hour. Dozens of commuters streamed past without a second look at the bird. Between us the businessman and I created a small protective island on the sidewalk while we wondered what to do. Then, suddenly, the bird took wing across Walnut Street.

Had my mom been there, she probably would have brought it home.