I know my way around most of the LBJ National Grasslands (LBJNG), in Wise County. I have driven up there more times than I can remember over the past 25 years, and I can navigate that network of county roads, day or night. In several of the Grassland’s units where I often walk, I can follow the network of trails without taking a wrong turn. I have to add that any turn you take is likely to bring you to some new meadow, some new hidden pond, or another dense oak woodland; it’s only a “wrong” turn if you are nearly out of water or time and needing to get back to the car.
To a lesser degree, I know my way around the nature of North Texas. That knowledge is about what the land and water are like, being able to recognize many of the plants, fungi, and animals of the region, and having some understanding of how it all works together. When land managers know such things, they can help us avoid wrong turns that can harm the ecoregion. The more our teachers can navigate the natural history of the Cross Timbers, the better they are at teaching and inspiring a new generation of nature kids. And when individuals and families know something about the trees, grasses, grazers, predators, and all the rest, they are better equipped to find their way home. Our goal in Cross Timbers Connection is to offer the tools and share the needed experiences to help us find our way.
As I was first exploring LBJNG, two things helped me find my way around. One was an ability that comes from real-world experience. With practice over the years wandering roads through wild or semi-wild places, you get to where you kind of know which way you’re headed and where you came from. That knowledge lets you backtrack as if you had a map in your head, sort of. And in fact, most of us do. Finding your way around in places like that trains your brain and builds your spatial memory and spatial reasoning. Like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. The hippocampus and other areas within the brain get pretty good at knowing where you are and how you got there.
The other thing that helped me navigate the Grasslands was a paper map. Not a GPS app that tells you to take this turn and that to get to a destination; a map – a picture of the landscape and its roads, which my brain could (on a good day) remember and visualize from different directions. And so, coming up to the intersection of County Road 2475 and 2675, where the road seems to split around a small, steep hill, I could say, “If I go to the left, I wind up circling around and going through some nice habitat before coming back to 2675.” Before that route was locked into my memory from experience, I could visualize it from the map. Maps are useful tools for finding your way.
Later, of course, GPS apps became a thing. We all have mapping apps on our phones, and we plug in the destination and the phone tells us, “turn left” and “turn right,” and then we arrive. We didn’t have to pay much attention to how we got there. For some people for whom visualizing direction is inherently difficult, it is an important support. For most of us, it sidesteps the brain skills I mentioned above. We become dependent on the mapping program in our phone, not the one in our brain. In one study, fifty drivers were questioned about their lifetime use of GPS and then presented with virtual navigation tasks (without the app). Those with greater lifetime GPS use had poorer navigation abilities. And, three years later, those spatial ability skills declined even further with continued GPS use[i]. (Full disclosure: I do use GPS apps, particularly in urban settings, both for the route and for reports of traffic congestion.)
My point is that navigation using experience and “analog” tools is a pretty good metaphor for how we understand nature and natural history. Direct experience is extremely helpful, as are intellectual, perceptual, and even emotional or cultural tools. Those tools should build “maps” based on information that helps us tie different things together, allowing us to see the big picture.
We may start with knowing what a species looks like. While walking in the Cross Timbers, something looks back at us from across a meadow. Standing alert and attentive, with those yellow eyes sizing up our potential for threat, pointed ears up, catching every sound. That long muzzle, white around the mouth, the bushy tail, the graceful body with tawny and grizzled gray fur. Too big for a fox and too small for a wolf. A coyote, Canis latrans. By the time this has registered, the coyote turns and disappears into the brush.
A naturalist’s calling is to know more – the details of its habitat, the variety of its prey and predators, the phenology of its life from day to day, season to season, and (the subjective part) how we and others respond to its form, beauty, utility, perceptions of its skill or ability to persevere, and its place in the world. Or even to take what we observe and create stories that guide or enrich our own lives. I’m thinking, for example, of the Indigenous stories and myths about the coyote. It’s not that we should confuse our personal or cultural reactions with objective data about coyotes. It’s just that we have a richer and more complete understanding of coyotes if we have the whole picture.
Our aim is to be a resource that helps us find our way in the woods and prairies and to get to know all of it in a more holistic way. The articles in the Post Oak & Prairie Journal, the website, and other things we will do should help connect all of us with places, with plants, animals, and ecological communities. We would like Cross Timbers Connection to be a sort of meeting place for the naturalist community where some provide articles for the journal, some make use of the website, and everyone shares their ideas, hopes, and suggestions. We imagine bringing that naturalist community together (face-to-face and digitally) and spreading the word about others who are hosting meetings and doing other good work. What would that look like in your part of the naturalist neighborhood? We would love to hear from you (using the Contact form or emailing masmith.tx@gmail.com).
[i] Dahmani, L. & V.D. Bohbot. 2020. Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation. Sci Rep 10, 6310, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62877-0
Cross Timbers Connection 
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