Missouri Master Naturalist Training – Week 7

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The 7th week of Missouri Master Naturalist (MMN) training included one evening class and my first solo volunteer gig.

The class lectures were on

  • Forest Ecology and Management

  • Pondering the Pond as a Wildlife Habitat

Forest Ecology and Management was done by a Missouri Department of Conservation Educator; I would like to have the charts since he went through them very quickly! The last segment of the lecture was hands-on…passing out small branches from the tree to everyone and then using the dichotomous key in the back of the Fifty Common Trees of Missouri booklet to id it….a red maple. I photographed my branch’s buds, branches and leaf imperfections!

Pondering the Pond as a Wildlife Habitat was done by a person that has been a MMN for over a decade…and done a lot of videography at a pond in a hayfield (i.e. not used by cattle…with adequate vegetation around its edge). Her Youtube Channel – Nature in Motion is something I will be viewing over the next month! She showed over 100 species in 17 minutes of her talk…fast paced…prompted me to think later about the richness in the intersection of science and art.

The volunteer experience was an after-school event at a local school for gifted students…15-20 minutes sessions with two groups of about 12 students each…on two days. My theme was getting outdoors in the fall and looking at some things that could be found.

My table was set up with items to look at: pinecones (3 different kinds), acorns (3 different kinds), Osage orange fruit, black walnuts (in a bag complete with emerging caterpillars), goldenrod (in flower and seeds), magnolia pod, maple branches, and a holly branch.

It also included a hands-on experience with pressed leaves/small branches. Each student made observations about their leaf (color on both sides, holes, insect eggs, shape)…and then compared it to other leaves at their table. The leaves were mostly oak or maple although there were some that were unique (river birch, magnolia, oak leaf hydrangea, boxwood).

The time past very quickly!

A Colorful Maple Leaf

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When I came out of my polling place (for the Missouri primary) earlier this month - I noticed a spot of color in one of the maple trees growing in an island of the parking lot. I took a closer look.

It was the only leaf on the tree that wasn’t green! Of course, in the fall the tree will be full of leaves that are brilliantly colored since so many of the trees here are varieties of red maples. I am savoring this spot of color and not yet having to worry about mowing my yard frequently enough to mulch the fallen leaves into the grass.

Yard Work – July 2024

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The only yard work I do on a weekly basis is mow the grassy area; it is a good way for me to achieve my ‘intensity minutes’ of exercise for the week! I do some weed eating every other week. Everything else is more ad hoc…and as needed.

I ordered 25 orange daylily roots and got them planted around the base of our two red maples in the front yard. The ruff of these plants around my oak in Maryland looked good and made it easier to mow around the base of the tree without being too close to the trunk. The daylilies are better than mulch to keep the grass from growing too close to the tree trunks!

The Virginia creeper has covered the stones in the raised bed in front. I pull down any that tries to climb the brick and try to keep weeds from growing in the area (like poke weed). I do need to trim the boxwood (and remove the Virginia creeper growing into it.  

I have rounded most of the corners created by the fence by planting lambs ear…and I let low growing poke weed grow there too.

I mowed part of the area I didn’t mow in May back in June and left the thick clippings to mulch in place; much of the grass has died there and violets from the flower bed are spilling into the yard. The larger leafed plant near the metal iris is a spikenard which is in the same area. About a foot of grass has been eliminated along this section of the flower bed. Over time I will use this strategy to reduce the grassy area of our yard.

A plant came up in a bare ‘hole’ in the turf in my back yard and I have been carefully mowing around it. It appears to be a small white aster and has been blooming for more than 4 weeks. I’ll eventually mow it, but it was a fun experiment to see what kind of plant it was.

I noticed a tall something in the flowerbed on the yard side of the stairs from our deck. It is a young redbud! I’ve decided to keep it…will trim the bush that is on one side of it and the ornamental grass that is on the other side.

My spider mum metal sculpture was visible from my office window when I first stuck it in the ground…but the branches of the pine are growing and getting lower around it. I have borrowed a pole saw from my daughter and will trim the lowest ones (it is impossible to get close enough to the trunk without using a pole saw!).

I am pleased with the progress I am making on the yard. My goals are to make it easier to maintain…more native plants…less grass…all while staying within the ‘rules’ of the neighborhood HOA.

Bringing Fall Foliage Indoors

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I found a small oak and a maple growing in my flowerbed…cut them since they can’t grow large there. They were colorful so I put them in a kombucha jar on one of my office tables and have been enjoying them for the past week or so.

The oak was the largest of the two small trees and the leaves were a variety of colors. It is probably a child of the oak in our neighbor’s yard – maybe planted in our flower bed by a squirrel.

The oaks in our neighborhood retain their leaves longer than many other trees nearby…so maybe this young one will last longer indoors too.

The red maple seedling made an interesting macro image from above! It is smaller and more delicate than the oak…but the topmost leaves continued to grow after I cut it!

The maples in our yard have already lost their leaves but the small one indoors is still photogenic!

Fall Foliage in our Yard

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The change in foliage started back in early October with the leaves of our red maple showing patches of red.

When I mowed our yard in late October, I noticed one of the bushes had red leaves, the red maple was beginning to shed its leaves, and the Virginia creeper in the flower bed had turned red. One side of our back yard had a dusting of river birch leaves from a neighbor’s tree.

The pokeweed berries were ripe – being eaten by birds!

While I was away in Texas, our Missouri neighborhood experienced a hard freeze.  I took a panorama image from my backyard toward the tennis courts and pond. The trees were very colorful.

The next day I walked around the yard for a closer look. The dogwood leaves looked brown….although they looked interesting enough backlit. The forsythia (in the foreground looking toward the tennis court) looked like the frost had surprised it – the leaves curled and limp.

Tender plants like pokeweed (lower right corner of the first image and the taller pants in the second) and hostas had wilted/collapsed with the cold. I’ve cut down the pokeweed in the most visible areas of the yard but left it in out-of-the-way places…will see if the birds continue to eat the berries.

At this point, the river birches have lost all their leaves. The maples are thinning fast; the ones in my front yard have lost more than half their leaves. The oaks are just beginning to shed their leaves. I think the early frost got all my crepe myrtles…hopefully not killing them back to the roots – which is what happened last winter. One of my pines shed old needles (already brown) after the cold snap and enlarged the circle of needles around it (must mean the tree is getting bigger).

I am enjoying my fall yard!

Macro Maple

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The sucker growing at the base of one of our red maples is now in a small vase in my office….and became an opportunity for some macro photography! The leaves had a lot of red pigment along with the green. The new leaves are red…the newer stems are red…and sometimes injured areas are red as well. The new leaves are the most obvious. In reality – even the green leaves have the red pigment; it is just overwhelmed by the green of the chlorophyll – until fall when the chlorophyll dies and leaves the whole tree full of red leaves!

As I moved around the sucker, I found a tiny spider….too small for my macro set up to capture. I lost track of it…so now the tiny spider could be roaming my office!

Tree Mulching Project

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When we first moved to Missouri last summer, we hired a crew to mow/weed eat/edge our yard. This season I am doing it. The first time I mowed (with our new battery powered mower…a big improvement over the gasoline powered one we had in Maryland), it was obvious that the job would be easier if the trees had mulch around them – an area large enough to avoid any low branches. The front yard has three trees: 2 red maples and an Asian dogwood. The red maples are relatively young trees so the mulched area did not need to be large. The dogwood had a lot of lower branches that I wanted to keep – hence a larger circle of mulch.

The first step was define the circle I would cover with mulch with very short grass; it was a good project for me to learn to use our new weed eater (also batter powered).

My husband helped me pour bags of mulch and I spread it around with a rake. The red maples took 1.5 bags each and the dogwood took 3 bags.

My follow up plan is to plant some daylilies and butterfly weed in the mulch areas around the red maples. The base of the young trees in sunny because are relatively skinny trees; the plants should do well. I enjoyed the ‘ruff’ of daylilies I had around the base of our oak tree in Maryland, and I hope eventually that will happen around these red maples. The plants might make it easier to extend the mulch circles as the trees grow since they reproduce rapidly. There aren’t deer wondering through our Missouri neighborhood eating buds like candy (like happened in Maryland); I’m looking forward to having flowers!

Our Missouri Neighborhood – March 2023

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The temperature has fluctuated wildly – from the teens to 70s this month. I took walks on two of the sunny days. We’ve had enough rain that the drainage into the ponds had running water on both days, and I stopped on the bridge to take pictures of leaves from last season in the rippling water. Oaks, maples, river birch, and red buds are represented.

There is almost always a pair of mallards about….and lots of robins.

Some branches from a magnolia in a nearby yard are upright in the pond. I wonder how long they will last…..or maybe someone is trying to root them (i.e. start new trees)?

The turtles are more active on warm days. They all appear to be red-eared sliders. Their snouts are usually all that is visible unless they are closer to shore or sunning on some high ground in the pond.

One day I started out in sunshine but there were more clouds than I anticipated. I took some landscape shots….experimenting with backlight and the curving walkway through the trees around our pond.

Some geese were on the walkway (and this time of year I give them space since they might be aggressive) so I went up to the street to complete the loop to my house. I noticed that the stormwater drain is labeled ‘no dumping – drains to river’ with a metal shield; in Maryland the labeling was painted onto the concrete.

The red maples are some of the earliest trees to bloom. The trees along the path don’t have low branches so my pictures of the flowers rely on my camera’s zoom.

Sometimes I photograph something because I didn’t anticipate it…the oak leaf stuck in the chain link of the tennis court is an example.

Another is the mats of algae on lower spillway between the two ponds. They had washed from the upper pond but are doomed to dry out on the spillway if another rain does not come soon. Still – they were ‘emerald isles’ at a time of year where there is still a lot brown in the natural world.

Zooming – February 2023

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There were some sunny days in February – good for outdoor photography even if they were very cold! The ravages of winter on vegetation from last summer/fall is reaching an extreme. We’re all ready for the spring! Enjoy the February 2023 zoomed images!

Our Missouri Yard – November 2022

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When I arrived home from my late October trip to Carrollton, TX, one of the red maples in our front yard had already dropped its leaves and the wind had blown them away. The other tree still held a few leaves but most of them were on the grass. The arrangements of the leaves on the grass were more interesting than the scraggly ones still on the tree!

I took pictures of the pokeweed fruits (the plants were in inconspicuous places in my back yard so I had let them grow). The fruits that were ripe before the frost (purple, rounded, and plump) are probably still edible by the birds but the immature fruits probably will not be eaten; I am leaving the plants with their wilted leaves standing…to see if that is what happens.

The roses that were blooming before the frost still had some color…although the draped petals are fading and brittle. The new leaves are red before they turn green, and they seem to have survived the frost just fine.

I’m looking forward to the changes coming as the days shorten and the weather is colder!

Our Yard – May 2022

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Damp weather has been my excuse for not doing yard work…but I finally did a walk around and an hour of work a few days ago. The holly at the corner of the house was hiding the weeds behind it. They are gone now. The front flower bed had quite a few little trees: red maples and tulip poplars; they’ve been pulled.

I appreciated the oak near out mailbox. The tree has been declining but it looks like the spring rains have helped it come alive for another year. The Virginia creeper on its trunk has leafed out as well.

The azalea that drapes itself over a side of the front porch is blooming. I’m going to trim the bush beside it to give it more room….or maybe that will make it easier for the deer to nibble the tender azalea stems.

The nine bark bush is blooming. I will trim it after the blooms are done.

A branch broke in one of the bushes…I cut it out and the bush looks lush and green. There were also some vines growing up through the bushes…which I removed.

My goal in the chaos garden was to cut down everything except for the spice bush and, of course, the sycamore. I started but didn’t make much progress during my hour. I discovered some irises getting ready to bloom – which I won’t cut down!

Overall – I had a wheelbarrow of vegetation that I cut or pulled that was added to the brush pile at the edge of the forest. On the way I noticed that the violets are beginning to bloom. I dodged the ferns coming up under the deck as I returned the wheelbarrow to its place; there seem to be more ferns every year.

Cherry Blossoms

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Our cherry tree was blooming when I returned from Texas and retained enough blossoms through the rain and wind of my first days back to be worth photographing on the next sunny day. The temperatures were cool (almost cold) which probably slowed down the blooming.

I was most interested in getting macro pictures of the flowers and buds with the clip-on lens my husband got for me in December. There are a few leaves that are beginning to unfurl but the blossoms dominate.

The trees in our yard are progressing in the usual order. The red maple blooming first; that happened before I went to Texas; the seeds are forming now. Then the plum; there are still some battered blooms but there are more leaves than flowers at this point. Both the plum and cherry look better this year because they were professionally trimmed last fall.

The tulip poplar has green buds but will be a few weeks before the flowers open. The leaves are already more visible on the tulip poplars than any of our other trees.

Watching the trees emerge from winter is a rite of spring…always worth observing/photographing.

Icy Morning

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I was surprised when I looked at the forest behind our house one morning: the forecast was for the temperature to be above freezing overnight and into the morning but there was ice accumulating on the trees! I took some pictures: The sycamore

The red maple

The pines

The tulip poplar

I went downstairs to check the thermometer we have measuring the temperature on our deck – taking some pictures of the azalea near our front porch (always some good color in ice and snow) as I got the bottom of the stairs.

The thermometer was reporting 35.5 degrees Fahrenheit…so the forecast was correct, but the rain was cold enough to freeze to the branches! It was a good morning to be indoors and enjoy the icy scene. By the afternoon the ice was completely gone, and the sun came out.

Foggy Forest

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One morning it was warm enough to be foggy and wet in the forest rather than frosty and snowy. The fog softened the view from my office window. It’s a view of winter that could also be early spring. But I know it’s not early spring in February; this day is a brief respite from mornings below freezing. The taller trees in the background are tulip poplars. The tree to the right in front of them with the darker trunk is a red maple. The branches even more in the foreground on the left is a sycamore.

Zooming in on the sycamore….the droplets of water condensed from the fog are evident on the small branches. The wet branches are more colorful when they are wet; when they are dry the cracking, curling bark is brown or grey and the smooth parts are white. In the wet, it is easier to see that there are chloroplasts in the smooth parts….the tree can make sugars even in winter!

Morning Forest

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Our forest is on the west side of our house; the treetops often catch morning light over the house. There are a few minutes of orange color. I noticed it on three mornings in January…. photographing the forest illuminated in morning light. The first morning was after a snowy night. The seed pods on the tulip poplars provide enough texture to hold snow. In the second picture notice the pine in the lower left, the tulip poplars tall in the background, and the maple in the right foreground; the orange light had already begun to fade although there are parts of the forest interior that seems to pop through the maple branches.

There are times when the color looks surreal. In the winter I usually think of the forest being mostly brown…but it isn’t for these few minutes in the morning.

And the layering of the forest becomes more obvious. Somehow the clouds or the angle of the sun precluded the light from reaching the trees in the foreground on one morning…but the background trees were bathed in morning light.

Trek to and in Druid Hill Park – Part II

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On out way to Druid Hill Park through Baltimore, there were some trees that still had most of their leaves! All the ones around our house in the suburbs to the south of the city and the airport have lost all their leaves.

I wondered if it was the heat island effect of the city or the disruption of wind by building and walls; there are some city microclimates that cause the trees to keep their leaves a bit longer…very noticeable right now. I also noticed tents periodically on medians and places along the road with a little more space (see tent on the right under the trees in the picture below); is this the way the homeless people in Baltimore are surviving this winter?

There is graffiti on buildings…but there are also bits of city art on otherwise mundane buildings. I wondered if the height and lights are have kept the art intact in some places.

On the way home – the GPS routed us through downtown and I took pictures of the Bromo-seltzer Tower as we stopped at lights. It’s used for artists studios now….next to a fire station.

Overall – the birding walk was a tiny step back to ‘normal’ for us although both by husband and I are beginning to realize that we’ll probably never be quite like we were pre-pandemic. It’s not just the pandemic that has changed us; more on that thought is few days when I write my month COVID-19 pandemic post.

A Sharp-shinned Hawk

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I spotted a hawk in our red maple tree…managed to take some pictures. My first ID was ‘Cooper’s Hawk’ but then when I looked at the pictures on a large monitor – I decided the head was too rounded….which skews the ID to ‘Sharp-Shinned.’

We see them occasionally in our yard, probably because we have two bird feeders and a bird bath. Once we took our feeders down for a few weeks to encourage the hawk to move on, but the environment is rich enough in the forest behind our neighborhood (the buffer area for the Middle Patuxent River is a wildlife corridor) that they are not frequent visitors anyway.  

It was a beautiful bird in the morning light…feathers a bit fluffed in the cold….the red eye seeing all. The tree was a great place for the bird to observe the scene and for us to observe the bird! I took my pictures through a pane in the French door near our breakfast area…a lazy bit of birding on a cold morning.

Tree Trimming

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One of our ‘get ready for winter’ projects this fall was to get 2 trees trimmed. One of our neighbors made a well-timed comment about their arborist; we got an estimate…and the work was done a few weeks later. They did projects for several of our neighbors on the same day! The tree concerning me the most was a sycamore that shades the west corner of our house – making it much cooler in the summer. The problem was the branches that were brushing the side of the house and the roof (and skylight). I wanted to keep the tree…but not let it damage my house! I took some before and after pictures. The crew did a great job taking off the problematic branches and balancing the tree.

The other tree was our thundercloud plum – purchased about 18 years ago – just before the previous 17-year cicada emergence. It was small enough to cover with netting which protected during that first challenge. It had been damaged in the center by a branch that broke in an ice storm about 10 years ago; the trimming made that hole show more but now all the dead branches are out and the hole will begin to fill in. It will also be much easier to mow around it!

The work only took about an hour since the crew had great equipment (and knew what they were doing). The branches that were cut were shredded into a truck. As I walked around afterward – I photographed fall aspects of our trees. The red maple in our backyard is always the last to turn and drop its leaves; I like that I have longer to enjoy it.

The sycamore has lost a lot of leaves already. Many of them are very large. The Virginia Creeper growing on the trunk is turning red.

The tulip poplars leaves turn yellow but this year they are going from yellow to brown very quickly…often while the leaves are still on the tree. We get the leaves in our yard but the very large trees  are in the forest.

Overall – our fall tree trimming project was an easy success…and now we can focus on not letting the falling leaves build up too much on the grass. My strategy is to mow the leaves into the yard as much as possible rather than expending energy raking!

Through my Office Window – January 2021

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I seemed to be busy with other things during January…so I was a little surprised that there were enough pictures to make a ‘through my office window’ post this month. This time of year, the heated bird bath is popular with many birds. I managed to get pictures of blue jays, Carolina chickadees, and a mourning dove there.

 Both the male and female northern cardinals are coming to the deck and feeder. The male prefers the seed under the feeder, but the female takes her time there…stays on the feeder perch of minutes rather than seconds.

The gold finches come to the feeder in small flocks. There are often 2 or 3 of them at a time.

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The white breasted nuthatch comes to the feeder but has started checking around the shingles of the covered part of the deck. I wonder if the bird stores seed there or there is something else the bird is looking for there.

I photographed the red-bellied woodpecker at the feeder but also in the maple tree. There is one in this series where the bird is getting ready to take off from the maple to make a run at the feeder. We only have a female around right now. I hope a male shows up by the spring.

Deer come through our yard frequently. Their route is always on the south side of our house – either heading to or coming from the forest. Sometimes they seem to be looking right at the camera. I saw two males butting heads at dusk, but the light was too poor to get a picture.

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There is a small flock of house finches in our area. They enjoyed nibbling the red maple buds on a warm afternoon, but they are often at the feeder this time of year as well.

My favorite pictures this month were of a group of crows finding tasty things in the back yard. They were digging down into the leaf mulch and grass; note that one of them has dirt on his beak! Also – one has white feather.

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 7, 2020

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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.

Taking the measure of sea level rise - ocean altimetry, land motion, ice height, gravimetry – NASA missions that measure some aspect of sea level rise…there is a lot to work to measure and analyze – to better understand that is happening.

Health Care Facilities Maintain Indoor Air Quality Through Smoke and Wildfires | U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit – Some of the HEPA filters purchased for the pandemic were available and were used to keep hospitals operational in areas where the outside air was smokey. Are we going to need this type of filters in our homes as well – for air quality more than the pandemic?

Top 25 birds of the week: Seabirds – Beautiful birds…from all around the world.

From Palmyra to the Pacific: Realigning a Rainforest – Cool Green Science – An atoll 1000 miles southeast of Hawaii…marred by human intervention…now owned by The Nature Conservancy…inspiring the creation of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in 2008. Restoration is ongoing to maximize Palmyra’s resilience to climate change: eradicating black rats, realigning native rainforest (not restoring because what was there originally is unknown), and reintroducing native bird species.

Red maples doing better in the city -- ScienceDaily – Hurray for red maples. The study was done in Philadelphia which is a couple of hours from where I live….and I have a health red maple in my back yard!

Deformed Beaks: What We Know About An Alarming Bird Disease  - Avian Keratin Disorder (AKD) which might be caused by a poecivirus. The birds in the article are from Alaska but some are species we have hear in Maryland too. Hopefully, this is not a disease that will become widespread.

Top US States for Percentage of Electricity from Solar – Even states that aren’t normally viewed as ‘high sun’ are near the top of the list! This chart will probably change a lot over the next few years as more and more utility companies and individuals transition to renewables. Government can help but it is quickly becoming the more cost-effective path forward…market forces will drive the transition.

Scientists Discover New Human Salivary Glands | The Scientist Magazine® - Tubarial glands…what a surprise that they haven’t been discovered previously!

Floating gardens: More than just a pretty place -- ScienceDaily – It is a small experiment…but there was measurable nitrate reduction by the garden….maybe it is something that could be scaled to reduce accumulation of nitrate (from agricultural and yard runoff) that causes algal blooms.

Largest Arctic Expedition Ever Comes to a Close | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – The Polarstern, a German research vessel, is back in port after spending a year drifting with the ice floe across the Arctic. It will take 2 years to fully process all the data collected but the initial assessment of the Arctic environment is summarized as grim: ice gone in places it should be meters thick.