We went on a search for cattails and we found that we have two different areas of cattails within walking distance of our house. We decided that we could cut one cattail to bring home to closely observe. I was surprised at how “into” finding the cattails the boys became once we got started.
Another place that we found cattails was along the walking trail we frequent every week. These were much taller than the others and I think this will be the spot we observe over the next year.
There was a little water in the ditch where we found our cattails but not much. It was more like a muddy puddle than anything else.
Here is a close-up of the flower spike and right now it feels like velvet. The boys were surprised at how soft and fuzzy it was to the touch. We talked about what we learned from our pre-study and how the cattail is edible. We all decided that we would like to try eating it someday……something to plan for the future.
My sons were content to complete the notebook page with photos but I was inspired as so many others are by the simple beauty of this plant that we so often don’t take the time to appreciate. I pulled out my watercolors and made a quick painting for my nature journal. I found a tutorial in a watercolor book that I have on the shelf that showed how to add stippling with a pen once the paints are dry. I love the way it adds a little detail to the cattail.
This was a perfect way to start off our Autumn Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges.
A few weeks ago I wrote about finding something extraordinary in the ordinary as far as things we see in our own backyard and in our own neighborhoods. We have done some follow-up work on our five subjects and I wanted to share a little about what we learned and didn’t learn. 🙂
Morning Glory (Handbook of Nature Study page 519 reference to twining)
We learned that it is closely related to the sweet potato. It is called a morning glory since the blossoms only last one day. It grows in just about any soil, doesn’t like too much moisture, and will thrive in full sun.
I love the way the vine curls up the poles and then into the trees.
Alligator Lizard (reference and photo of alligator lizard and fence lizard, Handbook of Nature Study, pages 210-211)
We did some research on our alligator lizard but guess what? We saw an even bigger and more glorious lizard last week.
How is that for a lizard? I love his feet!
I think he might be a Northwestern Fence Lizard which we have had in our backyard before but he also may be a Sierra Fence Lizard. He has lots of color on his back and we have always just called these guys “blue bellies”. I am not definite about who exactly he is but still enjoyed observing him with his wonderfully long toes on his feet and his inquisitive eye.
We learned from reading on different websites that lizards can have ticks! That is something we definitely did not know before and for some reason we all found it very interesting.
This is an older journal entry my son did for a lizard we had in the backyard. He incorporated a photo and a sketch. We did some additional research this week on the alligator lizard and found that there are several species that live in our area. Now we are not sure which one we have so during our next encounter we will know more in detail what to look for.
Caterpillar (Handbook of Nature Study -lots of caterpillar info. We used page 299 for a drawing in our nature journal.)
We had no luck with figuring out what kind of caterpillar we saw on the sidewalk under our Sweet Gum tree. You would think that with its bright colors and outstanding horns and markings that we could find it somewhere in our field guide or online. Nope. We will be keeping our eyes open to see if we can observe more about these creatures right outside our back door.
Hummingbirds (Handbook of Nature Study section on hummingbirds starts on page 115)
We were still not able to figure out our dark headed hummingbird from a few weeks ago. We have been watching the feeder but the regular hummers are keeping it busy. Anna’s Hummingbirds are very common at our feeders all summer long and then even over the winter. We learned that they are *not* migratory which is really interesting since it gets very cold here in the winter and we even have snow. Where do they live when the weather is bad in the winter? You can be sure we will be keeping our eyes open to answer that question.
We have been working on taking photos of the birds in sports mode and we get much better photos…a tad bit clearer.
After some research and online digging, I think we have identified our migratory black headed hummer as a Black-chinned Hummingbird. I looked at the migratory map on WhatBird.com and it looks like it is highly likely it could be just this bird. Here is more on their migration.
We read some more about this regular to the feeder, or more specifically…under the feeder. They always come in a pair. What is interesting is that the map does not show that we should have these birds but we have them year round in our yard. The other thing that is interesting is that the maps show that we should have Spotted Towhees all year but we don’t during the summer. Hmmm….don’t know what that means but it is interesting.
We also learned that California Towhees are sometimes called “car birds” since they like to run and hide under parked cars. We have actually witnessed this behavior several times and think it is quite funny. They also will sit on car mirrors and “fight” their own image. We have not seen that behavior but it wouldn’t surprise us.
Our Fabulous Five Ordinary Things
That wraps up our fabulous five ordinary things that we looked more closely at from our yard. This was a great exercise and we will be certain to do it again.
Woke up this morning feeling a little sad about the end of summer.
I am going to miss…..
Summer hikes in the National Parks……
My gigantic sunflowers and participating in the Great Sunflower Project, sitting quietly watching for bees.
Crazy games of volleyball in the park with friends…even in the rain.
Hikes with the boys looking for Big Foot in the redwoods.
Lunchtime walks at the river with our swimmer dog Kona.
I am even going to miss the hot summer afternoons and garden tending.
The Oregon Coast-camping, hiking, photographing, exploring, sitting peacefully in the sand, hiking in the trees, identifying mushrooms, observing banana slugs, and dodging rain….all of those things made such great memories this year.
Freshly cut grass and crepe myrtle blooms in the warm summer evenings….usually with accompanying bats flying overhead.
I will just need to find some things to fill me up during this autumn season. I will challenge myself to find the best parts of this season.
Outdoor Hour Challenge-Autumn Series #1
Cattail Autumn Study
Cattails are the focus of this nature study and you will either be able to complete the challenge by observing cattails this week or sometime in the future. Look at the reading of the Handbook of Nature Study as a way to prepare you for a future nature study. Be on the look out for cattails as you drive around your local area and you may be surprised to find them in places you did not notice before.
Inside Preparation Work
Read pages 500-503 in the Handbook of Nature Study. View the images of cattails and talk about where you can find them in your local area. I asked my boys and they thought of three places near-by that they remember seeing them grow.
Print out the Cattail Seasonal Nature Study notebook page and go over the suggested activities so when you have your Outdoor Hour time your children will be prepared for what to look for.
Outdoor Time
Look for Cattails: Spend your outdoor time looking for cattails and then observing them to record their appearance at this time of the year. You will be revisiting this spot in every season to record your observations and to note the changes that take place from season to season. If your child does not want to sketch the cattail, bring along a camera to have them record the appearance with a photo. Remember the things you read about in the Handbook of Nature Study and see if you can complete the Cattails Seasonal Nature Study notebook page with lots of details. Also, look for other living creatures that might make their home in the cattails or that might visit there if you are still and quiet.
Alternate Idea: Use your fifteen minutes of outdoor time to explore your own backyard. Look for something ordinary that you can learn more about during the next week. The most important part of your Outdoor Hour time is to spend a few minutes with your children outdoors, slowing down enough to observe something closely in your own backyard or neighborhood. Keep the atmosphere relaxed and let your child’s interests guide you to find something to observe. Don’t forget to use all your senses and try to include a few minutes of quiet time to experience the sounds of your own backyard.
Follow-Up Activity
Allow your child a few minutes to tell you about their outdoor experience. Help them find a few words to record in their nature journal.
Give time for a nature journal entry and remember it can be as simple as a sketch, a label, and a date. Complete the Cattails Seasonal Nature Study notebook page for the Autumn season and file it in your nature journal to compare to future cattail studies. As always, remember that the nature journal entry is a great way to record your outdoor experiences but it is not necessary every time.
Additional Resource for the Cattail Seasonal Nature Study:
There is a great book to look for at your library, Discover Nature in Water and Wetlands. This book has a whole section on studying cattails that I found very useful in preparing this challenge in addition to the Handbook of Nature Study.
Please note these are Amazon affiliate links to books I own and love.
It is very important for those of us who take our children out into the woods for nature study to be able to recognize poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac.
Where we live we have an abundance of poison oak and this time of the year it is actually very pretty and easy to identify. I know in other parts of the country there is poison ivy and sumac as well.
This video does a great job of explaining everything you should know before you take a walk in the woods and potentially come into contact with poison oak, poison ivy, or sumac. Knowledge is always a good thing.
My husband says that in his job as a wildland firefighter, they use Tecnu after any exposure. We are going to get some and have it on hand for those times we think we may have come into contact with poison oak.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will try to find answers for you as best I can. I would hate for you to unknowingly expose anyone to something potentially dangerous. On the other hand, don’t get too worried either. Just remember the “leaves of three, let it be” rule and you should do a good job of avoiding contact. We have had our share of poison oak rashes in our family and I think most of our exposure comes from our family pets. Don’t miss that part of the video.
We have quite a few new participants in the Outdoor Hour Challenges so I want to give a big welcome to everyone….hope to see your nature study entries soon.
We have been enjoying fresh tomatoes from our garden for quite some time now. There just is no comparison between homegrown and store bought tomatoes. I actually don’t like the store bought ones very much. It wasn’t until I grew my own tomatoes that I learned what a tomato really should taste like.
We did a bit of research into various kinds of tomatoes. There is a farm near our home that grows a variety of heirloom tomatoes that are amazing in color and shape. We are inspired to give a few a try next year. Does anyone have any experience with a particular variety? Source for seeds?
We completed our study with a few tomatoes from the garden, closely observing the seeds and flesh of the tomato.
The notebook page was filled out and filed away in the nature notebook.
But as usual, most of our time was spent outdoors in the garden looking at the plants, blossoms, and ripening tomatoes. There are quite a few blossoms on each of our two remaining tomato plants. The weather is still pretty hot and I think we have a good chance of having tomatoes at least until the end of the month.
We noted the smell of the tomato plant when you rub it and how it makes most of us itchy after working in the garden. This year is the first time we have pruned our tomato plants as they grew and it seems to have helped in two areas. First, we seem to have larger tomatoes and secondly, the plants don’t bend and break so much.
We use a wire tomato cage around each plant to help support the branches but before trimming, the branches still try to get really long and scrawny. We trim those off as they start to stick out over the path.
Tomatoes are a great crop to grow in your garden. If you didn’t get a chance this year, make sure to plan to grow a few in your yard next spring and summer. You will not be disappointed.
So yesterday was our big day trip to Turtle Bay. The weather was perfect which was a big relief. The city of Redding is usually scorching hot this time of year but there were a few high clouds in the morning to keep the temperatures down.
We started off with the outside exhibits at the nature center just in case it warmed up and the aviary was first on the list. What a racket these birds can make! You are given a little stick with some seeds on it to attract the birds down to eye level. This was a great way to spend extended time close-up to these colorful birds.
These Rosellas preferred to sick up high and watch us instead.
This pair of cockatiels posed for me and they never did come down to snack on the seeds.
After the aviary, we visited the butterfly house. We didn’t see too many butterflies this time but this Julia on some sedum was the prettiest one that I captured in a photo.
After lunch we went outside to explore the botanical gardens. What a display of plantings that will grow in our climate! I did not realize that this place had so much information and now I need to go back when I am fresh and the sun is not so hot. We became members of the nature center so we can get in free for a whole year and this will make it easier to go back just to look at the gardens and get some ideas for my yard.
We are going to be pulling up our lawn and replanting with drought-resistant plantings and the display at this botanical garden will help us pick things that will flourish and be beautiful without so much water.
This is the famous Sundial Bridge which doesn’t look much like a bridge from this photo because I took it from the gardens. Believe me, it is a very large bridge over the Sacramento River that connects the nature center with the botanical garden. Follow the link above to see the whole thing in a photo.
The bridge really is a big sundial. I took this photo of the shadow at 12:47 and you can see on the rock that it says 1:00….what a great way to teach about the sun and telling time.
One more thing that I loved about this nature center is the way things are so open to explore. This shelf is just what I want in my living room to display all our collections and nature stuff. I might have to have my son take a look at it and see if he can design something similar to fit my space.
It was a very long day with a long drive to get there and back but all of us agreed that it was a fantastic place. We all found something to be excited about and interested in. What more can you ask for?
We often see Red-tailed Hawks in our area and they are an awesome sight as they soar high above us. If you listen carefully, their call can be heard from very far away because it is so distinct. Try clicking the photos to see them larger.
This particular hawk landed in a little stream area at the flower farm. You can’t see the little bit of creek in this photo where he is sitting at the water’s edge. He had swooped down over our heads and we thought for sure he was after his prey but he landed and sat for a few minutes which allowed us to take a few photos. My boys commented that he was a lot bigger than they thought and he was a big guy. I looked it up when we got home and our field guide says they are around 22 inches with a wingspan of 52 inches and weigh around 45 ounces.
He waddled through the tall grasses and up into the near-by parking lot and we were able to really see his red tail feathers. He turned his head and gave us his best “hawk eye” and then he flew off.
Off he goes!
For more information on these gorgeous birds, I highly recommend the AllAboutBirds.com article. This page has inspired me to try sketching the Red-tailed Hawk in my nature journal, Naturalist’s Notebook, although my sketch will be a far cry from this piece of art. 🙂
Find the Extraordinary in the Ordinary I challenge you to find five ordinary things in your backyard or in your everyday life that you can study and learn something more about. Find something extraordinary in something you have come to think of as ordinary and usual, so usual that you may not even notice it anymore.
Sebastian actually gave me this idea that I think would be a great challenge for nature study close to home. In order to start developing the idea, we challenged ourselves to go out in our backyard and find something extraordinary. I decided we needed a little clearer definition.
Extraordinary: beyond the usual, far more than usual, more than expected
It is that “more than expected” part that we want to develop an eye for in our family.
Here are the five things we will be learning about from the Handbook of Nature Study, the field guides from our nature shelf, or internet sources like WhatBird.com and eNature.com.
The blue of the morning glory is outstanding and we have never done a formal study of this garden flower. Now is the time to do it since we have lots of blossoms to observe. We already have decided how extraordinarily blue this flower is…not very common in flowers I think.
While we were outside, the cat was chasing this Alligator lizard. Lizards are not an extraordinary creature in our backyard but as we watched this lizard, we started to wonder about its defense mechanism…the breaking off of the tail to distract its attacker. We are going to do some more research about this extraordinary ability.
This California Towhee is a regular visitor to our feeder, or rather under our feeder. We have never taken time to focus our nature study on this particular bird but now we will. I’m sure there is something extraordinary about it that we don’t know yet. The most visible difference we have noticed about the California Towhee is its very long tail…hmmm….maybe that is extraordinary.
We have noticed an increase in hummingbirds in our yard this summer and there have been two in particular that we would like to study more in depth. I was unable to get a photo of the hummingbirds but thought you might enjoy seeing my new feeder. I think maybe the two unusual hummers we saw were migrating and I would love to learn more about where some of our hummingbirds go at different times of the year.
Caterpillars have been dropping out of the Sweet gum trees and before they can crawl away, the birds swoop down and eat them. These caterpillars are busily eating the leaves from the tree but we don’t know exactly what they will be once they go though their life cycle. Look at those colors, now that is extraordinary! We are going to try to identify these critters as part of our challenge.
Now we have a list of things to investigate.
1. Morning glories
2. Alligator lizards and their tail
3. California Towhee
4. Migrating hummingbirds
5. Caterpillar from the Sweet gum tree.
You can take the challenge to find the extraordinary in the ordinary if you are up to it! Find something in your yard to focus on and really see the beauty, the design, and the magnificence of something that perhaps you have been overlooking. It could be as simple as the dandelion in the crack of your sidewalk. It could be the robin gathering worms in your lawn. It could be the ants on your kitchen counter. The possibilities are endless.
If you take the challenge and you blog about it, leave me a comment and I will come over and read about it.
I will be posting our results over the next few weeks.
Inside Preparation Work We have come to the last of our crop plant challenges. This week we will be observing tomatoes. Since there is no section in the Handbook of Nature Study for the tomato, I found a couple of things that will help you share information with your children. You might like to read the article and watch the video in preparation for this challenge.
1. Read pages 20-21 “Gardening and Nature Study”. This small section will remind you of the value of keeping a garden or at least a small box or container with a few plants to observe.
2. Make sure to get fresh tomatoes to observe during your follow-up time. The ideal way would be to pick them from your own garden but buying them at the grocery or at your local farmers market will work just as well. If you can, have on hand two different kinds of tomatoes to compare during your follow-up time: cherry tomato, plum tomato, beefsteak tomato, green tomato, or different heirloom varieties.
Outdoor Time3. Make sure to spend 10-15 minutes outdoors in your backyard or a near-by park. If you have tomatoes or other crop plants growing in your garden, make sure to spend some time observing the plants, insects, birds, or other living things that visit from time to time. Collect a few leaves or flowers to put in your press and then in your nature journal. You might check on your seasonal tree to see if it has changed since your last observation.
Follow-Up Activity
4. Take a few minutes to talk about anything your child found outside that was interesting. Use the Handbook of Nature study, previous challenges, or local field guides to learn more information. Give you child a chance to express in their own words something they experienced outdoors.
5. If you have a real tomato to observe and taste, you can make a journal entry to record a sketch or thoughts about the tomato. (If you purchased the Crop Plants notebook pages, you will have a page to record your observations.)
Here are some journal ideas to get you started:
If your tomato has a stem and leaf, make sure to sketch those in your journal.
Measure the size of your tomato with a measuring tape.
Compare different tomatoes.
Cut your tomato crosswise and observe the seed pattern.
Describe the texture of the tomato skin and the inside flesh of the tomato.
Take time to observe the smell of the tomato and record your description.
Remove some seeds and compare them to other seeds you have studied during the crop plant challenges. (size, shape, location, color, texture)
Make a watercolor painting of your tomato or just its cross-section.
New for this series of challenges are custom made notebook pages for each crop plant we will study. I have designed simple to use pages that will complement each challenge and will be an easy way to start a nature journal. Each of the eight notebook pages is in full color, but they are just as great in black and white.
