The In Balance Around Us - Experienced Through My Childhood

I grew up in Kennewick all my life, being a child who loved exploring the nature around me and hunting for insects/spiders. I remember being in early grade school when we had a year of invading ‘army worms'. They were everywhere! It was truly my first experience in witnessing the in balance in nature. More still, I took notice of how vast the number of invasive European Starlings swarmed in acrobatics in the skies; and how little we seen of our state's native Goldfinch. Years later, we had a different kind of invasion, around 1999; millions of ground beetles swarmed the city and roads. They said that they were possibly native, yet it only shown how the balance in our local ecosystem was off. That same year, my middle school class researched native animals, mine was the Greater sage-grouse; it was already on the endangered list and one I have never seen. It is heart breaking seeing how little we notice around my hometown on what was dying off around us. (Not many of the sage-grouse are surviving in WA, yet recently they have made a comeback in the Midwest in recent reports, a rare triumph.) My parents' house was on the outskirts town, they currently still live there; they are close to the sage brush fields where we would sometimes see coyotes wander into the streets. We had ground squirrels in our back yard when they moved there in 2000, yet in a few years as more houses were built around us, before they too disappeared. Every so often we would see the endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits run across the road or even visiting our front yard for water. Sometimes we find one injured in hiding in our shrubs, trying to avoid our cat's claws. We would do our best to keep our cat from harming them and provide a small wooden shelter to help them hide from the other cats in our neighborhood. We had a leaking hose that created a small puddle, so it was clear they were seeking water during the hottest days. Even than we would find ones that were not as lucky that met a tragic fate of being hit by a car coming up the steep hill road. In the end we felt as helpless on how to help the native wildlife living by us, just as they were struggling to adapt to our human invasion of growing estate development. For the greatest truth we human blind ourselves from, is that we, are truly the ones invading our wildlife's home…