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Growing up in the North, we knew how to turn the outdoors into a playground—and sometimes a jewelry box. We whistled with spinning maple seeds, tasted nectar from honeysuckle blossoms and linked clover into bracelets and necklaces.

Some of our creations were less innocent. I made rings and bracelets from the glowing parts of lightning bugs, an activity I now admit was hardly kind. The clover jewelry wilted quickly, but replacements were always growing nearby.

Other relatives had their own unusual encounters with wildlife. My sister-in-law once won a carnival lizard that came attached by a tiny chain to a safety pin. She proudly wore it on her blouse and, now nearing 90, still smiles at the memory.

My nephew tethered locusts with thread and let them fly around him. While I was babysitting one day, he even caught a bird with a homemade trap: a cardboard box held up by a stick, a string tied to the support and a trail of birdseed leading underneath. He waited until a hungry bird entered, then pulled the string.

After moving South, I discovered children there had played many of the same games—but with an even wider selection of creatures.

One woman recalled that her brother caught small lizards, opened their mouths and let them clamp onto his earlobes. I suspected someone was teasing the newcomer from the North. Then another woman confirmed the practice before I could finish asking about it.

“Oh, of course,” she said. “We ALWAYS wore lizard earrings.”

Southern children also reportedly encouraged visiting youngsters from the North to play with Spanish moss. The visitors fashioned it into mustaches, beards and wigs without realizing that mites and other tiny creatures might be living inside.

There were also rumors about games involving tree frogs, but some childhood traditions may be better left unexplored. Compared with our maple seeds and clover chains, these old-school Southern children had nature’s jewelry game thoroughly mastered.