Naturalist Essay

For my nature walk I decided to walk down Fullerton to the beach. Even though I did not go to a park or somewhere there would be a lot of trees and other nature, I encountered a lot of nature on my way to the beach and also at the beach. There was the water and sand and also trees at the beach, and on the way to the beach there were trees and many flowers. I have walked to the beach down Fullerton before but this time I took a closer look to all of the nature around me. Once you pass Lincoln Ave. you get to a lot of the apartments and houses and that is when you see a lot of the trees and flowers. Down the side of the street there are trees almost every couple of feet. Because the seasons are starting to change some of the leaves have started to fall off and a lot of them have started to change colors as we come into the autumn season. Some other nature I came across was flowers. A lot of the houses had flowers planted in front of them and also around the trees on the side of the street.

Walking down to the beach today I took a closer look at the flowers in front of the houses. I saw a patch of really pretty purple flowers with some bees flying around them. I usually wouldn’t look so closely to see the bugs around them but because I looked so closely today I noticed that these flowers were the prettiest ones that I came across. I also noticed that there are a lot of trees once you get out of the apartment part of the walk and you walk by The Lincoln Park Zoo and are almost at the lake. There are a lot of different paths and trails that you can walk or run with lily ponds and trees all throughout them. I never really noticed that there were so many places that you could sit and relax or go running through with so much nature going on through them.

On a daily basis I usually don’t think about nature very much when I’m walking around outside. I usually have a purpose of why I’m outside and walking so I don’t think about anything else but why I’m walking somewhere. If I have time or I am just walking outside because it’s a nice day then I think about nature a little differently. I take notice to the little flowers that are growing or how the leaves are changing. While I am inside though, I don’t think about nature except for the weather. How nature interacts with me on a daily basis is the weather. The weather everyday tells me what to wear. It also tells me if I need to leave a little bit earlier than usual because the weather isn’t very good that day. Also I interact with it everyday when I choose to not liter. Those are some ways how I interact with nature and how it interacts with me.

My walk was more like Muir’s because I wasn’t doing research on my walk. I was just taking a walk and seeing how much nature was around me that I never noticed before. I wasn’t trying to analyze if there were a lot of people in the park rather than somewhere where there weren’t a lot of trees or nature happening. The two writings differ where Muir’s writing is about how he is in nature and how he was one with nature. He tells us how he was interacting with nature while he was walking through the canyon. Kuo’s writing was research about how trees affect parks and open spaces. The writing was a lot of research methods and the results to the experiments that were happening.