Sunday, September 26, 1999

Kids demand answers for nature's many riddles

By Matt Markey
A-T Outdoors Columnist

A lesson in humility can come quickly and without warning. Kids want to understand how things work, what's what, and the why behind everything. It's not always easy to field those questions, but they keep on coming anyway.

Why does the moon change sizes? Now for an adult with any kind of basic education, that should be an easy one, but when a six-year-old poses the question, where do you go for an explanation. Getting into the tilting of the axis and elliptical orbits and that kind of mumbo-jumbo will just confuse them, and muddy the issue.

So the moon is kind of like your eye, and when your eye is wide open it is full, and when you close your eye lid almost all the way it is just a silver, and when you shut your eye the moon is gone.

Where does the moon's light come from? That is a tough one, too, but it's kind of like when a car goes by at night and its headlights shine on the road signs and the light is bounced into the windows of your home. The moon is just acting like a mirror, bouncing the sun's light to us.

But the sun is down because it's night, so how does the sun do it? It's night here, but the sun is never really down, we just turned away from it. It is day in China when it is night here. Now we are getting dangerously close to the orbit and axis stuff again.

Then a bird shows up that doesn't look like any bird they've ever seen before. Well, at least they think it's a bird. Right at dark it zips into the flower garden and draws nectar from some of the petunias. In the fading light, they assume it's a hummingbird, but they want to be sure. What kind of bird is that?

A couple flash pictures were snapped when the mysterious creature was doing its fly-bys, but no one was certain its image was captured. When the film came back, there it was, but the answer was not provided. It kind of looked like a hummingbird, with its long, slender bill that was perfect for stealing the nectar from the flowers. But the size and the markings on the winged visitor said no, it was not a hummingbird, after all. It looked more like a moth.

Some hurried research and a quick look at the photos by a real expert revealed it was just what the photos were telling us - it was a hummingbird moth - an unusual but not rare air pirate that feeds like a hummingbird, but looks like a moth and prefers the darker hours, like a moth.

That troublesome mystery solved, the questions kept getting tougher. They started to make the fifth grade math homework look easy.

Another bird question came up, and we weren't doing too well in that category, if this was a Jeopardy game. The kids noticed that you often see tiny little birds chasing, and sometimes picking fights with, much larger birds like hawks. Why? They had to know why a small bird would want anything to do with a big bird.

They had to understand that size was all relative when it came to the issue at hand. Now little birds don't normally go out looking for a fight with a larger bird, especially a hawk. But the reason they get so feisty is because their nest or their young are threatened. That's when the smaller bird will dive at the hawk, peck at it, and raise the dickens until it runs off the larger intruder.

The next question concerned ants. How do they know where to go? They pick up bugs and pieces of food and lug them back to the next, but how do they know their way back? They don't have a map. Well, actually they do have a map.

Ants follow scent lines and trace their way back to the nest just like they are following a highway. We can't see it. We can't smell it. But the line is definitely there and they follow it. They also follow directions a lot better than kids do.

After observing a commotion in the shallows, a puzzled youngster wanted to know what caused that splash and swirl in the pond. It was most likely a bass chasing down and eating a blue gill, or maybe a smaller bass.

That prompted the question about why fish eat other fish. A simple explanation of the food chain and how it works in something small like a pond covered that topic. Then the young mind spun its wheels for a few seconds, and wanted to know why a bass would eat another bass.

That is a little tougher question, but as an aggressive feeder, the bass will eat just about anything that moves, including young bass. The six-year-old with the huge blue eyes smiled a look of relief, and said she was glad people don't do that.

Later she wanted to know why frogs croak at night, and not during the day, why chickens all look the same but people all look different, and if all that noise at night is crickets talking to each other, then what are they saying?

Those may sound like tough questions, but compared to some of the others, they're not. I am still recovering from one that stumped me a few years back, in the early days of the Barney TV show. She wanted to know why Baby Bop was the same size as Barney, if she was really a baby? Questions like that just don't have an answer.