Nature Study: Wildflowers?

The Outdoor Hour is doing wildflowers right now, and I was all excited about findiing some of the early spring wildflowers that Barb was talking about. One of the blogs I visited in the past couple days (sadly, I can't recall which one) mentioned that there are a lot of wildflowers at this time of year, before the trees leaf out because there is more sunlight on the forest floor. I guess I picked the wrong place to go looking for flowers, because we didn't find a single flower. But we still had a good time. It's still early spring; my crocuses aren't even blooming yet. We'll have to try again.

We went to the same area that we saw the hollow tree at earlier this spring. The hollow tree wasn't nearly as interesting to Monkey as it was last time. Instead, we headed up the hill exploring the low-hanging pine trees as we went.



There was a riot of birdsong going on all around us as we were looking at the trees and their pine cones. We heard red-wing blackbirds (my favorite), a blue jay, and black capped chickadees. There was also at least 2 bird calls that I didn't recognize. We couldn't see much of these birds. They were flitting from the top of one tree to another, and Monkey was too busy for me to stand still and try to photograph or even really look at them very long. We did see some Canadian geese and a duck, probably a mallard.



But mostly, we looked at trees. I wished that I had brought along my tree field guide, but I didn't grab any of that stuff this time, just my camera. Monkey is still too little to do "notebooking," so we're going to keep a Nature Book for him: a photo album that he helps choose the pictures that go in it, and has more access to than the rest of our scrapbooks. We chose a picture to go on the front today, and picked a couple of our pictures to go inside.