Late Summer Wildflowers

August 28, 2014 Ashland Nature Center. Hockessin, Delaware

5:29 p.m. sunny with no clouds in the sky

The wildflowers course for the naturalist certification series was arranged a bit differently from our other lectures and field trips. Rather than learn a bit about the environments where we would likely find flowers and information on the plants themselves, both the lecture and the time in the field were focused on identification. We learned how to use a handy little book, Newcomb’s Guide to Wildflowers, which has a system based on examining the structure of a plant’s flower and leaves to narrow down what species it must be. Joe taught the class and recommended the Stokes Guide to Enjoying Wildflowers for further information about the flowers identified with Newcomb’s, and that was my first source for the information below.

Two ordinary, excellent weekends

We have entered a stretch with naturalist certification classes every two weeks as we wrap up the class, and I have a dozen wildflowers from my last class I need to research and write up here. But before I get too far into that project, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past two weekends, when I had the chance to take a couple groups of kids around Ashland.

I haven’t written about these hikes in a while, mostly because the scout and community groups that come for the overnight programs really slow down in the summer. But the two groups in August reminded me of why I am excited to work as a teacher-naturalist for the Delaware Nature Society.

Insect Hike

9 August 2014 Ashland Nature Center, Hockessin, DE

9 a.m. Sunny, 71 F

We started our morning insect walk in the auditorium at Ashland for an overview of collection methods, which was helpful for me since I had missed the lecture. From the first, it was useful information, as we learned that the mesh nets and the canvas nets we use with groups are not just a matter of preference but are designed for different jobs, which should have been obvious, in retrospect, but had not occurred to me. (Mesh nets are aerial nets, for catching insects in flight or when they have landed on top of vegetation. The canvas nets are used for sweeping through grasses and other vegetation, the way I am most accustomed to collecting at Ashland.)

The other methods we learned were interesting but not immediately applicable, pit traps and funnels, lights for collecting insects at night. With the overview done, the group grabbed aerial nets and jars and headed outside. The plan for the morning was to walk through four different habitats, starting with the gardens around the nature center.

Tiger swallowtail

Peck's skipper

The phlox at the beginning of the native pollinator garden was alive with butterflies, tiger swallowtails (Papilio glaucus), black swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes) and Peck’s skippers (Polites peckius).

Birding at Bucktoe Creek Preserve

I missed the Naturalist Certification Series birding field trip, so I made it up by joining a small group on the weekly Sunday morning bird walk at Bucktoe Creek Preserve, in southern Chester County. It was a great experience, and because it is regular and open to the public, I can wholeheartedly encourage anyone who wants to try this themselves to go! We had a friendly, funny and knowledgeable guide, and the half dozen of us along for the walk rounded out a good group from neophytes (my mom and me) to people who could have been guides themselves.

29 June Bucktoe Creek Preserve, Kennett Square

7:55 a.m. 70 degrees F sunny, not a cloud in the sky

We arrived just a few minutes early and found one person had already been sitting at the shelter by the parking lot for a while. It wasn’t a bad place to watch birds even without walking, in fact, as the expansive meadow in front of it, with forest to the left, provides good ecotone habitat for a diversity of birds, and they have set feeders near the shelters that bring near the less shy birds. Before we even set out we had seen a number of red-winged blackbirds, probably nesting in the meadow, tree swallows, barn swallows, and a red-bellied woodpecker that flew overhead.

Reptiles & Amphibians with the Naturalist Certification Series

Finding reptiles and, especially, amphibians has a mystique quite different from a bird walk or studying ecosystems. It needs to be done at night, and it involves playing in the water. The highlight of our night was exploring a Delmarva bay, seen above, but we found different animals in three separate locations down New Castle County.

31 May 2014

Middle Creek Natural Area

6:07 p.m. scattered clouds but mostly sunny, 75 degrees

Our first stop was brief but fun when Jim White led us to an old springhouse at Middle Run Natural Area, a county park just north of Newark where the restoration and biological diversity work is managed by the Delaware Nature Society. I had heard Jim describe the springhouses that dot our area as great habitat for long-tailed salamanders (Eurycea longicauda) a couple of times, but not having any ready access to one, I hadn’t seen them myself.

Terrestrial Ecosystems trip with Naturalist Certification Series

This account is of my second Naturalist Certification Series field trip and is quite long, but hopefully of interest for the variety of plants, animals and interactions they retell. There's more I should be doing to fully develop this entry, but I'm eager to finally get it posted, since it has already been more than a month.

17 May 2014

Burrows Run Preserve Hockessin, DE

8 a.m. Sunny

We gathered in the parking area just off Ashland Clinton Schoolhouse Road, surrounded by the tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) being studied by a University of Delaware graduate student for response to stress. Their comfort around people and their acrobatics above and around us immediately drew my attention, but being just a bit late, I hurried over to Joe who was starting to explain the day. We would be hiking through five distinct terrestrial ecosystems this morning, discovering what we could and learning about how the plants and animals in each interact.

An Overwhelming Weekend

It was such a busy weekend that it could be a challenge to remember with any detail the earlier hikes (some time over the weekend someone found a green frog, but I can’t remember who or when), but there was definitely a unifying feeling I noticed Saturday morning - spring means such a profusion of exciting signs of life it is hard to know what to focus on. There are wildflowers coming up, flowers on the trees, amphibians in the marsh, birds singing and flying overhead. There were a notable number of people enjoying it all too - the overnight groups I was working with, people out to walk their dogs, to take pictures, to get directions to Mt. Cuba’s wildflower celebration. There was even a memorial service, a sad occasion to be sure, and not for anyone I knew, but you have to trust that whoever it was would appreciate the beauty of a spring weekend and family and friends being out in it to remember. Then Sunday afternoon I worked a three-year-old’s birthday party, and those together remind me of the fullness of humans’ lives too - death and loss, birthdays and celebration, tension with others when running behind, joy with them on a pleasant walk through the woods. (The highlight of my weekend was the walk on which we saw very little, other than every patch of stinging nettle that Skylar seemed uncannily drawn to--Mimi brought the boys out Sunday afternoon and we went for a hike after I was done working.)

25 April

The weekend ended with a hike with my family in the warm spring sunshine, but it started with a rainy night that made us doubt we’d be able to get in a hike at all. With a group of 14 girl scouts, we allowed ourselves to do a leisurely nocturnal animals presentation, figuring the rain was going to shorten or prevent the outdoor portion of the evening. The group had wanted to learn about bats too, so we added in some information on them and shared the skeleton and preserved free-tail bat. Mostly, we answered the kids’ questions, not worrying about cutting them off to keep the time moving. And these girls were asking good, relevant questions, engaged and interested.

When we finished, the rain had slowed to just a drizzle, so we got to take the kids down to the marsh after all. My fellow teacher-naturalist Jessica got the best reaction I have yet heard when she had the kids “turn on their night vision” - having everyone gently close their eyes for 30 seconds to allow the pupil to expand and gather more light. When they opened their eyes afterwards, nearly all the girls said “wow.”

The spring peepers were calling, although not as many of them as there have been, and we heard some pickerel frogs as well. We didn’t see as much as we have on some hikes, but the toad tadpoles have become reliable crowd-pleasers. All weekend I only saw a few wood frog tadpoles. I had heard from other staff at DNS that they’re having a bad year and people are worried. There seems to be more water flowing through the marsh this year since it has been so wet, and the frogs’ tadpoles may be getting swept into areas that aren’t as conducive for them. Or maybe where they’re just harder to see - we can all hope.

As we left the marsh, we spotted a salamander or a newt we couldn’t identify - mostly a nondescript tan without any pattern and possibly a reddish tail - but catching sight of an animal is always fun, even when you don’t know exactly which it is.

26 April

I was back the next morning to take the girls on their morning hike, and the rain had completely moved on. It was a nice hike, a bit quick, but the group continued to enjoy themselves. The marsh impressed the kids again by how different it looked in the daylight, and they gleefully checked out the toad and wood frog tadpoles and especially the snails that were all over the plants near the boardwalk. I was enjoying all the birds out during the morning - the red-winged blackbirds, crows, woodpeckers and swallows - but the group was definitely focused on what was nearby that they could engage with. It was a funny disconnect, and I could indulge it a bit since I was bringing up the rear for the hike. The kids did get excited about the mallard ducks we surprised on first entering the marsh, though. They disappeared down to the Red Clay fairly soon after we arrived, but not until after everyone got to see them. The morning hike wrapped up without much more excitement, The kids learned about skunk cabbage and realized they had not seen the raccoon scat we passed the night before.

The program for this group was geology, which meant a bit more hiking after an introduction in the auditorium. Geology is not a subject for which I have a natural affinity, but it was neat to look at the land through such a different lens and try, somewhat unsuccessfully, to imagine the Earth on such a wildly different time scale. The kids took to the rock hunting with as much eagerness and energy as trying to catch tadpoles or snails, bringing rock after rock over to be identified, breaking them apart, exploring the flooded land where the Red Clay dumped up to four feet of gravel and stone when it flooded during one of the hurricanes within the past decade or so. On the hike from the floodplain to the hillside on Treetop Trail, Sheila pointed out stinging nettle, noting that the plant that often grows nearby and provides a salve, jewelweed, has yet to push up through the soil so it’s a bad time of year to get into it.

27 April

Sunday morning started with a good hike around the marsh with a new group, confirming stinging nettle for an adult leader concerned because some of the girls got into it last year, answering the adults’ questions about mayapple. (Conveniently, the adults the day before had also been curious about mayapple, and I had asked Sheila for a few good facts to share after everyone had gone.) The kids were interested in the animal sign. I took advantage of the pileated woodpecker evidence we saw on our naturalist certification hike at the beginning of March, which gave the kids something they could guess that was also impressive. Also from the mammal walk almost two months ago, I shared the difference between walnuts eaten by grey squirrels and those eaten by red squirrels. The kids enjoyed passing the shells around and finding examples of each for us. I may have made the biggest impression on them, though, when I brought out the pocket field guide to try to identify what had to have been the third or fourth bit of scat we had found on the trail.

The program for this group was EcoHike, so we decided to look for life in a meadow, a forest and a stream. My group started in the meadow and I was worried at first because the meadow has no real tall grass to speak of yet. My demonstration sweep of the area that will be tall grass netted one fly I didn’t recognize, which is another worry for me in these meadow programs since I haven’t done too many of them yet, but I realized it just provides an opportunity to share with kids how they can use a field guide and look for animals on their own. (By the time the kids were done their own sweeping we had identified it as a flower fly.) The kids found a couple grasshoppers and lots of gnats, but they also caught a crane fly, which worked well for the program since there is always a good chance of catching crane fly larva in the stream.

It was hard to get the kids to put the nets down and move on to the forest - this group was hard to get to move on ever, really, and while it made staying on schedule hard, it was actually a great problem to have, children having fun hunting bugs. While explaining searching under rocks and logs in the woods, we saw a bald eagle soar overhead, which was certainly a highlight of the weekend. The kids had some success amidst the trees too, finding millipedes, beetles, isopods and earthworms.

Even the hike out to the stream was productive for this group as they saw a turkey vulture and a woodpecker, who really got everyone’s attention, and one of the adults caught a toad on the trail. We didn’t have as much time at the stream as we would usually take, but it still ended up a success, with not just the mayfly and stonefly larva I’ve become used to seeing, but also a damselfly larva. One girl even caught a very small crayfish, which was probably my favorite find in the creek. We didn’t catch a cranefly larva, but the other group had left out one they had caught, along with a salamander, so I could still share with the kids how that overgrown mosquito-looking insect from the meadow starts its life.

The birthday party that closed out my long weekend at Ashland was notable mostly for how different the crowd was - family and friends rather than an organized group, and the kids were mostly young, probably 2 to just 6 or 7. It changed the dynamic of the program - presenting native animals - but in a really fun way - these kids got excited just to see the animals. They touched some, we put some down, we fed some, and every bit of it was magic for the group. Nothing like seeing how children react to something to remind you that wonder and awe really are the most appropriate emotions to much of what we see every day.