Nature Photography with Belmont Summer Camp – Part 1

This is my third summer to lead a summer camp nature photography session for the Howard County Conservancy’s Summer Camp. Every year is different. This year the weather was perfect on photo shoot day. I am illustrating this post with pictures I took – the children took many more than I did and pushed the abilities of the camera’s they were using to the brink. There were two groups of campers. The younger group was the first to head out and elected to go the fastest route to the woods. Almost everyone took a picture of the path into the trees.

Looking up I noticed some spider webs high in a tree.

I took one picture since none of the cameras the children were using had enough zoom…but quickly moved on to things they could take: the root end of a fallen tree,

A tree that had fallen across a small stream and was too rotten to use as a bridge, 

Curls of grass as we headed back to the meadow, and

Caterpillars.

As we were heading back to the Nature Center we realized that the path through the cut grass contained a lot of ticks. It was tick-check time as soon as we got back to the Nature Center!

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 3, 2017

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #88 – My favorite is the roadrunner with the lizard!

American Trees are Shifting West – Based on analysis of tree inventories done between 1980 and one finished in 2015 and included 86 species of trees.

New York Marine Life Revealed at Brooklyn Photo Exhibition – Underwater views by photographer Keith Ellenbogen….raising awareness of the conservation needs of local marine wildlife and their habitats.

An inside view of Hong Kong’s hidden rooftop farms – Born out of fear of contaminated food! Fresh, locally grown vegetables are a luxury in the big city that imports more than 90% of its food.

Monarch butterflies: the problem with herbicides – Research that looks at the many factors that contribute to the decline of this migratory insect. I know that in our areas of Maryland there are a lot fewer Monarch butterflies than 20 years ago.

It’s Not Easy Being a Hatchling – 3 osprey hatchlings…growing fast….the live cam feed is available here.

New Online Database Catalogues 20,000 Threatened Archaeological Sites – Armed conflict, looting, tourists, construction….there are a lot of sites at risk. The link is an introductory article; the site itself is here.

The future of employment – There are quite a few categories of jobs that will be done by computers rather than people in coming decades. Some – like registered nurses and teachers – will still be performed by people.

Extremely Detailed Macro Portraits of Colorfully Exotic Insects – Insects….done with one shot, not stacked images.

Vacation at Toadstool Geologic Park – Sometimes out of the way places hold a charm found no where else!

Dogwoods and Jack-in-the-Pulpits at Brighton Dam Azalea Garden

Azaleas are not the only plants I look for at Brighton Dam Azalea Garden. The dogwoods and jack-in-the-pulpits are blooms at the same time. The dogwoods are understory trees. The older ones that are the understory to the big oaks and tulip poplars are native dogwoods – white with notches on the outer edged of the ‘petals’.

Newer hybrid dogwoods are planted in the same area as the new hybrid azaleas in an area to the left of the garden entrance. There are white ones – without a notch…and pink ones. They are easier to photograph because the trees are smaller and more flowers are at eye level.

Jack-in-the-Pulpits are harder to notice because the flowers are almost the same color as the leaves. See if you can see the flowers before scrolling down to see more enlarged views. One of the enlarged views has a lot of aphids (yellow).

Young Oaks at Brighton Dam Azalea Garden

There lots of big oak and tulip poplar trees at Brighton Dam Azalea Garden that provide the dappled environment that azaleas need. The surprise for me this time was the large number of smaller oak trees. There must have been a large crop of acorns in the past few years that the squirrels planted and forgot and the result were a group of foot high oaks with tehri leaves unfurling. The leaves of one were still wrinkled and red.

Another was a little further along and the leaves are looking more like oak leaves (red oak probably).

I wish there was a stand of young oaks like this to show the pre-schoolers when they come for a Nature Tales field trip and we talk about the life cycle trees.

The is such a great time of year to see how trees come bare from the bare branches of winter – and the small trees are much easier to observe than the giant trees with their branches so far above eye level.

There is an art like quality to the unfurling of leaves as well…I could resist these very young leaves emerging from the bud.

Preserving Spring

When I used twigs to show pre-schoolers about how the tree buds and seeds looked during the spring…it occurred to me that it would be good to have those items to show for more than just the early spring. I decided to enclose some of them in clear contact paper. Maybe the plastic would seal off enough air to keep the plant material from deteriorating…and it would not require the heat of a laminator. The red maple samaras were my first experiment. The seed part of the wings bulge a bit, causing a little bubble. As I looked more closely after I’d finished encasing them front and back with the contact paper, I realize there are still remnants of the flower (red) where the seed is connected to the small stem.

My next attempt was with sycamore leaves that had unfurled from the branch I put in water after I cut it when it has enlarged buds.  I got several sizes of leaves from the buds that split open and have leaves unfurling now (see my previous post about from a few days ago).  The smallest ones are the size of a finger nail. The clear contact paper on both sides makes it possible to view both sides of the little leaves and to notice that one is still curled – not quite unfurled from how it was packaged in the bud.

I had some sycamore leaves from last summer that I had pressed in a book. I used the contact paper with them too. They are very dry and fragile at this point but the contact paper may stabilize them. The leaves are the size of my hand or larger. One of the them had lots of holes in it….so would be good to reinforce that trees are food and home for other creatures.

Next time I am a volunteer naturalist talking about trees….I’ll see if they survive!

Sycamore Buds

I cut some small sycamore branches from tree at home to show the pre-K field trip groups. When it cut the branches, they only had buds – no leaves - and that’s what the children saw. I decided to put them in water when I got home to see what would happen. The buds split and tiny leaves began to emerge about a week after the field trips!

Once they started, progress was rapid. The pictures below were taken 2 days after the earlier ones. The leaves are curled at first but quickly flatten out and begin to look like sycamore leaves.

The branches have been indoors and are not ahead of the rest of the tree. We’ve some cool nights here in Maryland and the buds on the tree are just now popping open --- at least 5 days behind my branches inside.

I also put the maple branches that I cut in water and the samaras have continued to develop but the leaf buds are still very tight.

My next project is going to be encasing some of these small leaves and seeds in clear contact paper. Hopefully it will preserve them enough that we can use them with field trips later this month and into May.

Pre-K Field Trips at Belmont

Last week I volunteered (with the Howard County Conservancy) for two field trips for pre-kindergarten groups that came to Belmont Manor and Historic Park.  I realized that I’ve learned a lot from these programs that I didn’t learn from my daughter when she was 4! I’ve learned to alternate sitting and moving, talking and quiet, asking questions (that they can answer with a little thinking) and explaining.

I had groups of 10-15 children with their chaperones – in the forest – to learn about the life cycle of a tree.  Since they had a little hike to the activity from the previous one, I had them sit down at the beginning and we talked about trees. They had planned lima beans at their school…so I used that to talk about seeds and roots and sprouting and saplings. Their lima beans had roots and some had sprouted…so they had already been thinking about it. So I moved rapidly to passing around different kinds of tree seeds (with the help of the chaperones. I had a branch from a maple tree with small samaras, some acorns, some sweetgum balls, and some tulip poplar seeds that we picked up from the leaf piles beside the blanket.

Then we all stood up and pretended we were trees sprouting from seeds (crouching down to begin with then reaching up one branch (arm) and then both arms.  I encourage them to look up. I asked them what happened to the little branches when there was a breeze (fortunately there was a breeze and they could see some of the little branches moving….it was clear that many of them had never noticed tree branches moving like that). In the end, I asked if they wanted to pretend like a hurricane wind came – a very strong wind – and that some of the might fall over. Most of the groups had a few children that did want to fall over!

We sat back down and walked about leaves and how the trees were just beginning to get new leaves. Some of them remembered playing in leaves last fall. We picked up some of the brown leaves on the forest floor and looked closely at them.

We took a short hike to look at a little more of the forest and notice there were wild flowers…violets and spring beauties. There was a big tree that had fallen and was rotting. It had a wild flower growing on it…and lots of moss.

And then it was time for them to go to their next activity! It was an intense couple of hours repeating the tree life cycle with each group….and enjoying the children’s reaction to the forest.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 11, 2017

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

High-Resolution Satellite Imagery at the World’s Fingertips – Interested in archaeology?…here’s an opportunity to contribute as a citizen scientist via the GlobalXplorer community.

The Secret to Living a Meaningful Life – A little self-analysis…can go a long way.

Five Endangered Species Recoveries You’ve Never Heard Of – I’d heard of the brown pelican (and seen some too).…but not the others.

How heat from the Sun can keep us all cool – Another technology that might help us in a warming world.

Pitcher Plant Enzymes Digest Gluten in Mouse Model – Pitcher plant secretion are approximately as acidic as human gastric juices and can snip bonds linking the amino acid proline to other amino acids…and prolines make up 15% of gluten!

19^th Century Experiments Explained How Trees Lift Water – fluids are not supposed to have tensile properties….but that is what the cohesion-tension theory – explaining how water moves up into the tree again gravity.

Inside the Far-Out Glass Lab – The article starts out with a gif of flexible glass bending like a piece of plastic and ends with a picture of an ultra thin glass spiral (looks a little like Slinky). Corning’s research center is full of innovations with glass.

What I learned after banning screens from my home for a month – Maybe this is something we all need to do periodical…get back into the mode of using technology rather than being so addicted to it that it takes control of every moment of our lives.

#ColorOurCollections - Free Coloring Pages from Museums and Libraries – Not just for children. Take a look at the #ColorOurCollections page to see the whole collection.

Hundreds of ancient earthworks built in Amazon – Evidence of ancient agroforestry in the Amazon…and geoglyphs.