Today, I decided to take a walk in the place I consider most to be nature, a small section of the Cook County forest preserve that I have been walking through for over fifteen years. The section is less than a block from where I grew up and it seemed like the right place for a nature walk. I’ve seen trees fall, rot, and eventually begin to foster new life; it’s my well-worn path, it’s home. Part of the charm of this piece of woods is that I seem to be the only person I know who bothers to walk through there, and because I have been doing it for such a long time, my knowledge of its changes is what I consider to be its greatest charm. Watching the gradual change in things has always fascinated me, but in the woods it’s not artificial. In the city I like to watch skyscrapers climb to ever-new heights, and buildings come down, but the world of nature has an organic feeling all to itself, outside of the realm of the human.

Compared with my normal interactions with nature I made sure to pay special attention to all the fauna that I could observe. Normally, I see squirrels, deer, and birds on a daily basis, so I attempted to notice other things that I do not usually see. I was lucky enough to see something that I never would have imagined I would have come across, a snake being ravenously devoured by a hawk. It was incredible to see, for rarely have I observed snakes in the woods I was walking in, but I have seen several hawks coming back to the area in the last few years. So, while I knew that both of these animals lived in the woods, I never would have imagined that in the hour I was outside I would have observed a hawk doing much more than flying let alone eating.