Nerd alert!!
I have always been the type of person who has found solace and excitement in the outdoors. When I was a kid, I loved going fishing with my grandfather and swimming in the ocean. After I moved to the West Coast I got into a lot of recreational hiking. These days it's harder to do some of these things with the baby, but it's exciting to start to be able to share this stuff with my older son. I can't wait until both of the kids are old enough to do things like kayaking or camping.
In the meantime I have this giant collection of wildlife guides, and I get excited about identifying the critters that make their way into my backyard. So far we've seen or heard coyotes, great horned owls, red-tailed hawks, mule deer, raccoons, gold finches and bats. We've seen a bobcat down the road. We have a bunch of sagebrush lizards that feed on the ants in our yard and intimidate each other by doing push-ups. And we live on the outskirts of a major city.
I don't know whether it's contagious, but my little guy enjoys knowing the names of things too. Recently we went to the bookstore and he picked out a guide to North American trees. We bought it and started identifying the trees in our yard. From pine cones and needles we figured out that the three big pine trees in the back - the ones that always seem to be watching over our house like three brothers - are Ponderosa pines. Why am I so excited about this? I don't know. But I find it weirdly comforting to know what they are.
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I have the tree guide, the wildflower one, the NE bird guide, bogs and swamp ID book, scat and tracks guide, and the guide to mushrooms of the NE. Totally nerdy, but completely fun. My older kids still get into it. Not to mention you can impress your friends with your wealth of knowledge the next time you go hiking! (dork)
I was the head naturalist at camp my last summer there, and I LOVED it. I wanted to learn more, but those three months taught me SO, SO much. Good stuff!
24/MN. Queer, veg, single, AP mama to DD1.
25/MN and WA. Queer, veg, single, AP mama to DD2.5.
Hikes are very slow with me, cos I always have to stop and identify stuff-- mostly wildflowers, but also birds, ferns, fungi, herps......I'm better at things that don't MOVE though! 
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough. -- Emily Dickinson
You want to do what you think is right and what matters to you, and if other people don't like it, as my father would have said, they can go fuck themselves. -- Amy Bloom
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Those sound cool - esp the scat and tracks guide. My favorite is the fish guide. I love looking at pictures of fish. My brother is the expert there - the best is to go to an aquarium with him, it's like having your own personal tour. We are still teasing him for this quote, from a family boat trip when we were in high school:
"Note the double-breasted cormorant. It's a prehistoric bird, known by its snakelike neck."
"Too weird to live. Too rare to die." - Hunter S. Thompson