Winter Wednesday 2011 #4 - Tree Silhouettes

We went on a nature walk around our neighborhood with the goal of finding as many different tree silhouettes/shapes as possible.  It has warmed up arond here, but we do have some snow and the winds are still very cold. 

 Winter is also an excellent time to see details of a tree that would be hidden by the leaves in the other seasons - trunk and branch colors, if there are buds or not, or any empty birds' nests. 

When my daughter was drawing her silhouette picture she also decided to draw the tree in the 4 seasons. 

Winter Insects, Follow-Up

Our Burlese Funnel was finally successful!! After finding another place to collect soil in our backyard we had bugs!! 2 in the water and 2 crawling around the floor-- ANTS, who apparently go wherever they want, including climbing down the counter and checking things out on the floor.

Post 1 ~ Post 2

Burlese Funnel

2 Ants in the water of the jar

More pictures from our visit to the Hutchings Museum.

They had a great bug collection.

Winter Wednesday- Birds- Week 8

A hawk we saw on a drive during the week.

Somehow we have fallen behind in our Winter Wednesday and Outdoor Hour Challenges!! But we are catching up. This week for our Winter Wednesday on Birds we decided to learn about the only kind of bird we have seen at our bird feeder: the House Finch. Our bird feeder has issues, but we are working on solving them, so we hope to see more types of birds in the future.

The house finches come to our feeder in the morning, around breakfast time, and are easily scared off by kids clamoring at the glass to see them. That is the extent of our observations this week, though we have seen them feeding from wild sunflower plants on our nature walks in the past. For a coloring page, I borrowed the purple finch page from the Cornell coloring book, as it very closely resembles the House Finch.

Austin, age 7:

Nyah, age 6:
Today we visited a small local museum-- John Hutchings Museum in Lehi, UT. I especially wanted to visit because of their bird egg display which fits in with our other science lessons. They have a great free lesson on bird eggs at their website, which we modified and used last week. We had a good time comparing the eggs with each other- size, shape, color, eggs laid in nest vs. those laid on ground. The display included eggs, nests, and stuffed birds. I find stuffed birds and animals a little weird and interesting at the same time.

Eggs:

House Finch Nest:

Another House Finch Nest:

Nyah's Favorite Eggs- American Robin

Austin's Favorite Eggs- Golden Eagle

Smallest- Hummingbird

Biggest- Ostrich in middle, Emu to right, Rhea to left

Part of display:

Another part of display:

There was also a very interesting insect display,

and the kids loved the Owl butterfly:

More Winter Insects--Burlese Funnel

What is a Burlese Funnel? According to the book we have been using it is an insect strainer to examine insects who may be wintering in the soil. ". . . an effective tool for capturing insects that live in the soil, or decaying leaves."

Picture from book:

The one we made:
I didn't want to use my kitchen funnel so I cut off the top of a soda bottle. I also didn't have any wire mesh on hand (add to shopping list, right? maybe not) so I used a double layer of cheesecloth held into place with one of my girls' hair elastics. The book suggests to use rubbing alcohol in the jar, but then says "If you do not want to kill the insects, use water instead of the alcohol." Which I think is a pretty silly thing to say because our lone insect drowned very well in the water.

How it works: Put soil into the funnel, place light above funnel and leave on for 6 hours. "The insects in the soil will move down the funnel away from the heat toward moisture and tumble into the alcohol."

Our results: Yes, you read correctly above, we only managed to have one insect tumble out of our funnel. Our insect was about half a centimeter long, and millipedie-ish, earwig-ish looking due to the many legs. As I mentioned he drowned in the water and when we tried pulling him out to examine him further, his body fell apart. Apparently he shoudln't have been left in the water sooo long. The books suggests "If you don't find any insects, try again with soil from another place. Beneath a tree is a good place to find soil containing insects." We have been trying soil from 4 different areas of our yard all week long, and no luck.
Hypothesis of why it didn't work: No bugs in the ground (obviously), but why? Not fertile enough to attract bugs, too wet, the weather warmed up so all insects wintering came out, though they probably regretted it with the snow today.

I think we will try again, but I plan on collecting some soil samples from our nature walk this weekend to use. So I'll update when/if we have better results.

Winter Insects--Week 6

I'll start by apologizing for some of the pictures--my camera claims to be "all weather" but apparently it can't weather my toddler who I caught playing with the lens and now it won't focus when I'm trying to take a picture up close. We read through parts of the chapter from Discover Nature in Winter, but especially looked at the pictures together. Because our yard isn't landscaped we knew we would be able to look under rocks, leaves, composting weeds, and whatever else may be in our yard. We also looked at tree and bush branches, but we didn't find anything in these. Also, we didn't find much in the way of wintering insects, most of them were out and moving about (or not an insect at all).

Nyah and her trash, um, collection. Austin reading.

Our first find was a beetle under a rock. It is the blackish spot in the middle of the picture. If you click on the picture you can see it better, and also that is is more of a green color.
Unfortunately our yard is the lowest point on our street with the two houses to our right, and the two houses to our left, draining into our yard. So under a number of rocks we found mold growing, though it looks like it could be spider web. There were also some small aphid looking bugs, not exactly like aphids, but very similar.
Not a bug, but an earthworm- the whitish skinny thing next to the bigger stick.

Also not a bug, but a slug sticking to a rock. We saw plenty of these.

Under some leaves we found some tiny, black bugs. They are the black spots on the green weed in the center of the picture, and the leaf above and to the left of the weed.

Our biggest finds were under trash--cardboard boxes, paper plates, newspapers, apparently

our low point on the street means we get all the trash blown into our yard as well. This is a cricket by my fingertips. Around our front steps and concrete foundation we found a number of holes, probably leading to burrows of some kind.

A beetle, found under a cardboard box, in the company of several crickets, but they had the sense to dive for cover.

At the first sight of bugs Olivia headed for the stairs. She started to cry when the older two were trying to catch a cricket, and only came down when they had headed in a different direction.

There are two black spiders in this picture, see if you can find them.

We also found some more winter weeds. These two are both "mean" or so my kids say because of the thorns/stickers. This first one is a thistle, it has beautiful purple flowers when it blooms, but as you can see it would be crazy to try to pick one. I have no idea what this one is, but I've grown up calling it a sticker bush, and I had to pull some thorns out of my hand from touching one of these on our insect walk.

Winter Wednesday, Week 6 Winter Weeds

Winter Weeds

I have found that my kids prefer to explore at their own pace on our walks, so I take pictures and collect what is needed for us to do lessons at home. They tend to lose enthusiasm when I want them to come look at things or try to discuss something for longer than a sentence when we are out and about, but during school time they are perfectly willing. So I took pictures of 5 different plants and collected a branch from each one in a ziploc bag. The branches naturally shed seeds in the ziploc bags so we didn't have any trouble finding the seeds. I created a page with the pictures and had the kids match the pictures with the samples. Then we taped some seeds next to each picture and tried to identify each sample. We were only able to identify 2 of our samples, and decided some of the plants I picked weren't wildflowers at all, but one is a grass and I think the other is a native shrub of some kind. But the kids had a good time.

Native shrub:

Branch collection:

Nyah's:
Austin's:

Grass:

Common Sunflower--this was a favorite with the birds. This was our first walk where we saw a lot of songbirds. Usually on our walk we catch sight of a bird-of-prey that we have yet to identify (two kids & a dog make plenty of noise for a warning to all wildlife to skedaddle), but this time he wasn't to be seen and we were able to watch the birds eating from the sunflowers. We saw a number of magpies and finches.

Woolly Mullein--My favorite because of its unique look.