My uncle Bob was a urban naturalist long before the title was invented.  Not by any self-proclamation or through award of the title by some official authority, but by virtue of a lifetime of quiet study and practice helping people appreciate the natural world wherever they found it.  Part time citizen scientist and full-time student and role model, he earned this recognition over a lifetime of showing one person at a time how to see and experience the wild all around us, even in the most unlikely of places. As a young boy desperately seeking an escape from the asphalt grids of south central Los Angeles, I was his student, but it took years for me to understand and appreciate his lessons.

Though still very young, my education had indeed left me blind to the natural world and to the values that should guide me.   I wasn’t alone here as Aldo Leopold argued in his Sand County Almanac.  As a 1950’s “Boomer” I was growing up in a world being massively reshaped by the unrelenting sprawl of suburbia driven by population, technology and trade.  South Central Los Angeles, and the city of Compton in particular, had been on a growth tear since 1867 when Griffith Dickenson Compton settled here with his small band of pioneers.   My little part of Los Angeles, the “Hub City” as Compton was called then, was literally the high traffic crossroads between downtown Los Angeles and he port of San Pedro.  Tract houses, retail shops, freeways, concrete river beds and big oil – the whole package of pumpjacks, derricks, tanks and refineries—now obliterated the last truck farms, wild flowers, creeks and bridle paths that were still recalled by older family and friends.  All I wanted to do was get out of town, but he showed me that all I really needed to do to learn was how to see and appreciate what was still in plain sight even in suburbia’s concrete and wire thickets.  My uncle taught me this with very few words.  Rather than focusing on what was lost, he took delight in pointing out what was still there.

On one particularly memorable occasion, when I was in elementary school, what began as a quick walk across a parking lot turned into a into a lesson I would never forget.  Half way across that lot, we came upon a rather large puddle scraped into a rough area of cracked concrete and a dirt lot.  My eye was immediately caught by tiny, black squirmy things in the water. I thought they were fish and was mesmerized by their movements.  I couldn’t pull myself away.  About this time, my uncle squatted down with me and gave these tiny creatures a name – “pollywogs”, he said! I recognized the word, but had never seen a pollywog and wondered how they got into the puddle.   Well after he cleared this up – which may have been my first sex education class — we peered into the puddle a few minutes longer and just delighted in our unexpected discovery.   I felt his calm demeanor and saw his obvious appreciation for these simple creatures. I wanted to reach into the water to catch one, but he motioned to just watch.  I walked away from that puddle knowing something about pollywogs and frogs.

What I didn’t know at the time, however, and only realized many years later, was that I also got my first lesson in appreciating nature.  Though I wanted to jump in with both feet and scoop them up with splashing cupped hands, my uncle told me without taking his eye off the puddle that this was their home and we should just quietly watch and enjoy them.  Many years later I would learn a little more about the science of ponds, pollywogs and frogs.  In time, I would also learn that my uncle’s restraint toward this tiny pool reflected in the fullest sense the “voluntary decency” of the land ethic advocated by Leopold.  This was a big lesson for a kid.  The puddle, after all, wasn’t mine.  It belonged to the pollywogs and, at the same time, to me and everyone else.  Over time, I came to recognize that my uncle had it right.  The same kind of lessons were usually attached to our encounters with other common  creatures.  From grasshoppers and lizards to pocket gophers and crows, I learned to see them from the role they played in our amazing world.  Appreciation, indeed, went hand in hand with a responsibility to protect and conserve.  He was indeed a master naturalist in the urban environment and my earliest teacher of all things wild.