Missouri Master Naturalist Field Trip (1)

Last weekend was probably the best of the Missouri Master Naturalist training field trips. The location was a privately own mixed forest, old fields, a cemetery and a creek: a place with history and almost 30 years of restoration work. It was a scenic drive of about 20 miles from my house…quickly going to 2 lane road…then a road without a center stripe….and then a single lane gravel round with some low vegetation in the center which I heard brushing on the bottom of my car.  

There were three rotations with lunch between the second and third ones. The day started out cool but was close to 80 by the time we ended so I was pleased to do the walking rotation first. It was focused on native trees and plants…and fungi.

There were lots of black walnuts on the ground….and looking up…it was easy to see which tree was producing them since there were still nuts on the trees.

As we walked along the road – there were several fungi to see on rotting logs.

There were familiar leaves and bark….and heart shaped leaves of wild ginger. The leaves on the ground were brown but there was color in the leaves still on the trees.

The millstone from the old mill (broken into two pieces) was near the entrance to the cemetery…brought there when it was found in the creek. Both areas are reminders of the history of the place as much as a place along the creek we were told about over lunch where many arrowheads had been found (a place there they were made over many hundreds of years before Europeans arrived).

Our guide for fungi had brought some other specimens found elsewhere to share with us since the drought had reduced what we would see otherwise on our walk.

The hour past very quickly and we headed back to our next rotation which was journaling…I’ll post about that tomorrow.  

Browsing Natural History Magazines – April to June 2021

I browed the The American Museum of Natural History’s magazine available on Internet Archive published in 1985 to 1993 over a 3-month period. The topics of the articles are wide ranging…something for everyone interested in Natural History. I picked one image from each volume…noticing that I am more skewed toward birds that the magazines are.

I am looking forward to browsing the volumes from 1994 to 2010 that are also available via Internet Archive….when I get the time.

 I posted about  the 1966 to 1984 volumes that I browsed back in March previously.

The Royal Natural History from the late 1800s

The Royal Natural History series was published in the mid-1890s by Frederick Warne & Co. – the publisher of Beatrix Potter’s books a few years later in the early 1900s.

These natural history books were edited by Richard Lydekker with a long list of illustrators. I enjoyed browsing through 5 of the volumes back in November: one, two, four, five and six. Two sample images from each volume are below.

As I was looking at these volumes again for this post, I discovered that there were a lot more books to look at. They were published as 6 volumes, 12 sections….many of the ‘volumes’ are multiple books! So – I’ve bookmarked the Internet Archive list again…planning to go back to look at the books I missed on the first pass!