As a child, I loved the natural world. Maybe it had something to do with growing up in a small town in upstate New York where the distractions of big-city lights were absent. Maybe it was because nature had so many secrets and I was thrilled to be a detective, uncovering them one by one. My neighbor Betsy and I built a tree fort and created rooms walled by foliage. We collected wildflowers instead of Barbie dolls. We put band-aids on earthworms inadvertently chopped by our dads’ lawnmowers. We diligently rescued and cared for baby birds that had fallen from their nests. We called our fort “Hullabaloo,” alluding to the action-packed activities of our backyard world.
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