I think that the holidays feel like frozen noses. I love walking with the dog for long periods of time.

Hopefully it's snowing and you've got to wrap up warm. So I think a frozen nose is a sweaty armpit

because your wrapped up so warm but then you're climbing hamps and heath and you get to the top

and you're like, and then you can see the breath but then your nose is still freezing to touch.

Join in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

So I'm a solo hiker, I prefer to hike alone and I'm a meanderer. So I have no idea what I'm going.

It's July 2021 and I'm meandering with Daniel Lee, a biology professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

We are in our neighborhood in North St. Louis County, a very pretty subdivision with

charming two-story brick houses, many curved lawns and flower beds. But where Daniel and I are heading just down the road isn't as pretty.

But this is a city on part. This is a city on part. This is wilderness park.

Wilderness Park is a dense spot with lots of weeds, overgrown trees and brush.

We walk along the edge partly to avoid the many ticks and critters that live deeper inside.

And I'm really, really interested in what I would call these little urban green packets.

So parks would be green spaces but I'm really interested in like low-use spaces.

So for me that would be like abandoned fields or newsproperties with lots of overgrown grasses and stuff that people hardly manage.

Daniel wants to study field mice here to better understand how they thrive in urban settings.

I'm really interested in understanding how the rodents that we consider a problem make a living both off of us, near us with us.

As we walk around wilderness park she tells me about how this space is ideal for field mice and many other kinds of wildlife.

We know that deer live around here. Like we see deer all the time around here. We know that there's fox around here.

We know that there's rabbits around here. We know that there's squirrels. We know that there are hawks.

The more I walk around with Daniel, the more my eyes are open to the rich wildlife that's so close to where she and her neighbors live.

I'm interested in the ways that all this amazing wildlife can live right next to us and thrive and we don't recognize it.

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