Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 6, 1990 TAG: 9007070396
SECTION: SMITH MOUNTAIN TIMES PAGE: SMT2 EDITION: BEDFORD/FRANKLIN
SOURCE: By TRACIE FELLERS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There was no quaffing of drinks after work with friends. No date. No dozing off in front of the TV.
Instead, shortly after 9 p.m. I was making my way through the woods at Smith Mountain Lake State Park with eight others who were adventurous enough to traipse about in the dark.
Park interpreter Shawn Miller started the hike by addressing the youngest members of the group: five boys under the age of 12, who were camping at sites in the state park with their families. Miller leads night hikes on the park's Beech Wood Trail twice a week and heads a host of other activities sponsored by the park this summer - including early morning and afternoon hikes, canoe trips and crafts demonstrations.
In a soft but firm voice, he asked the boys to be very quiet while going through the woods. "I want you to walk like storks," Miller instructed.
He asked the youngsters to practice lifting their feet far off the ground and putting them down carefully and quietly. The boys giggled as they took exaggerated high steps. One dark-haired boy with freckles said he'd have no problem with Miller's request: "I'm used to [being quiet]. I sneak cookies in the dark," he said.
Miller then talked about what animals we might see - bats and turtles were mentioned by the enthusiastic boys. Finally, our unlikely group, consisting of children, a reporter, a photographer and a contractor, was off.
During the course of the mile-long hike, Miller led the group through simple exercises to make points about human hearing and night vision. For one of the exercises, he divided hikers into two groups.
Miller then asked each person to cup their hands around their ears and listen very carefully as he threw a handful of pebbles into the brush off the trail. "How many rocks did I throw?" he asked. Four, five and 10 were some of the guesses, but none of us came up with the correct number - 11.
In spite of our incorrect answers, Miller said the notion that animals hear better than humans is false. "Most animals don't have better hearing; they have bigger ears. Or maybe they hear at a different frequency," he said.
Miller also urged us to use our senses of smell, which delighted the kids. As they joked and jostled each other, Miller kept the focus on the scents of our environment. "Can you smell rain? How about soil?" he asked.
When we had taken a few more paces, Miller gave each hiker an envelope containing five paper cutouts of shapes in different colors. He asked each person to identify the shapes and their colors. We offered our guesses, then tried again farther down the trail, after the sky was more dark than dusky.
After our second attempts, Miller pulled out a small flashlight and illuminated the small pieces of paper. We'd had no trouble identifying the shapes correctly, but the colors were a different story.
One youngster said all the colors looked the same to him. Another named a color that didn't turn up among the five shapes. Miller explained why. "Your eyes adjust to [differences in] light easily, but you need a certain amount of light to see color," he said.
We stopped near the end of the trail - on a section overlooking the lake - to listen the sounds of the inhabitants of the woods. We stood there for a few moments, stock-still. Even the boys were quiet.
And as we listened to the drip of water droplets on leaves and the contented chirping of tree frogs, that wooded trail seemed as far removed from the world as a lone satellite floating in space.
As the night sky enveloped us in almost-total darkness, the serenity and tranquillity of it all was powerful enough to entrance even the youngsters among us. Well, . . . for a little while, anyway.
Miller then announced - very softly - that he was going to try to attract the attention of a great horned owl. "They're the biggest ones in Virginia, and they're the only ones that eat skunks. Can you imagine eating a skunk?"
Miller used two plastic horns to make two different types of calls. The first call had the sound quality of an owl's hoot. The second, which Miller called an "owl laugh," was a nasal, quacky noise that produced barely suppressed giggles among the youngsters.
Patrick Amarino, a Virginia Beach contractor who was working near the lake and camping out at the state park with his crew, was also amused by the call. "It sounds more like Daffy Duck," he whispered.
Miller's repeated calls were to no avail that night. It was only the second time this year that an owl did not answer his calls, he said.
The great horned owls live in trees and on cliff ledges, he added on our way back. "You can't hear them fly at all because they have real soft, downy feathers and they're silent in flight."
For a schedule of July's night hikes and other Smith Mountain Lake State Park events, call the park's visitor center at 297-5998, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays.
by CNB