As an occasional contributing poster here at Pocket Mouse Publishing, I’ve enjoyed posting about how my children and I got out into nature regularly.  How we had consistently enjoyed forest freeplay and learned through the book Hunting Red.

Then, we moved.  A job-relocation across the country.

Our habitat is no longer the lush green forest and small creeks of the temperate East Coast pictured above but rather the Sonoran desert of the Southwest: a place of dry sands, endless sunshine, and prickly cactus.   See below.

We’re adjusting.  Adapting. We’re ready to explore our new habitat. We’re reading about desert life in books like 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: Phoenix, The Nature of Arizona, and Critters of Arizona Pocket Guide.

We’ve even ventured to take a couple walks in the desert and are planning some more. It’s not the forest freeplay we had grown to love. In fact, one child refers to it as “desert doomplay” due to the sheer number of opportunities to interact with cactus spines.

One thing remains the same, despite this new habitat: the night sky.  The stars are the same. The constellation Orion is still the only one we all recognize.  I wrote about that nearly a year ago in Walking the Nature Talk. And the moon!  The moon is still the same. Did you know that we all see the same side of the moon, all the time?

In a few days it will be the first full moon of 2016!  I’ll be making a calendar to share the dates of each full moon — check back soon.

And enjoy your habitat, whatever it may be!

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