Today (April 19) was our first "official" day of nature journaling. Prior to today, I feel like we've been dabbling in it, with aimless stabbing taking place. But today, we jumped in, with a much more pointed direction and plan for consistency in what we'll be doing. I'm pretty excited about this adventure.
Following Clare Walker Leslie's suggestion in her book, Nature Connection, we went outside for about 25 minutes this morning, simply listing the nature that we saw. We will be doing this daily for one week.
Here's what we came up with:
Birds
Cardinal (male)
Crow
Blue Jay
Mourning Dove
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Purple Finch
Phoebe or Flycatcher (not sure, although leaning towards phoebe due to tail movement)
(4/20) Determined that it was indeed an Eastern Phoebe!
Mockingbird
(4/21) Canada Goose
Pileated Woodpecker (heard it only)
(4/23) Scarlet Tanager! (Dear Son spotted it high up in the thickly-leafed trees, and yelled, "Cardinal!" I was about to congratulate him on the good find and identification when I realized it did not have the crest on its head, and it was even more vivid red than the cardinal, if that is even possible. Then I saw his dark red-black wings and said, "We've got a good find." :)
Insects
Crane Fly
Leaches Millipede (I do not like these!)
Orchard Orbweaver (a beautiful green spider with a red-spotted belly, guarding a perfect web)
Six-Spotted Green Tiger (fluorescent green beetle)
Earthworm
Carpenter Bee
(4/20) Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly?
Ladybug
(4/25) Aphids
Ants
Assassin Bug
Trees
Peach
Dogwood
Redbud
Ornamental Cherry
Tuliptree
Shagbark Hickory
(4/20) White Oak
Long Leaf Pine?
Wildflowers
May Apple
Trillium
(4/20) Trillium
Larger Blue Flag Iris
Wisteria
Forsythia
Common Buttercup
(4/23) Lyre-Leaf Sage
Reptiles/Amphibians
Rough Green Snake
Worm Snake (Both of these are currently captured and in containers on our front porch, thanks to Dear Son.)
(4/21) Ring Snake
Brown Water Snake
Weeds/Grasses/Other Plants
Clover
Violet
Honeysuckle
Poison Ivy
Common Fleabane
"Lemon Leaf" according to kids, but don't know it's real name yet
Various Mosses
Wild Grape Vine
(4/20) Virginia Creeper
Cultivated Plants
Rosemary
Weigela (ending blooming season)
Clematis (deep purple, currently blooming)
Lilac (starting to bloom)
Star Jasmine
Pink Knockout Rose (blooming)
Snowball Bush (ending blooming)
Lavender
Fungus/Lichen
"mushrooms" on a dead, downed tree
Animals
Groundhog
Squirrel
As the week progresses, I will add to this list. I'm thinking the following days will be more difficult, as we're quickly knocking out things that we know, and will now be identifying everything from our Field Guides or pictures on the web. I cannot help but think about how our knowledge is about to greatly expand here very quickly!
(4/20 update) Today was a lot harder! Yesterday we knocked out a lot of things that we knew without having to look them up. Today we had to use the field guides for nearly everything, and even then were unable to identify probably half of what we saw. Dear Daughter has no sense whatsoever about how to use a field guide, and I'm not much better off. She did at least try, and when I opened the page to where the oaks were, she was able to figure out which one it was. Dear Son likes to look at the pictures and learn all the details before he ever finds the actual live specimen. When he finds a specimen, he can go straight to it in the book and then asks me to read what it says. We will all learn a lot doing this!
(4/21 update) We spent the day at our "second home", which is a retreat center about 45 minutes from our house. We were there with a large group, so didn't really go hunting anything down. I sat on a large rock at the edge of the creek and watched the kids play in the water for awhile. My son came up to me, and suddenly exclaimed "SNAKE!" I jumped up, saw the snake curled up two feet from where I had been, and went and got my husband and the field guide. Another man came along and caught the snake by the tail, got bit, and hoped it wasn't poisonous. Ahhh!!! That was the second snake. As the day progressed, Dear Son found at least four other snakes, was given a salamander of some sort, and went on several other great hunts that turned up various other critters. It was a good day.
(4/23 update) What a chilly, windy day! At only in the 50's, after having spring days already that felt more like summer, we bundled up in our winter jackets. The unusual winds had the trees in our thick woods bending and swaying. The leaves fluttered their silver underneaths into the bright sunshine. It really was a beautiful day to wade into the woods! We always wear our tall garden boots, as poison ivy is thick already. Dear Son had his flashlight, looking into the rocky crevasses for snakes (none found, for once!), and I sported binoculars, the likes of which I have to really get any good at using. My naked eye seems to prove more accurate at this point, but I do like to try out the "spectacles". . . . This wandering in the woods is so good for my soul. I'm SO glad we're doing this! I picked several different maple leaves that maybe one day I'll be able to identify. For now, I did a rubber stamping of them in my nature journal, to refer back to later. I also picked one flower that I didn't know, brought it inside, and painted it. (You can see that in the above post.) It was an enjoyable time.
(4/25) Yesterday was too cold for me. ;) (It was actually beautiful, but cool in the morning when we would have been outside. So I copped out, and instead of nature journaling, we watched the live webcam from Cornell University's site of the red-tailed hawk. Today was gorgeous, and found us back outside. I've decided I need to invest in more than just children's field guides, as more than half of what we have around here is not in our books. I can't identify much anymore. So it will be leaf prints in our journal, waiting for later I.D.
Following Clare Walker Leslie's suggestion in her book, Nature Connection, we went outside for about 25 minutes this morning, simply listing the nature that we saw. We will be doing this daily for one week.
Here's what we came up with:
Birds
Cardinal (male)
Crow
Blue Jay
Mourning Dove
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Purple Finch
Phoebe or Flycatcher (not sure, although leaning towards phoebe due to tail movement)
(4/20) Determined that it was indeed an Eastern Phoebe!
Mockingbird
(4/21) Canada Goose
Pileated Woodpecker (heard it only)
(4/23) Scarlet Tanager! (Dear Son spotted it high up in the thickly-leafed trees, and yelled, "Cardinal!" I was about to congratulate him on the good find and identification when I realized it did not have the crest on its head, and it was even more vivid red than the cardinal, if that is even possible. Then I saw his dark red-black wings and said, "We've got a good find." :)
Insects
Crane Fly
Leaches Millipede (I do not like these!)
Orchard Orbweaver (a beautiful green spider with a red-spotted belly, guarding a perfect web)
Six-Spotted Green Tiger (fluorescent green beetle)
Earthworm
Carpenter Bee
(4/20) Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly?
Ladybug
(4/25) Aphids
Ants
Assassin Bug
Trees
Peach
Dogwood
Redbud
Ornamental Cherry
Tuliptree
Shagbark Hickory
(4/20) White Oak
Long Leaf Pine?
Wildflowers
May Apple
Trillium
(4/20) Trillium
Larger Blue Flag Iris
Wisteria
Forsythia
Common Buttercup
(4/23) Lyre-Leaf Sage
Reptiles/Amphibians
Rough Green Snake
Worm Snake (Both of these are currently captured and in containers on our front porch, thanks to Dear Son.)
(4/21) Ring Snake
Brown Water Snake
Weeds/Grasses/Other Plants
Clover
Violet
Honeysuckle
Poison Ivy
Common Fleabane
"Lemon Leaf" according to kids, but don't know it's real name yet
Various Mosses
Wild Grape Vine
(4/20) Virginia Creeper
Cultivated Plants
Rosemary
Weigela (ending blooming season)
Clematis (deep purple, currently blooming)
Lilac (starting to bloom)
Star Jasmine
Pink Knockout Rose (blooming)
Snowball Bush (ending blooming)
Lavender
Fungus/Lichen
"mushrooms" on a dead, downed tree
Animals
Groundhog
Squirrel
As the week progresses, I will add to this list. I'm thinking the following days will be more difficult, as we're quickly knocking out things that we know, and will now be identifying everything from our Field Guides or pictures on the web. I cannot help but think about how our knowledge is about to greatly expand here very quickly!
(4/20 update) Today was a lot harder! Yesterday we knocked out a lot of things that we knew without having to look them up. Today we had to use the field guides for nearly everything, and even then were unable to identify probably half of what we saw. Dear Daughter has no sense whatsoever about how to use a field guide, and I'm not much better off. She did at least try, and when I opened the page to where the oaks were, she was able to figure out which one it was. Dear Son likes to look at the pictures and learn all the details before he ever finds the actual live specimen. When he finds a specimen, he can go straight to it in the book and then asks me to read what it says. We will all learn a lot doing this!
(4/21 update) We spent the day at our "second home", which is a retreat center about 45 minutes from our house. We were there with a large group, so didn't really go hunting anything down. I sat on a large rock at the edge of the creek and watched the kids play in the water for awhile. My son came up to me, and suddenly exclaimed "SNAKE!" I jumped up, saw the snake curled up two feet from where I had been, and went and got my husband and the field guide. Another man came along and caught the snake by the tail, got bit, and hoped it wasn't poisonous. Ahhh!!! That was the second snake. As the day progressed, Dear Son found at least four other snakes, was given a salamander of some sort, and went on several other great hunts that turned up various other critters. It was a good day.
(4/23 update) What a chilly, windy day! At only in the 50's, after having spring days already that felt more like summer, we bundled up in our winter jackets. The unusual winds had the trees in our thick woods bending and swaying. The leaves fluttered their silver underneaths into the bright sunshine. It really was a beautiful day to wade into the woods! We always wear our tall garden boots, as poison ivy is thick already. Dear Son had his flashlight, looking into the rocky crevasses for snakes (none found, for once!), and I sported binoculars, the likes of which I have to really get any good at using. My naked eye seems to prove more accurate at this point, but I do like to try out the "spectacles". . . . This wandering in the woods is so good for my soul. I'm SO glad we're doing this! I picked several different maple leaves that maybe one day I'll be able to identify. For now, I did a rubber stamping of them in my nature journal, to refer back to later. I also picked one flower that I didn't know, brought it inside, and painted it. (You can see that in the above post.) It was an enjoyable time.
(4/25) Yesterday was too cold for me. ;) (It was actually beautiful, but cool in the morning when we would have been outside. So I copped out, and instead of nature journaling, we watched the live webcam from Cornell University's site of the red-tailed hawk. Today was gorgeous, and found us back outside. I've decided I need to invest in more than just children's field guides, as more than half of what we have around here is not in our books. I can't identify much anymore. So it will be leaf prints in our journal, waiting for later I.D.
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