One recent morning, about an hour after dawn, I sat in a stand of pines on a mountain side with my dog Wynton. We watched a broad tailed hummingbird hound a pygmy nuthatch. As the two zipped through the branches and circled our heads, we could hear the thrum of two sets of wings. Red-breasted nuthatches and chickadees chirped higher among the needles, and a flicker rattled a trunk in the distance. Wynton and I smiled; we felt great.

The world of my youth couldn’t have been ...