Signs Of Spring: A Spring Scavenger Hunt

This week the Outdoor Nature Challenge was to look for signs of Spring! One option was to take a Spring Scavenger Hunt, and that's what we decided to do. Here are the things we saw, felt, heard, and smelled:

Things we saw:

New Spring Leaves


More new leaves


Two different shades of green


Tiny WildFlowers


A taller wildflower (With a bug on it!) Notice how hairy the stem and leaf are!


A weed...or a wildflower. Which would you call it?


A tree with blossoms. This is our Japanese Cherry tree.


A bee


A beetle (Okay, this one wasn't on the list, but we found it while looking for ants!) We did find a few ants as well, but they kept dipping in and out of the grass before my son could get the picture.

Things to feel:

A soft smooth petal (It's nice looking at how petals look up close too!)


Actually, we found a bit more than one flower petal!!


Something warm from the sun
This is our cat, Tiger. He got a little too hot and headed for some shade! (We could completely identify! We were hot in the sun too!)


Something cool in the shade.
Well, Tiger's mostly in the shade anyway! In this photo, he's standing beside our butterfly bush, which will quickly shoot up again before too long. All around Tiger are petals off of our nearby Japanese Cherry tree. The small patches of sunlight on the ground come from the sun peaking through the branches of our Japanese Cherry Tree.

Things we smelled:

The flowers of Red-tipped Photinia smell really nice!


These flowers smelled wonderfully too!

Things we heard:
Birds chirping.

Other things we noticed:

We thought these flower petals were quite interesting!


Last week I posted some photos of our Candytuff plants. They were a Mother's Day gift to me one year! When my family gave them to me, they'd already planted them in our walled garden area. As they've grown, they begun to drape delicately over the wall.


Look how much more the Candytuff flowers have filled out this week! Last week the shape was quite different!

Early Spring Flowers: A Homeschool Nature Study

This week's Nature Study Challenge was to study and learn about Early Spring Flowers. My son and I didn't have any trouble finding spring flowers to study! We have a Bradford Pear, a Japanese Cherry tree, crocuses, and several other blooming plants in our year right now.

We began our nature study by comparing the blossoms of the Bradford Pear, the Japanese Cherry tree, and an ornamental shrub. We observed the parts of the flower on each one, and also discovered that they all had five petals.

Bradford Pear Tree


Japanese Cherry Tree

I've forgotten the name of this one. I believe it's some sort of dwarf ornamental pear. Whatever it is, it's very pretty when it's blooming! Notice how it has both white and pink blossoms on the same plant.

You can see how the sepals help protect the bud!

We had quite a few bees flying from flower to flower in our yard. Luckily the bees were more interested in the flowers than they were in us, as my son had to get pretty close to the bees and stay there for quite some time as he waited for a bee to land on a flower long enough for him to snap a photo!

Next we explored some crocuses that were blooming in our yard.

We noticed that, unlike the previous flowers we'd studied that day, they did NOT have five petals. They have three petals and three sepals. The sepals are the outer "petals" which help protect the flower, especially while it's developing from a bud.

We observed that our crocuses have grasslike leaves, with a white stripe down the middle of each. In the Handbook of Nature Study, Anna Botsford Comstock explains that crocuses don't come from bulbs. They come from corms, which are thick underground stems. Bulbs have layers, like an onion, and corms do not. Roots grow down from the corm and shoots grow up from it. Each year, baby corms grow on top of the mother corms, causing the corms to be eventually be pushed out above the ground, and necessitating the need to replant them every few years. We're looking forward to planting some crocus corms in the fall, so we can see exactly what the corms look like! We did find a great image of a crocus plant, including the corm: Crocus Corm in Spring. We also found some nice images of crocuses in different stages of developing, including the corms: SRGC Bulb Log Diary



Here are some of the other flowers we found in our yard.

This is a very small flower that was growing in our grass. We noticed that, like the crocus, this one did NOT have 5 petals. It had four.

Our Candytuff didn't have 5 petals either! I found this to be a very interesting petal arrangement! The photo above was taken 4 days ago. When I looked today, the flowers had begun to fill out more.

Here's a side view of our Candytuff, taken on the same day as the photo above.

You can see the additional flowers that will soon be open. They will help make each flower cluster look more round.

Nature Study: Animal Tracks, Sea Gulls, & Fiddler Crabs

My family took a short vacation to Skidaway Island State Park in Georgia this week. We camped and hiked at the state park, visited the nature center, observed birds with some binoculars, explored Savannah, and also took a couple of trips over to Tybee Island Beach. One of the ideas suggested for this week's Outdoor Hour Nature Study Challenge was to search for animal tracks, so we decided a nature trail at the Skidaway Island State Park would be a great place to look!



The path was mostly sandy, although parts were also covered with boardwalks and bridges. The trees overhead were absolutely covered in Spanish Moss!

The first signs of animal life that we found along the trail were some holes in the ground, with piles of sand standing nearby.



Further investigation showed us that the holes belonged to crabs! Fiddler crabs!


You can tell they are Fiddler crabs because the males have one very large claw which they hold somewhat like a fiddle.


Here's a Fiddler Crab coming out of his den.


Next we came upon some tracks on the path. Maybe these are dog tracks? We did see several dogs go by. We were amazed at how deep the claws sunk into the sand!




This photo appears to have one track (the bigger one) facing left, and a smaller track facing right.






At one place, we were able to get off the trail and explore the wet sandy beach a bit closer! We found lots of snails and crabs here! We also saw some ducks across the river.

Here's a crab leg we found as we headed back to the main path.


Later that afternoon, we headed over to Tybee Island Beach. We searched for tracks there too.


Can you guess what types of tracks these are (photo above and below)?



Have you made your guess?


If you guessed Sea Gull tracks, you're correct!

There were sea gulls everywhere! They moved as a huge flock, from place to place along the beach.

Here are some other tracks we found on the beach at Tybee Island.

It appears to me that this photo has tracks from two different type of animals on it.



It was also suggested that we study one or more mammals this week. We looked up some information about raccoons, hoping to see one while camping. We didn't see a live raccoon on this trip, but found one on display at the nature center at Skidaway Island State Park.



Oh, I almost forgot to mention this part! Although we didn't see the guilty critter who did this, we suspect it was a raccoon who tried to get into our small canvas cooler in the middle of the night one night. He knocked the cooler onto the ground and put three small teeth marks into the side. He was not successful in getting in to the cooler this time.

I do recall watching a raccoon open a cooler when I was a child. My family had already gotten into the tent for the night, when I heard a noise and peeked out. There was a raccoon, up on our picnic table, opening our cooler! He simply turned the locking mechanism and opened our cooler, with no more effort than a human! On another trip, I remember turning around just in time to see a raccoon stealing a hot steak off of a lit grill! Raccoons must be pretty clever!

"One-Small-Square" Nature Study Activity!

We had so much fun last week completing the Outdoor Hour Nature Challenge, that we decided to participate this week as well! The assignment this week was to mark one square foot somewhere on the ground, and then observe, prod, dig around in, examine, and discover what we could find there!



Here's what we found:

Lots of pine needles (which we moved aside)
rocks
a large root
many small roots (after we began digging in that area)
a twig
leaves
a piece of pine bark
a maple tree seed ("helicopter")

We dug into the dirt some, but didn't find any insects. Nor did we find any worms. My son decided it was too dry for worms there, and he was probably right! Since we didn't find any bugs, we decided to look around for bugs elsewhere.

Here's one thing we found:


This tree had been lying here for quite some time and was already well on it's way to turning back into dirt. It was so interesting looking at the layers of wood that were left!



Here's what we found when we lifted up a section of the tree.


It's a millipede! Look at all those legs!


Look at how the main part of the tree has decayed, and left just the center core.

My son knew where there was another tree that was decaying, and so we went to have a look at it.



He had found this tree while out playing a previous day. He and his friends had discovered that when they stepped on it, it was bouncy - spongy - springy. He had me stand on it too, and it did indeed feel very much like a sponge. (Note: I didn't get a photo of the part that we stood on. It wasn't the core, as is seen in the photo above.)

I don't know about my son, but I certainly learned something new from our nature study. I learned more about the stages that a tree goes through as it decays!