My path to becoming a nature freak was, um . . . let’s say halting.  My earliest memory of birds is from age three.  Really!  I grew up in the Midwest, the only child of a World War II widow.  We were living on the second floor of a duplex with a large screen porch with a 180º view of tall, fruit bearing trees.  Hearing my mother squeal with delight, I ran out onto the porch to watch Cedar Waxwings gorging on berries, so close it seemed we could touch them.  Bird wasn’t a verb back then, we didn’t own a pair of binoculars, and my mother was, um . . . let’s say Victorian.  She was prim, proper, and long past getting down and dirty in the outdoors, so this initial spark went flameless.

I joined Cub Scouts thinking it would be an entree to nature and camping.  One night at our monthly meeting the scoutmaster introduced us to can boxing.  Can boxing was a contest between two boys inside a small ring, both blindfolded, both with a boxing glove on their right hand and a tin can containing several small pebbles in their left.  The cans were tied together with a string.  I was small for my age and drew the class bully from the grade ahead of me.  Yeah, that’s the night I dropped out of scouting forever.

Flash forward to high school biology class where we were required(!) to collect odes, butterflies, and bugs.  Though we didn’t do much with avian forms, this was literally and figuratively a breath of fresh air, and I was finally hooked fast on nature, in both meanings of that adjective.  Imagine how quickly, then, it clenched the deal when I discovered the hottest girl in my college biology class liked to camp and backpack.  The two sons we raised were brought up on dirt and bugs, if not birds per se.

So, who’s Kim Hosey, and what’s she have to do with this?  Kim Hosey is this month’s featured artist (through August) at Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park.  You can follow Kim’s blog at arizona-writer.com and view more of her photography at flickr.com/photos/khosey1.  Kim does a lot of birds along with a lot of bugs, and many of her bird images are taken from a very different and refreshing perspective that you won’t see in traditional wildlife calendars.  They aren’t magazine covers, although some of her silhouettes against velvet orange and mauve Arizona sunsets should be.  They are, rather, vignettes highlighting third dimension features, textures, and shapes that capture the essence of a species that lingers in the subconscious long after field guide bird images have faded.

Here’s the best part.  Kim has a nine year old son she’s raising on dirt and bugs.  I have to tell her it’s a fifty-fifty proposition.  One of our now adult sons is all about the outdoors, the other one not at all, but imbuing our species’ young with dirt and bugs, the real grass roots level, is the only way we’re going to save our planet from the extractors, the developers, and the polluters.  What I really wish, though, is that Kim Hosey had been my mother.  Maybe when I reach my second childhood I can get hooked up with her.