Each summer, when the warm nights glow with J-shaped yellow flashes, Ed Duensing and his three sons go out to the backyard to call the fireflies. They “talk” to the insects with ordinary flashlights, mimicking the code of light that female fireflies flash to lure males. “It’s easy,” explains Duensing, a writer, researcher, and naturalist. When a flying firefly flashes, count two seconds (one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi), and then, holding a small flashlight close to the ground, turn it on for one second. Almost immediately, the firefly will turn and approach you. Continue the responsive flashing, and soon the firefly will land on your hand.
In their backyard in Milford, New Jersey, Duensing and his kids have called fireflies in from as far as forty feet away. Sometimes, several fireflies come at once—as well as all the neighborhood kids. Duensing even lures in some teenage friends of his eldest son, seventeen-year-old Alex. “You ask them, ‘You want to see something neat?’ And you get the skeptical look on their faces,” Duensing says. “Then the firefly starts to come in, and they’re totally attentive and amazed. Then they’ve got to do it themselves. It’s irresistible.”
Duensing, author of Talking to Fireflies, Shrinking the Moon: A Parent’s Guide to Nature Activities, proves an important point with his firefly trick: summertime’s wild plants and animals can provide kids with more gee-whiz magic than any video game or TV show.
“You give a kid a choice between watching a live wild animal and a TV show, and they’ll choose the wild animal,” agrees Duke Dawson, program director for the New England Science Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Playing with nature creates a real sense of discovery. It can really stretch kids’ imaginations.”
Nature and kids are a natural combination. “For kids, outdoors is the funnest place to be,” says Delia Clark, who used to direct children’s programming at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont. “Sticks and stones and puddles and streams is the stuff childhood is made of.”
Or so it used to be—when most kids grew up in the country and later taught their own kids the outdoor games and nature skills their parents had taught them. “One hundred years ago, there wasn’t a country boy alive who couldn’t hypnotize a bullfrog, or a farm girl who wasn’t an expert at weaving a chain of daisies,” Duensing observes. But these “old-fashioned” pleasures are just as fun for today’s kids.
Sadly, some parents may be afraid of letting their kids play with nature. Duensing recalls a colleague’s horror when he told her he was taking his family for a swim in a lake. “But there are living things in there!” she exclaimed. “Yes, and I’m going to be one of them, Duensing replied.
“Kids need to discover that the environment is alive,” Duensing says, “and know that it’s not just a passive backdrop. They need to find out that if they do something, something in the environment will respond, like a conversation. That’s what makes nature so much fun.”
For instance, you and your child can play with bats—without ever touching one of the winged creatures. You will find bats on summer evenings even in the most densely populated city park, usually in open areas along a stream or riverbank. Toss a small pebble up gently in front of a flying bat. If your aim is good, the bat will immediately sense it with its sonar—the same way it senses the flying insects it eats—and wheel, midair, to power-dive toward the stone. It is almost like flying the bat like a kite. Bats always figure out it’s just a stone and veer away at the last minute; they never swallow or catch the pebble. Kids find this irresistible. The only precaution: Watch out for falling pebbles!
Try ant watching. Like playing the bat-flying game, this is something your kid can do on city sidewalks as well as in the country or woods, and you needn’t touch the animals to enjoy them (especially since some ants, particularly in the Southwest, can bite and sting). With an inexpensive magnifying glass, it is even more entertaining. (E. O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist who founded the field of sociobiology, keeps ten thousand Amazonian leaf-cutting ants in his office. He says that under magnification, he can sometimes tell individual ants apart.)
You might suggest that your child watch a single ant for a while. A tiny drop of nail polish on the ant helps identify it among its nestmates, Duke Dawson advises. How long will that ant take to find a cookie crumb you leave for it? Run your finger across the path an ant seems to be following and see what happens.
Daddy longlegs make fine playmates. Don’t worry, these aren’t spiders—spiders have two body segments, the daddies only one and they can’t bite. Show your kids how to handle one. Never pick it up by a leg, or the appendage might come off. Just coax the creature onto your hand. Then stand up. Tap the back of your hand to catapult the daddy longlegs into the air—and watch it turn into a sky diver, using its body as a parachute to float slowly and gently, almost magically, to the ground. Kids will want to try this for themselves, and the insects won’t disappoint them.
Younger children, whose tiny hands may not be steady enough to trust with handling a live animal, can still have fun with them. As an alternative to catching the creatures, Delia Clark suggests that youngsters first watch, then imitate the animals around them. Frogs, chipmunks, and squirrels are big hits with preschoolers.
Little kids also love treasure hunts, and nature’s treasures provide endless hunting. Give the kids a mission: Find two things that smell different. Find something prickly. Find something tickly. Find something hard. Find something smooth. Small children have incredible powers of observation, Clark points out. If you give five-, six-, and seven-year-olds each a leaf and have them examine it in great detail, they’ll be able to pick that leaf out of a pile, even if they are blindfolded. This makes a good game.
“If you put kids in an interesting outdoor setting, they’ll find neat things to do,” Clark says. Your own yard, even if it’s only a sliver of land, can be a wild kingdom for a child. Make it more interesting. Instead of mowing every inch of the lawn, leave a section to grow up “wild.” Put up bird feeders—or let your child make one (a slab of wood loaded daily with seed will do fine). Don’t “clean up” that woodpile; let your child explore it and be prepared to admire the finds. Don’t worry, says Clark, that your kids’ outdoor time need he tightly structured. When school is out, let them enjoy their freedom.