¡Colores!; 404; John Nichols, My Heart Belongs to Nature

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: The Nellita E. Walker Fund KNME-TV Endowment Fund The Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund Viewers Like You >>THIS TIME, ON COLORES! A PHOTOGRAPHIC TRIBUTE, AUTHOR JOHN NICHOLS' BEAUTIFUL NEW BOOK FROM UNM PRESS, MY HEART BELONGS TO NATURE WAS CREATED FROM A LIFETIME OF OBSERVING, EXPERIENCING AND LOVING NATURE. >>From the moment I was born I was surrounded by people who loved the natural world and explained itto me. I mean I was absorbed. That was my first great love. >>John Nichols: Hi, I'm John

Nichols. >>Lucy Nichols: Hi, I'm Lucy Nichols, >>Both: And, our hearts belong to nature! (guitar music) >>John Nichols: I see three lesser Goldfinches and two Pine Siskins. >>Lucy Nichols: They're really pretty. >>John Nichols: They are pretty. I'm amazed that the goldfinches have been here all winter. You remember when you would make these? Can you read that? >>Lucy Nichols: Find plants and tape them to a piece of paper like this (laughter). I learned a little bit about the leaves because Pacha, or my grandpa helped me discover new plants and new things that I didn't know what were called, or didn't know were here before.

>>John Nichols: Those little Siskins are really eating those seeds, they must be hungry. >>Lucy Nichols: Yeah, after a long winter they must be. >>John Nichols: I know. >>Lucy Nichols: Sometimes I think about how many different things there are in the world and how many things we haven't discovered, compared to how many things we have discovered. >>John Nichols: I mean it's important to know and care, right? The curious thing about this book, "My Heart Belongs to Nature" is I just thought, book with photographs of how much I've cared for a particular area. It seems to me thatphotography, like all the other arts and stuff like that and theater that discusses human dilemmas or social justice or whatever, they're all a part of trying to create a positive world

for us to live in. (guitar) Singing: My heart belongs to nature and I know it always will. I love the sound of thunder storms and the calls of whippoorwills. Ravens aerial acrobatics always make me smile and it's fun to see the Bighorn sheep on a ridge-top in single file. my grandpa and my dad took me out for long, long walks through the forest and meadow lands.

We saw Eagles circling up high and herons in the lake and sometimes we'd see marsh wrens chattering way down in the breaks. My grandpa was a really fine ichthyologist. For 40 years at our best museum he was king of their fish. When he was young my daddy wished to be a field zoologist. through meadows in the mist. >>Nichols: From the moment I was born I was surrounded by people who loved the natural world

and explained it to me. I mean I was absorbed. That was My grandfather worked at the American Museum of Natural History. I would ride with him on the Long Island railroad train into the museum and I visited his office. His office was just bottles of pickle fishes and pickle frogs and snakes and whatever he was an ichthyologist, herpetologist and my grandfather and my father kept records of almost everything in the natural world. My dad and my grandfather kept a daily record of all the birds they saw. It's pretty incredible when you think of how many years they did it. My dad sent my grandfather letters all his life from the age of six or seven, until my grandfather died in 1958. My father would draw

the birds and say, you know, what's this or is this a particular type of semi-palmated plover that I haven't seen before, you know. And grandpa would answer him. I mean their relationship was predicated on going back and forth and constantly interconnecting about the natural world, in particular ornithology, particularly the birds. A naturalist is the person who has a macroscopic overview of how the entire planet works. A naturalist is somebody like John Muir who understands that quote when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

This is the camera I really love, the Nikon, but it's heavy. Before that I had a Nikormat. It was even heavier, but then the Olympus is just, you know, this I use for a lot of, you know, a lot of the panoramas, just blip, blip, blip blip like that. Between the ages of 56 and seventy I spent sometimes two or three days a week in the high country mountains hiking up to 13,000 feet. Every hike I took I took photographs. I have all the packets from that, and I kept field notes, from five to ten pages of typed notes and every trip that I made I also tried to put together panoramas. Basically it's really simple. This is a panorama

of the little tarn that is featured in "My Heart Belongs to Nature" and a number of photographs. You just try and line everything up as closely as you can, and it's as simple as playing three-card Monte in New York City on the sidewalk on a cardboard box and when you see the cops coming you can immediately run away. Presto! A photo is worth a thousand words (laughter). Better to show you a picture with fish than try and explain of birds because he was very interested in defining their habits, their posturing, you know, that kind of thing, just the whole language of what made them work. I've

taken photographs. I'm not at all a scientist. I'm not at all like my father. But I just took photographs because, I mean, it was another way of communicating in that world. Once I had a two room apartment on Gallego Street in Taos. The year was 1990, I was 50 years old. Outside there was a very small lawn, and a single tulip grew in the grass. One morning at dawn, just before I went to bed, I took a picture of the tulip. Everybody that people look at, they think is mundane on the planet, whether it's a weed in my gardenor elm tree whose roots are destroying my septic system, right, or a stock tank out on the Western Mesa is incredibly interesting.

In the beginning it's the place. The place is flat, it's full of sage brush, there's hardly any trees, maybe no trees, so the sky is exposed, 360 degrees. You know you can look everywhere and I love just being in that space. It used to be empty. It's not empty anymore. Tres Orejas used to be my favorite mountain when it stood all alone in the middle of the Western Mesa surrounded by nobody. You can barely see the nub of a third ear to the left of the second ear in this picture. Before people came, eagles nested up under the middle ear. Those are Jack Bradley's horses grazing to the west. For years Bradley had his camp and animals on the northwest tip the Carsonreservoir behind Tres Orejas but Bradley too left, when the onslaught arrived.

After my VW buses died I bought a nineteen eighty dodge D150 pickup truck secondhand. It lasted for 30 years. I collected many cords of wood chugged up into the mountains out to the mesas and everywhere else. The truck fetched sheep manure from my gardens from Pacomio Mondragon and Llano Quemado. I drove Andres Martinez all over Taos County while he explained where the old flour mills used to be, where horse thief shorty lived and where the Acequia de los Americanos once ran south of Los Cordovas. Mike Kimmel and I drove that truck up Little rivers and for many Septembers Andy Lenderman and I took it grouse hunting in Unit 49. I used hay bales and big rocks for weight, especially during the winter. If you live in town,

but you love the wild, you need a truck. It's a contradiction, yet I assuaged my conscience by loving the land and animals that those wheels conveyed me Being on the mesa you walk around it's like there's nothing for miles and you're out there just in empty space and I love that, and then by accident one day I was walking through a stock pond and saw these little clam shell on the bottom of the stock pond, and I said why are there clam shells in this little stock tank, so I went to the library, I got a book, I started reading. I learned about clams shrimp and fairy shrimp and all of a sudden I said, "wow," I bet this will be interesting when it gets water. So, I went back, and I went back and I went

back and then one day it rained. My real claim to fame is about the world's foremost authority on photographing southwestern stock ponds. For years as I walked around the empty western mesa, I observed the life cycles of just a few stock ponds over there and I also took many pictures. Days on end I would set up my tripod and camera and just wait. I'd wait for the twilights to change color. I'd wait to the cloud formations to shift, reflecting the sun. I'd wait for rain wisps to appear from the north or from the south. I'd waitfor the ducks to land in the water or for phalaropes or Ibises to arrive. I waited, and watch as bats and nighthawks hunted just for an insect above the puddles. I was mesmerized by the quietude,

thelack of noise. The silence occasionally broken by coyote cries. I thought nothing was more beautiful than those diminutive puddles of water among the treeless sagebrush plane with the wide sky above.A stock pond, people say there's nothing interesting about that, except a few cows and sheep come to drink there, right, but if you're quiet everything will come. And I would sit right on the edge ofthe stock pond, and I remember once there was a sanderling walking around in the mud picking out little microscopic bits, and it came right up to my shoe and picked something out of the treads of my sneaker, you know, you don't move, just don't move. There's spadefoot toads

galore in the stock ponds. There's juajalotes, there's mosquitos. I would sit on the bank and it looks like rain is falling on the water but it's mosquitoes being born and immediately they get eaten by the swallows and the nighthawks that are flying over the pond, eating them. No, it's fascinating, I mean, there's just so much life that nobody pays attention to. And then I became fascinated by the three little rivers, the Rio Chiquita, Pipe Creek and the Little Rio Grande that run out of the southeast in Taos County, and I just fished them and hiked them and traveled all over and then went grouse hunting up there foryears and years and years and then I became obsessed with the high mountains from the age of about 58 until 70. I mean, I would climb up

to 13,000 feet, two to three times a week. These are my old snowshoes. They actually have very complicated straps and you can see that they're put together with duct tape. One winter I think I made 60 snowshoe trips. I got really psyched out with show-shoeing. You know, you go climbing up into a universe that's just boulders and talus and scree and everybody says why are you doing that? And the fact of the matter is there's as much life in just boulders androcks and scree as there is in a lush meadow. You know there's a million naked souls in the city and every one of them has a story and there's a billion naked souls in the natural world and every one of them has a story. When I started

mountains, I said, "Oh my god, bighorn sheep." That's pretty exotic and wonderful and the first thing I did is read like three books by Valerius Geist who is one of the great bighorn naturalists and I just said okay I'm gonna learn everything I can about this animal and then I said I'm gonna learn everything I can about the botany of the area that I'm traveling through and then I'm going to learn everything I can about the migratory birds, when they come, when they go, you know. Whenare the hermit thrushes here? When do they nest? When do they leave? That kind of stuff. You know, people often say well are you religious or something like that? And I say no, but in termsof organized human religions, but it seems to me that life, just everything that's alive is incredibly amazing

and that's enough belief for me. I can't believe I carried these out of the mountains from 12,000 feet. You know, you look at these boulder fields and they just look like boulders and rocks and talus and then you just start looking, and what you're walking on and everything is so different I mean it's like being in Monet's garden with two hundred million different flowers and lilly pads and weeping willows and, only it's rocks. You know when my dad was courting my mother they were walking along the beach and he picked up a moon stone and gave it to her and she kept it for the rest of her life. I keep thesein my jewelry box for the rest of my life. The land is filled

with talismans. Some people like to walk up and down Fifth Avenue, walk in to Tiffany's and by jewels, right, but if you look at things, there's nothing that's not really complicated and really interesting, really beautiful, and these things move me deeply. Singing: When the winter comes, I love to snow shoe through the tall spruce trees. Animal tracks in the snow really put my heart at ease. Show shoe hares and pine martens and sometimes ermine too. I trail them across the snow as they search for voles and shrews. >>From this angle you can see

the gimp wing carried his right-wing, that its tip close to the ground, he seemed able to fly ok but I never saw him hanging around with other nutcrackers and I sensed itwas because of his disability that he gravitated toward my offer of easy tidbits. My guidebook tells me that nutcrackers are fairly aggressive in seeking handouts yet I've never noticed that except for gimp wing and I would not have called him aggressive, but I think connecting to a wild creature is about as exciting and as revealing as life can get for a human being. Singing: My heart belongs to nature and I know it always will. I love the sound of thunderstorms and the calls

of whippoorwills. Raven's aerial acrobatics always make me smile, and it's fun to see the Bighorn sheep on the ridge in single file. Raven's aerial acrobatics, they always make me smile, and it's fun to see the big horn sheep on a ridge top in single file. >>John Nichols: Do you remember back in the autumn when the bright gold finches were here? >>Lucy Nichols: Yeah. I would love Lucinda to grow up really involved with the natural world. I would love her and everybody else on the planet, frankly,

to grow up with a real appreciation for the natural world, a care for the natural world so that they actually chose a life that didn't destroy the natural world, that they were very self-conscious about you know leaving the small footstep, about trying to lead a sustainable life, that kind of thing. Lucinda's generation, if they don't know that, they're dead in the water. Our, generation, and the generation before and the generations that comprised the Industrial Revolution have pretty much put the planet, the natural planet on the edge of the abyss. The only way that we find a real love for nature is when we're young and if our family is into it and if our family encourages it. If you don't know

about or understand climate change and want to be a part of changing your life in the life of the human species so that we go in a different direction then we're screwed. So, I think evermore a love of the so-called natural world is really important to survival. To catch the sunset clouds over Wheeler Peak from this perspective, you had to be camping at the little turn a mile west of Wheeler Peak across the alpine bow on August 17, 2002. Altitude 12,000 feet.For me, as I write that was 14 years ago yet it seems like only yesterday. They say time flies whenyou're having fun yet when I contemplate this picture

and all the others in this book, time stands still. Memories flood over me and I thank nature profoundly for its gifts of awareness >>Funding for COLORES was

provided in part by: The Nellita E. Walker Fund KNME-TV Endowment Fund The Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund