Great Activities for Nature Lovers

One of the easiest and most accessible ways to get close to nature is by setting out on a good old fashioned hike. Hiking generally doesn’t require any fancy equipment or special skills, just a piece of map and a thirst for adventure. This activity can be as relaxing as you make it.

Why limit yourself to just a day hike when you can have a full weekend (or longer) adventure? Backcountry camping involves packing your tent, sleeping gear, food, and water on your back to set up camp in a remote location. If you’re an experienced hiker and camper, this is an excellent way to test your survival skills and explore the wilderness.

Unlike long hikes through the woods, biking allows you to cover more ground and travel farther in nature. Mountain biking typically involves riding up and down steep slopes, between trees, and over rocks. If this sounds too intense or your tires aren’t suited for rugged terrain, consider taking a road bike on paved trails through forest preserves or along country roads.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to travel beyond your own backyard to experience the beauty of nature every day. If your personality is less adventurous or your mobility restricted, consider planting a garden to grow your own vegetables, fruits, herbs, or flowers. There’s something truly satisfying about mixing up a salad with fresh ingredients you grew yourself. One of the best parts about spending time in nature is that it doesn’t have to break your budget and anyone can do it.

On a recent Wednesday morning, I woke up like a little kid on Christmas morning, filled with joy and excitement for the day ahead. The reason why I was so happy was that my 15-year-old daughter was coming home from overnight camp that day after being gone for four weeks.

That afternoon, as I watched her drop off the bus and run into my arms，my emotions took over and I started crying. As we hugged each other, I thought, “I'm never sending her back there again. This is just too much.” But who am I kidding? Not only is she planning on going back next year, she wants to go for eight weeks.

Sending my kid to a Wisconsin town five hours away and having no communication with her other than a few handwritten letters (no cell phones are allowed at camp) still freaks me out. But I have to say overnight camp was one of the best parenting decisions I’ve ever made.

It all started when my daughter was in middle school and going through the typical social problem that comes up around that age. She would come home crying so often because she felt constantly left out. Concerned about her unhappiness and lack of self-confidence, I felt like I had to do something. One day, it hit me: Overnight camp.

That first year we put her on the bus was terrifying. With her cell phone in a desk drawer at home, we said goodbye knowing we would have to wonder for 28 days how she really was.

Would she miss us so much that she'd cry every night? Would she be frightened? Would the girls be mean to her? We really had no idea what to expect, but we knew that if something was really wrong, we'd get a call. It turned out that that never happened, and the letters we got from her all shined with positivity. The changes I saw in my daughter’ s personal growth were immeasurable.

Gretchen Altman is smiling, leaning back casually, a cup of coffee in hand — Hills Bros. Coffee, to be precise. It looks like a casual shot, but if you hit like, leave a comment, and tag a friend, you can get three different cups of coffee, for free.

Altman is part of a growing trend of "micro-influencers". She has a small following — around 6,000 on Instagram (社交平台).Her going rate is $300 to $800 to promote something. She does some posts in exchange for free goods, as long as it's stuff she believes in.

As a micro-influencer she has a much closer relationship with her followers than a big social media star. "I'm just living a normal life and people relate to that," she says. "They just feel like I'm a friend of theirs."

But it worries consumer rights groups. Several recent studies have found that young audiences are largely unable to understand when something is sponsored content.

In some cases, it's clear. When a big star takes to a social media to advertise Coca-Cola, for example, the assumption is that he or she's probably getting paid to do so. And the posts are clearly labeled as ads, with the caption "advertisement" or "sponsored content".

But what happens when an everyday person with just a couple thousand followers takes to social media to extol(颂扬）the virtues of a product? The motivations are not so clear-cut. The problem with these social media posts is that you don't know whether it's an ad or not.

Altman is diligent about using those hashtags(标签).She loves what she does and sees it as a business, but she doesn't necessarily want to be a social media celebrity.

"With social media being so integrated into our everyday lives, we have this unique opportunity that I don't think anyone has ever had before where we can each be our own brand," Altman says.

Every year, little black-and-white birds called pied flycatchers(斑姬鹟) travel from sub-Saharan Africa to northern Europe to feast on caterpillars (毛毛虫), claim a nest, and have babies. And they fly back a few months later. But recently, some flycatchers have arrived only to find their nesting sites occupied by great tits (大山雀). And those birds don’t just chase flycatchers away—they attack them, kill them, and eat their brains.

Great tits live in European forests all year round. Flycatchers are regular vacationers. Since the 1980s,   flycatchers’ reproductive season has been inching up earlier in the month of April. Warm spring temperatures have caused caterpillar populations to boom. To adapt to that, flycatchers arrive a bit earlier, too. That won’t be too big a problem. But now, tits delay their breeding period a bit in April, so they overlap with the flycatchers, and violence begins.

Moreover, there’s limited nesting space in many of these birds’ favorite forests—the trees can be quite young and have very few tree holes where birds can nest. Volunteers and academics have placed nestboxes to help. But with climate change, birds’ breeding schedules getting closer, there aren’t enough nestboxes to go around. Unfriendly hosts—the tits, eat their brains.

“Great tits are superior competitors when it comes down to a fight, ” said Jelmer Samplonius, lead author of a study. “People see it as a cute garden bird, but some of them have a real anger management problem. ” Luckily, the murdered birds were often surplus males that arrive late. The deaths haven’t had a big impact on the population because those late males probably won’t have had babies anyway. But there’s always the chance that it could get worse.

“Whatever the flycatcher population’s future may hold, ” Samplonius said, “this is a good example of why it’s essential to study how climate change can shift animals’ schedules, often with deadly consequences. Understanding different responses to changing environments will be an important part of species assessments in coming years.”