All I could see was birds

I always get a laugh on native plant field trips. Everyone is staring at the ground, while a couple feet above their heads a bluebird sits on a wire unnoticed, a hawk hovers in consternation at us, a sparrow sings.

Then I go bird-watching and start accidentally stepping on unusual native flowers while staring up at moving specks in trees.

Oopsie.

Tunnel vision is awful easy to acquire. Just go out in the wild and look for something specific. All around you, the critters you AREN’T looking for will sit in plain sight, probably laughing. You won’t see them until you step on them, or find a bunch of little snowy footprints intermixing with your own.

As a child, I was better at this. I spent hours in the woods and developed what I called “owl vision,” as it was named in books by Tom Brown. His writing is all very peculiar and I think untrustworthy, but the practical guides to wildlife observation were very, very useful to me.

Instead of focusing on a specific thing, I would relax my face, let my eyes unfocus slightly, and try to see with my whole field of vision at once. When something moved, I’d focus in on it.

Your eyes take in the whole scene this way: the blur of grass, the trees speckled with moving leaves, the trail near your feet, a scrub jay’s tail twitching off to the side. By going slow, setting each foot down by feel before putting weight on it, I walked pretty quietly, without looking down much.

Eventually I fell into a natural pattern: wander a few feet, stop and observe, wander, pause, wander, pause.

My cat often moves the same way. So do coyotes and foxes, on the rare occasions I see them. It’s a good way to spot things you aren’t expecting. I even snuck up behind a mountain lion this way — totally by accident: I thought she was a stump.

So now you have a new activity: go outside at dawn and wander, pause, wander, pause, using owl vision to spot the color of flowers and movement of birds — and double-check the stumps, if they look like they have ears.