As part of the June Newsletter, I suggested that you try to find a garden critter to observe and study using the Handbook of Nature Study. There are already quite a few challenges that feature critters that you may come across in your own garden. Using the Outdoor Hour Challenge does not need to take a lot of time. In fact, I originally started the challenges and expected participants to only spend 10-15 minutes outdoors with their children. You do not need to make your nature study into a unit study or complicated. In fact, the simpler the better since it usually means the children are following their interests. If you already own the Getting Started ebook, you can use the first five challenges along with the suggestions in the June Newsletter.
Here are a few links to challenges that you may wish to think about using as part of the Garden Critter suggestion in the June Newsletter.
Garden snail (no OHC yet but covered in the Handbook of Nature Study)
Have fun exploring your garden or yard for something interesting to learn more about in your nature study. You might try to go outside early in the morning or later in the evening when the temperatures are cooler and there may be more critters moving around.
Make sure to follow up your study with the chance for a nature journal entry. Look up the answers to any questions your children may have either in the Handbook of Nature Study or at your local library. After you make your blog entry about your garden critter, submit it to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. Remember every entry to the carnival is an entry in my June Newsletter Giveaway for a Squirrel Buster Birdfeeder.
The new idea for using the Outdoor Hour Challenge Newsletter instead of a weekly nature challenge has liberated our family to follow our interests. I hope that your family is enjoying the subjects that come your way and that you take advantage of following up interest with the Handbook of Nature Study.
Lemon Queen Sunflowers sprouting in the lavender box.We are growing these as part of the Great Sunflower Project.
There have been several comments and emails asking if you can submit any nature study topics to the upcoming blog carnival. I would love to see whatever you do for your Outdoor Hour Challenge using the Handbook of Nature Study, or journal entries using the suggested ideas from the newsletter, and/or notebook pages from your own backyard studies.
Please feel free to submit your entries as you go along, just as you would have done with Mr. Linky. Here is the submission page for your entries to the carnival: Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival
I hope to get our next study posted over the weekend….probably our garden flower entry.
Blue dicks are the purplest purple of the spring in our world. I am thinking that the wildflowers on our usual trail are almost a full month behind their usual bloom schedule. I love knowing the rhythm of the growing things in our part of the world and being able to anticipate the blooming sequence.
There are meadows and trail edges filled with Blue dicks along with orange California poppies. Those two colors together are a feast for the eyes.
The other amazing purple flowers blooming right now are the Purple Chinese Houses. They are just starting to bloom and in the next few weeks they will bring the trailsides alive with color.
These are Indian Pinks….not very pink but rather a deep reddish orange. There are more of these blooming than usual.
The fennel is not as striking as some of the other wildflowers but it has a really nice shape.
Here is another kind of Miner’s Lettuce. You can really see how it grows in a rosette shape and then has delicate flowers at the ends.
Here is the first of the Pretty Faces. They are a really soft yellow and I like the way they look as they begin to open up. Maybe this one should go into my nature journal…
I almost missed this one! This is Hairy Fringepod and it makes me happy. There is just something about this plant that seems so special and unique. It will eventually bloom.
Here is a new wildflower for our list. I think it is a Woodland Star. It is in the saxifrage family which I am beginning to be able to pick out when I am identifying flowers.
This is certainly not a lovely wildflower but a really interesting insect that I learned about a few years ago….it is a Green Stigma Hangingfly. You can click on the image and go over to Flickr to see the largest size to really get a good look at this amazing insect.
I took quite a few more photos but this entry is getting really long so I will save some for another entry later this week. Hope you enjoyed seeing some of the colorful flowers from our part of the country (Northern California).
If you are interested in seeing more of my wildflower studies…you can click over to my Yosemite Wildflower blog and see some from past years.
We had almost given up trying to fit in a winter insect study but it was such a perfect day today to get outdoors that we took advantage. I whipped up some sandwiches, we jumped in the car, and we had a little picnic before we took a hike on our close-by and most familiar trail.
What impressed me the most as we started to hike was the greenness all around us! The grasses, the mosses, and the ferns are what Crayola would call “spring green”. It felt good to get outside and hike…we saw a red-tailed hawk right above us and it was amazing! We heard robins and Western scrub jays as we went along, nice to hear the familiar spring sounds in the woods.
Then the sky and clouds captured my eye and the beauty made me stop to admire and try to get a good shot of just how beautiful the almost spring sky is in our neighborhood today. We had a hail storm around 5:30 AM today and then the storm passed and the clouds parted, revealing a bright blue sky.
So for our insect study I was hoping to find some oak galls or leaf miners and I was successful in finding one of those things.
Leaf miners are talked about in the Handbook of Nature Study starting on page 329 (Lesson 77).
“Among the most familiar of these are the serpentine miners, so called because the figure formed by the eating out of the green pulp of the leaf curves like a serpent…..The serpent-like marking and the blister-like blothces which we often see on leaves are made by the larve of insects which complete their growth by feeding upon the inner living substance of the leaf.”
We saw evidence of other insects all around the trail when we stopped to look closely.
As I was taking these photos, I happened to see this guy. I have absolutely no idea what kind of insect it is but was great to observe him this afternoon, a sign of life in these woods.
The next leg of the hike had some surprises in store for us. Like these very first of the season Shooting Stars!
And these colorful and cheery buttercups…added bonus….some small fly-like insect.
I have been down this trail a hundred times and I haven’t ever noticed how nicely this manzanita is shaped. It must be pretty old because it is taller than most of the manzanita in this area and looks more like a tree than a bush. See the nice oak on the left all covered with spring moss?
On the way back up the trail we stopped to admire the waterfall and I was excited to see the early spring saxifrage beginning to sprout. Soon it will be blooming and I will know it is spring.
Kona had to get in the water while she waited for me to finish my photo taking. She moved some rocks around in the water with her nose and got a drink.
Here is the waterfall from the trail. This is looking up and there is a section below where we are so the sound of rushing water is heard from the parking place all the way down to where we turn around and come back up. It is one of those very relaxing and comforting sounds that we enjoy on this hike.
Here is a red insect I spotted while I was crouched down taking photos of the saxifrage. I don’t know what it is but it had wings and eventually flew away.
I think that wraps up our hike and our insects for our study. We are going to try to identify the red insect in the photo above and add it to our nature journals this week. What a great day outdoors! I think I have been color deprived because just seeing the few wildflowers, the greens of the grasses and mosses, and the colorful insect has brightened my mood. I think we all feel better.
Update:
I updated my last entry with a photo from last summer….we were at the redwood forest in Northern California. Click over and scroll down to see how small we are in comparison to the base of the tree!
If you are currently experiencing lots of snow (like we are), perhaps today is not the day to do this challenge. Pick one of the other challenges from the winter series: Filter snow, melt snow, look for animal tracks, observe some birds, or notice tree silhouettes.
There are plenty of challenges that you could try or do again this week if you can’t do the small square or get outside to look for insects. I look forward to reading about your family’s nature study this week. I am so enjoying glimpsing into your winter world and all of the bird study entries from last weekend.
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NOTE: If the challenge is included an ebook, it is noted directly after the challenge. If you have an Ultimate Membership, you will be able to pull up the ebook and print any notebook pages, coloring pages, or other printables for your nature study.
Over the last few weeks we have seen lots of these beautiful butterflies in our garden.
It is a California Sister or Adelpha californica which is found in oak habitats. These butterflies are not shy and they will flutter right around your head, swooping down to tease you. Today when we were watching another California Sister, a bird tried to fly down and catch it but we learned how *fast* these butterflies can move if they have to!
Our front yard has quite a few butterflies this month since we added several new butterfly attractive plants during our remodel. I will soon share a post with all the updates.
Now this could pose a problem…..a big pine tree down across our hiking trail.
We actually noticed before that this particular tree is *full* of acorn holes where the woodpeckers have made a huge storehouse of acorns in the trunk. We think this is what led to the demise of this big tree. That looks like a fresh acorn inside the hole.
When it fell, big pieces of the bark came off and exposed all the acorn holes. We climbed up and over to continue our hike. The dog decided to crawl underneath but either way it worked.
Further down the trail my son spotted this section of a wasp nest on the trail. These are amazing creations and hard to believe that an insect made this out of their spit and plant fibers. Once again the Handbook of Nature Study helped us to learn a little bit more about the process of building the nest on page 381 (Lesson 95). The whole section is fascinating…here is an excerpt:
“The nest is of paper made of bits of wood which the wasps pull off with their jaws from weather-worn fences or boards. This wood is reduced to pulp by saliva which is secreted from the wasp’s mouth, and is laid on in little layers which can be easily seen by examining the outside of the nest.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 381.
We also noticed these puffy growths on the oak branches along the trail. We thought maybe they were some sort of gall. I am still working on figuring out what exactly they are so if anyone has any ideas, I would appreciate an email.
It is nice to be out hiking again as the weather is cooling down a bit. My sons have been down off and on this week with a cold/flu. Mr. A said it was nice to get out and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine and I know it always makes me feel better too.
What is she looking at? We could not figure it out for a day or two. Then….
We took a closer look.
We could not believe the size of this tobacco hornworm.We at first thought it was the tomato hornworm but after investigation decided it is the tobacco hornworm which also eats tomato plants.
The birds ate a few of them and we picked off the rest. I love it when a new and interesting nature study subject comes our way unexpectedly.
I like the way it looks like their little feet are holding onto the branch. My son was fascinated with their mouths. Another great subject for our nature journals.
If you would like to know more about hornworms, you can read in the Handbook of Nature Study in the section on the hummingbird or sphinx moths (Lesson 75).
So we were out for a walk and I decided to take a photo of the Queen Anne’s Lace with all its seeds and the clusters. It is so pretty even now that it is drying up in the September drought.
I was excited to see an insect on the top of one of the seed clusters! It looks like a cricket to me. Just look at those really long antennae!
A wonderful surprise to add even more joy to our walk.
