Archive for the 'Nature Study' Category
September 12, 2008 @ 6:22 am | Filed under: Nature Study
I jotted down some notes at Bonny Glen Up Close the other day about the hummingbirds that are in love with our feeder. We think they are Anna’s Hummingbirds. (Someone please correct us if we’re wrong.) The one above is the male: emerald back, ruby throat. These next two photos show the female, more modestly attired in shimming green without the crimson ascot.
How we have marveled to see them perching on the feeder instead of hovering, wings aflutter! Besides their coloring, the reason we’re pretty sure they are Anna’s Hummingbirds is because they sing:
This bird is most often found singing a series of scratchy sounds, including a sharp “chee-chee-chee”, from a high perch. This is the only California hummer to sing a song. When moving between flowers they make a “chick” sound.
Our trio—we’ve counted two females and a male at once—are quite the musical bunch, chittering away all day. They seem to live in a tree right behind our backyard fence. We’ve seen them perched on a branch there (more perching!) and zooming back and forth to our feeder.
Don’t be fooled by the female’s demure attire. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Should a weary sparrow happen to pause on the feeder’s perch for a moment, she will fly in his face and scold him furiously.
Reminds me of someone else I know.
September 6, 2008 @ 7:20 am | Filed under: 100 Species Challenge, Nature Study
2. Agapanthus, or Lily of the Nile
Also called African lilies, these lovely shrubs grow in our front yard and all over town. Their bloom season is just passing now, so the globes of purple or white blossoms at the top of each long stalk are looking a little bedraggled these days. But all summer long they were gorgeous. You see them often in median plantings and commercial landscaping, often intermingled with the earlier-blooming bird-of-paradise flowers (that’ll be a future entry).
Lily of the Nile and red geraniums
3. Pelargonium
The red geraniums in the photo above give me a freebie for our challenge. Of course everybody knows what they are. Not that they are really geraniums—the correct name is pelargonium—but geranium is what everyone I’ve ever known has called them. On the east coast, we planted them as summer annuals or grew them in our windowsills. They’re still in my windows here, but they’re also in the ground, all over the place, sometimes in the form of huge bushes. I’ve adored them ever since Anne Shirley bestowed a kiss and a name (Bonny, of course!) on the red geranium blooming in Marilla’s kitchen.
This entry has been added to our main 100 Species Challenge page which contains our list-in-progress.
August 15, 2008 @ 6:03 am | Filed under: 100 Species Challenge, Nature Study, Outings
Okay.. maybe this is a silly question but how do go about learning about plants? We are surrounded by some beautifully landscaped areas but I have no clue how to start. The Peterson’s and Golden Guides are for “wild plants”. I seem to in the mood of firing off questions at your blog, Lissa.
Not a silly question at all. Great question. I’m sure others will have lots of advice here, so please chime in, folks.
My best advice is to start with a good nursery in your area. Spend some time just browsing the aisles, especially looking out for plants you’ve seen in your neighborhood but don’t know the names of. When we moved here, that’s how I learned that the big, wide-leaved plants in our front yard with the spires of beautiful purple globes are agapanthus, or “lilies of the Nile.” We see them all over town, purple ones and white ones. (I snapped a photo yesterday for our Challenge, but haven’t uploaded it yet.)
You could even take some pictures to the nursery with you—on your cell phone or iPod perhaps—to show the knowledgeable workers there and ask for identification help.
Something I did in both New York and Virginia, but haven’t done here in California, was to make a visit to the local branch of the cooperative extension agency. This is a governmental organization funded by the Department of Agriculture. You can find the number in the blue pages of your phone book, or try the Cooperative Extension System website. This is a fantastic resource and almost everything there is free. You can take in a sample of your soil for testing to see how you might need to amend it for certain types of gardening. There will probably be lots of information—booklets, fliers, etc—about native plants, invasive plants, wildflowers, and such. We took home stacks of fliers from the Charlottesville, Virginia branch, I remember. There was also a lovely garden there of native plants, all clearly labeled (bring a camera when you visit!) and a how-to display on composting. And there were “Master Gardener” volunteers on hand to answer our plant- and bug-related questions!
Actually a trip to the county extension agency is a great field trip for anyone, would-be plant identifiers or not.
Another great resource is your local native plant society. This is something I usually look up within the first month of our living in a new place. In Virginia, the local NPS offered guided nature walks at a nearby preserve, as well as a perfectly wonderful annual sale of native plants grown by NPS members. If you saw my big butterflies post from a few years back, you heard me gushing about how awesome that plant sale was.
April, 2003
Yesterday I took Jane to a native plant sale at a nearby nature center while the other girls were napping. It took us forever to even get into the building where they had the plant sale, because there were a lot of booths set up for various nature clubs and societies, and she was fascinated by all of it. At every table she struck up a conversation with the people running the booth. The old lady at the Invasive Plant Display could not have been more delighted to have this little kid seeming so genuinely interested in how to avoid nasty invasives like multiflora rose and ailanthus tree. The lady gave us a really nice booklet with color photos, saying, “I don’t usually give these out to people, but you really seem to care!”
But the topper was the butterfly table…
Oh my gosh, 2003. Five years ago. That does not seem possible. Pardon me while I shed a nostalgic tear or two for Ivy Creek and the Saturday morning butterfly walks guided by the very same man I described meeting in that post.
:::sniff::: OK, I’m better now. We made that plant sale every year we lived in Virginia. I picked up some treasures there: a wood poppy, a spicebush, a hackberry tree. I have to stop now or I’ll get weepy again.
Here in San Diego, I joined the NPS email list immediately and receive regular notices of nature walks and other events. It’s also a good place to ask any questions I might have about a plants I’d like to identify. These groups are full of enthusiasts who are eager to help—and experience has taught me that most of the members tend to be older, retired folks who are thrilled to see some “young blood” (e.g. my children) showing an interest in their favorite topic. You can make wonderful friends this way.
And finally, I would recommend visiting local public gardens or nature centers. Most places will have sections of plantings with labels. We’ve learned a ton from visiting Mission Trails Regional Center, a vast expanse of hiking trails on the scrubby hills in East San Diego County. Not that my kids and I have spent much time on the trails themselves: it’s just not something I can manage with Rilla in the sling and Wonderboy in the stroller. But the visitor center at the main entrance is a treasure unto itself, and we’ve made several visits there. The grounds around the center are full of labeled plantings. In fact, item #1 on our 100 Species list (the only entry so far) was identified and photographed there.
Here are more posts I’ve written about visiting Mission Trails:
“Some Breezy Open Wherein it Seemeth Always Afternoon”
“At First I Could Only Hear People Sounds”
So, to recap:
• local nurseries
• cooperative extension agency
• native plant society
• nature centers and public gardens
And I’ll add:
• befriend a neighbor with a beautiful garden. Usually this kind of neighbor will spend a lot of time outside working in his or her yard, and if you stroll by with your children often enough, sooner or later you’re bound to strike up a conversation. There’s a nice old gentleman who lives next to an intersection on the edge of our neighborhood. We see him out tending his front yard, a mini-landscape of drought-tolerant plants, several times a week. He has a whimsical touch when it comes to landscaping, artfully incorporating suncatchers, pinwheels, bits of broken pottery and glass, and even some old sun-bleached bones into his plantings. He is always wearing an enormous straw hat. There’s a four-way stop at his corner, and my kids always wave when they see him. He grins and waves back. In the winter there’s a breathtaking row of tall poinsettias—really!—lining his driveway. In summer, sunflowers. One of these days I’m going to get up the nerve to pull over and tell him how much I enjoy driving by his garden. Maybe this winter he’ll let me take a picture of his poinsettias for our Challenge list, too. I’ll bet he could rattle off a hundred species in no time…
Anyone care to add to this list? How do you learn about plants in your neighborhood?
August 12, 2008 @ 7:00 am | Filed under: 100 Species Challenge, Nature Study, Uncategorized
Here’s a list of bloggers who are participating in scsours’s very cool 100 Species Challenge.
scsours, who started it all
The Bookworm (England)
Sandra Dodd (New Mexico)
Monica (Romania)
Learn-O-Rama (North Carolina)
Yellow House Homeschool (Southeastern France)
Patricia at Wonderfarm (Northern California)
Fiddler of Rockhound Place (New England)
MacBeth (Long Island)
Love2Learn Mom (Wisconsin)
Theresa in Alaska said she might participate. I hope she does! Alaska! And several other commenters have said they might join in. I’ll add those links as they come.
Here’s my family’s running list for San Diego. I’ll post new entries as new posts and then add the info to the running list. We already have a bunch more plants to enter.
If you’d like to be added to this list, leave a link in the comments! (And if you’re not a blogger but want to share your family’s list, let me know. I can put you in your own post. 
) And if you’re on the list above and would like me to add your location, leave a comment for that too. I think it’s even more fun if we know the general whereabouts of people’s lists.
Don’t know what the 100 Species Challenge is? This post explains.
August 9, 2008 @ 6:18 am | Filed under: 100 Species Challenge, Nature Study
Updated to add this link to our family’s running list.
At The Common Room I learned about the 100 Species Challenge, the brainchild of scsours over at xanga. The idea, sparked by a quote about how few people can name a hundred plant species in their own neighborhood, is to become the exception to that observation by learning to identify the flora of your own surroundings.
Back in Virginia, we could have filled up our list right quick! But here in San Diego, as I’ve mentioned before, a good many of the plants are new to us. No longer can I dazzle my family with my encyclopedic horticultural knowledge. Nowadays, our jaunts around town are full of conversations along these lines:
Scott: “Ooh, pretty flowers. What are those called?”
Me: “I have no idea.”
Scott, incredulous: “But…but…but that’s your job!”
Which means, I guess, that all the other stuff I do around here is just a hobby. 
(Melissa Wiley: changes diapers for fun.)
Anyway. The 100 Species Challenge sounds like just what I need to regain my former lofty position as Family Guru of Flora and Fauna. (I’m thinking we’ll add fauna to our challenge: a second hundred-species list.)
Here are the rules:
1. Participants should include a copy of these rules and a link to this entry in their initial blog post about the challenge. I will make a sidebar list of anyone who notifies me that they are participating in the Challenge.
2. Participants should keep a list of all plant species they can name, either by common or scientific name, that are living within walking distance of the participant’s home. The list should be numbered, and should appear in every blog entry about the challenge, or in a sidebar.
3. Participants are encouraged to give detailed information about the plants they can name in the first post in which that plant appears. My format will be as follows: the numbered list, with plants making their first appearance on the list in bold; each plant making its first appearance will then have a photograph taken by me, where possible, a list of information I already knew about the plant, and a list of information I learned subsequent to starting this challenge, and a list of information I’d like to know. (See below for an example.) This format is not obligatory, however, and participants can adapt this portion of the challenge to their needs and desires.
4. Participants are encouraged to make it possible for visitors to their blog to find easily all 100-Species-Challenge blog posts. This can be done either by tagging these posts, by ending every post on the challenge with a link to your previous post on the challenge, or by some method which surpasses my technological ability and creativity.
5. Participants may post pictures of plants they are unable to identify, or are unable to identify with precision. They should not include these plants in the numbered list until they are able to identify it with relative precision. Each participant shall determine the level of precision that is acceptable to her; however, being able to distinguish between plants that have different common names should be a bare minimum.
6. Different varieties of the same species shall not count as different entries (e.g., Celebrity Tomato and Roma Tomato should not be separate entries); however, different species which share a common name be separate if the participant is able to distinguish between them (e.g., camillia japonica and camillia sassanqua if the participant can distinguish the two–”camillia” if not).
7. Participants may take as long as they like to complete the challenge. You can make it as quick or as detailed a project as you like. I’m planning to blog a minimum of two plants per week, complete with pictures and descriptions as below, which could take me up to a year. But you can do it in whatever level of detail you like.
I will probably create a separate page for our running lists: link to come.* The kids can help me keep it updated. It’s going to be fun to see how many we know right off the bat. We really have already learned a great deal in our almost two years here. (Can you believe it has been almost two years?)
Okay, what this project needs now is a pretty little button.** I would pester Alice Cantrell for one of her beautiful watercolors but it’s her gardening season and she just might be a tad busy!
*No time like the present: here it is!
**I tried my hand at a few (and stuck one in up above). Other contributions welcome.
Updated to add: Here’s a Flickr page for our Challenge as well.
June 14, 2008 @ 8:40 am | Filed under: Family, Family Adventures, Nature Study
The busier we are, the more I have to write about and the less time I have to write. It’s been an especially busy couple of weeks. Our Shakespeare Club staged a splendid performance of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am so proud of those kids. Our plans to perform outdoors were thwarted by San Diego’s first rain in weeks, but our obliging hosts, the Grimms, converted their living room into a perfect stage. We had a great time and celebrated with Alice’s special Midsummer Night’s Tea menu, which the rest of you can get a look at very soon when her long-awaited book hits the shelves.
Have I mentioned how excited I am about this book? It’s a gem. And I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. It’s called Haystack Full of Needles: A Catholic Home Educator’s Guide to Socialization, and it is full of surprises. And it’s not just for Catholics, nor even just for homeschoolers, for that matter. It’s being published by Hillside Education and is already available for preorder. Woohoo!
(By the way, Alice will be giving two talks at the Family-Centered Learning Conference in Lancaster, PA, on July 26th. Conference organizer Michele Quigley has put together a great lineup of speakers. Looks like tons of fun and I wish I were going!)
Other things that have happened in the past few weeks:
• I became the mother of a teenager (speaking of gems). Congratulations, Jane my love!
• Our ballet group had its spring recital. Jane was in three dances and did a beautiful job. They all did.
• The kids and I made a spur-of-the-moment visit to our favorite local nature preserve, Mission Trails. We’d been talking about the Kumeyaay Indians, and the visitor center there has several Kumeyaay artifcacts, including large flat stones with hollows ground into them by acorn- and grain-pounding pestles centuries ago.
This plant was our favorite sight of the day. It’s a member of the yucca family and goes by the colorful common names of Our Lord’s Candle or Spanish Bayonet.
We also saw this guy. He’s much less alarming in his natural habitat than in, say, our laundry room.
• We had an exciting new visitor to our backyard: our very first sighting of the Western Scrub Jay. No photos because Rose and I were too busy gawking. We had bluejays a-plenty at our feeders in Virginia, of course, but here we’ve been in California for a year and a half and we still hadn’t seen their western cousins! Hard to believe, but true. We’re still watching for a Steller’s Jay. Meanwhile, we enjoy the daily antics of our parliament of crows. Ever since I set up my nifty solar-powered birdbath fountain (awesome Mother’s Day present), the crows have been huge fans of Chez Peterson. They arrive with hunks of bread and perch on the edge of the birdbath, dunking their crusts and tearing off little bites of bread. It’s quite comical, and very messy. We have to clean gooey bread crumbs out of the filter every morning, but it’s worth it.
• The vines that took over our compost pile continue to sprawl across the yard. The blossoms look pumpkiny to me, which would make sense because I did dump our rotting jack-o-lantern in the pile last winter. But the fat green melon-thing that is growing on one of the vines looks decidedly watermelonish. Which is very confusing. I did toss some watermelon scraps out there, but the flowers are way too big for watermelon. All the pictures I’ve found of baby pumpkins look very different in color and shape. I suppose it could be a squash of some kind. Did we compost any squash scraps? Looks too fat for zucchini. We are perplexed.
• Some rodent chewed through the big plastic bin I keep my birdseed in. Whoops. There’s nothing left in there but empty sunflower husks. Poor birdies. Replacement bin and seed is on my list of errands for this week.
Oh, I’m sure there was more to tell, but I’m out of time. I’ll end with the obligatory dose of cute.
March 10, 2008 @ 7:40 pm | Filed under: Nature Study, Photos
All the San Diego papers are raving about the spectacular wildflower season we’re having. Bountiful late-winter rains following last fall’s fierce wildfires have combined to create an abundance of bloom that dazzles our eyes wherever we go. Um, as I write this it occurs to me it might be a little insensitive, given what some of you are dealing with. Can you forgive me?
I snapped this picture of ooh-pretty purple wildflowers on tall leggy stalks during our Cowles Mountain hike the other day. According to the identification guide in the local paper, they are Desert Canterbury Bells. We saw lots of other varieties but I got no pictures and don’t know their names yet. We did spot some whimsically-named “grape soda lupines” in thick clusters on the hillsides all around town, and there are orange and yellow carpets at every turn.
Also blooming, and very wild:
February 25, 2008 @ 7:38 pm | Filed under: Nature Study
Many thanks to Dan and Dixie for clueing me in to the identity of our backyard visitor: seem it was a Western Kingbird. I hope it visits again! It’s an insect and fruit eater, so it wasn’t snacking at our feeder, just perching on the hook. I’m glad I got at least one (albeit blurry) photo before it flew away!
February 25, 2008 @ 8:42 am | Filed under: Nature Study
Not the best photo but it’s all I had time for before he flew away. This is a new visitor to our yard; he was supervising the rowdy finches at the feeder this morning. He’s bigger than a finch, almost robin-sized.
We don’t get anything like the variety of birds to our feeders here that we got in Virginia, at the feet of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Gone are the charcoal-colored juncoes, the chipper titmice, the sweet chickadees, the nuthatches and downy woodpeckers and flickers. We used to have a nesting pair of bluebirds right outside my office window, and two cardinal couples who came for dinner every evening. Now and then a huge pileated woodpecker would dazzle us from the neighbor’s tree, and sometimes a hawk would swoop low and scare the mourning doves.
Here in the suburbs of San Diego, in this particular yard at least, there are only finches: house, purple, gold; and sparrows; and arrogant crows; and one inquisitive phoebe, a Say’s Phoebe, who likes to perch on our side-yard fencepost and survey the action in the street.
Oh, and parrots! A raucous flock of them, green and squawking in the treetops, fluttering up en masse and swirling together to the next tree. Always, by the time I’ve run for my camera, they are gone.
There is an elementary school on the other side of our back fence (I know, the irony is delicious), and last week my parents were walking along along the schoolyard fence with my three youngest bairns when they encountered a science teacher carrying cages of cockatiels. He let the kids play with the birds and told my parents he is putting a nesting box for the parrots in the big tree right behind us; he’s hoping for eggs so he can raise a pair.
So: parrots we’ve got. But I miss my Eastern birds, I do.
This fellow, the newcomer: I hope he’ll return. I don’t know what he is—yet. Any thoughts?
November 5, 2007 @ 6:59 am | Filed under: Nature Study
When Scott and I moved out of our little 2nd-floor Queens apartment to a rental on Long Island with a real back yard, the first thing I did was buy a bird feeder. And when we moved to Virginia two years later, the box with the bird feeder was—I’m not kidding—the first one I unpacked.
I am nutty that way. We love to feed the birds.
We’ve been participating in Project FeederWatch since our very first Long Island winter, paying an annual $15 for the privilege of helping track bird populations in North America. It gives the kids experience with collecting and tabulating data, hones their powers of observation and perseverance, and provides our whole family with the immense joy of getting to know our local feathered friends. Even baby Rilla is part of the fun; standing at the patio door watching the birds is one of her favorite pastimes.
The new FeederWatch season begins November 10th, so if you’re interested, flit on over and sign up!
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