Nature

We were very privileged yesterday to visit the Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, Washington. It is the first time we’ve ever gone and we were not disappointed. There are over 700 acres of tulips there. What beauty! Here are just a few pictures.

A picture of our family after we walked around one field almost all afternoon and had taken 600+ pictures. I’m not kidding! The blessing of digital cameras I guess, is that you can just keep on snapping and snapping and you don’t run out of film or you know you can delete later, so no cost. I just wish I could share tons of them with you, but I picked out just a few. Not too sure if they were my favorites. I think so though. I think we could print a book of tulip pictures now though!

Pretty up close…

…and pretty far away.

One of the very exciting parts of our trip was that Zippy had just received her new camera that she had recently ordered after saving her money for quite some time. She took some of these pictures. She took the one above with the trees in it. I’m proud that she turned out some very fine pictures with her point-and-shoot. She also took the one below so that she could study more closely what the inside of the tulips were like.

We also learned about the tulip from the Handbook of Nature Study pages 552-555. We referred to Zippy’s picture above to see if it was described correctly. It was! Our tulip matched the description.

From the Handbook of Nature Study we learned that tulips originally came from the Orient and were real popular in Persia where they were cultivated as early as 1000 A.D. Eventually they made their way to Europe where everybody fell in love with them, but especially the Dutch. According to the Handbook of Nature Study, the highest price paid for a tulip, during the "Tulipmania" was $1800, but we found a website called Tulip Fever that claimed that the highest price ever paid was by a Turk named Sultan Ahmed III who was beheaded for spending too much on tulips. A head in exchange tulips, I would say, takes the prize. While we read about the tulips the kids added pictures of them to their nature journals.

Left is Zippy’s (age 9). Right is JD Boy’s (age 6).

And last but not least, a favorite shot of me and my littlest man. His big brother and sister have been working on making nature journals of the things they observe in the outdoors, so they took theirs out to the tulip fields. He wasn’t to be left out. He proudly took his in his new turtle backpack and at one point just sat down on the road to draw a picture of the tulip fields. It was so cute. He was being such a big kid. Guess I’d better stop gushing though.

We heard that sometimes tulips are exported to Holland from these fields, but I did some looking around on the internet and have found conflicting reports on this. Some say that Holland will not import tulips and that the US imports from Holland. Others say that at some time in the past tulips were exported to Holland from here. Maybe they’re both true. Maybe there was one year that something happened to tulips in Holland, and so there was an exception. I don’t know. Most of the sites said that Holland will not import. All in all, it was beautiful. Now, if we could just visit a tulip festival in Holland!

Today we did a little more studying about blue birds and bluebirds! That was the second Bird challenge on the Outdoor Hour. Actually it was Jays and Bluebirds, but I thought my title was catchy.

We were able to see bluebirds really well at the grandparents’ house this past weekend and today we read about them and added them to our nature journals. We didn’t find a lot of information about the bluebirds, but we do have to admit that they are really special and we wish they’d come visit us at our house. I had a hard time choosing which photo to post.

That photo was taken on Sunday at my parents’ place.

The other blue bird that we learned about was the Steller’s Jay. That is the Jay that frequents our house and chases the birds away from our feeders. We do like the Steller’s Jay because it really is a gorgeous bird, we just wish that it would learn to share. But since around this house, we sometimes have trouble with sharing, guess we shouldn’t complain about the Steller’s Jay.

Unfortunately, even though we’re regularly visited by the Steller’s Jay, we don’t have any photos of them. One of these days. If you’d like to see it, you can visit my favorite online field guide: Steller’s Jay @ enature.com

The kids illustrated these birds in their nature journals. Here are their illustrations.

Stellers Jay and Western Bluebird by JD Boy, age 6

Western Bluebird by Zippy, age 9

Steller’s Jay by Zippy, age 9

This bird study also included comparing beaks of different birds, which we did. The favorite two to compare were the hummingbird with the Steller’s Jay. Can’t say how much we’re enjoying the bird studies on the Outdoor Hour Challenges.

We’re really excited that the Outdoor Hour Challenges right now are about birds. Birding and learning about birds is one of our favorite things around here. In fact, in a few weeks, we’re heading to a bird sanctuary for a few days to see what we can see. Can’t wait!

This weekend we spent some time at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. We ended up staying longer than anticipated and without any books. So we thought, the weather is nice and we need to do something educational, and I’d already looked through the bird challenges on the Outdoor Hour Challenges blog, so I looked through them a little better and we headed out to see if we could find the birds in the challenges. And my husband took out his special toy–his new camera. We were very thrilled to find the two birds from the first challenge that live in our area. (No Cardinals. Boo hoo. I used to live in the Midwest and I love Cardinals. I wish my kids could enjoy them like I used to.) We also found birds in the second and third challenges too, but we’re going to learn a bit more about them before we post.

So here are the birds from the first challenge:

American Robin trying to keep warm in the early morning.

American Robin wondering where he’ll find some more worms. We learned while we were reading about Robins that baby Robins need fourteen feet of worms every day. Talk about a lot of time spent on food preparation!

House Finch just sitting pretty.

Notebook pages that we did on the three birds that we learned about: American Robin, House Finch and Cardinal. These came from Notebooking Pages and Cornell’s coloring book.

I’m so ready for spring and summer. I must have cabin fever. Just two days ago we woke up to snow on the ground. Even the kids were disappointed. I woke the kids up and said, "I have a surprise for you!" JD Boy went to the window and groaned, "Oh no. Not again. I’m tired of that stuff." I asked G’tums if he wanted to go sledding and he looked up at me with a puzzled look and said, "I don’t know." We don’t get much snow where we live. So my kids are usually so excited for snow. They’ll sled on a quarter-inch of the white stuff, but not now. They’d had their fill. Me too. I’m ready for green and for flowers and all the things that make Summer so beautiful where I live.

But today was a totally different story. We were all itching to go outside today and do some exploring to see what we could find. We worked on math and some history for awhile, but outside was calling. I wanted to see if I could find the signs of Spring, like maybe some wild flowers. And when I got out there, lo and behold Spring was there to greet us. I was thrilled with the things we found.

The blackberries are starting to bud.

Moss is turning that living green color. I love it.

Spring is here and I was so excited, but my kids were on their own exploration. We started reading a book this week called: African Savanah (One Small Square). We are really enjooying this book. I highly recommend it for the K-3 age group. Even preschoolers like it–at least mine does. It’s about the habitat of the Serengeti.

Anyway, all of that to say that my kids wanted to pretend we were going exploring in Africa even though I was out searching for signs of Spring and wildflowers. They got outside before me. And when I got out there, they had a Rubbermaid container full of grass and mud and they were stomping it with a stick. When they saw my quizzical look, which meant "Why do you always want to do the messiest projects you can think of?" They said, "We are making fufu!"

I know you’re wondering, "What on earth is fufu?" Well, you see, my husband has gone on two mission trips to the interior of the Democratic Republic of Congo and he always tells about this stuff that the Africans eat called fufu. It’s made out of rehydrating dried cassava with warm water and, according to my husband, it is about the consistency of playdough. This fufu is the main staple where he visited. In fact, I have a picture.

The fufu is the stuff in the center bowl. They dip it into the sauces in the other bowls.

So making fufu is the reason that my kids had concocted such a mess. I guess that sounds a little more creative than what my brother and I always told our mom–we said we were making mud pies. My kids, at least, came up with a name on their own, instead of copying one out of a bedtime story book. And once they finished making their "fufu", they were ready for their excursion to the African Savannah!

So here they are, busy exploring the Savannah:

She’s trying to learn if our grass is the same as what grows in the Savannah.

Guess what! They even found a water hole. Oh, no! Another mess.

But I was still busy, whether I was in Africa or at home in America, trying to prove to myself that it was Spring. I thought that surely I would find some wild flowers blooming. I have seen pictures of them on the Outdoor Hour Nature Blog and I wanted to find some of my own. But hence, I think I live farther north than they do. I did find that some of the shrubs that we have planted are flowering and that the bees have discovered them. I sure hope this means that the wild flowers will show up soon.

My search was nearly in vain. Would you believe it though, I finally found three, yes 3, wild flowers. And they were all the same kind. Here is one of them. I’ll let you identify it.

Well, I’d sure like to find some wild flowers that were a little more exotic than that. I usually call these weeds and yank them out, but since that was all I could find, I left it. Maybe I’d better go to Africa and see if they have some wild flowers for me to see.

We have a little friend who has been visiting us very regularly the last few days. Actually we have two of them. They are Rufus hummingbirds. I think hummingbirds are like flying jewels. They are just so beautiful.

We have the hummingbird feeders right out our french door in the dining room, so while we eat, we are all watching to see who gets to say "I see him!" first.

Here are a couple of pictures my husband snapped of him.

 

I guess that was a short post, but I still had to share!

Mexico has many beautiful places, birds, butterflies and fish along the Pacific Coast, where we were. There are also whales, manta rays and dolphins jumping regularly.  This is a long post about the nature study that we did while we were in Mexico for a week in January.

We saw many beautiful birds while we there. Zippy increased her list by 17 identified birds: West Mexican Chachalaca, Great Kiskadee, Orange Fronted Parakeet, Purplish-backed Jay, Yellow-winged Cacique, Magnificent Frigate Bird, Brown Pellican, Blue Footed Booby, Streaked-backed Oriole, Inca Dove, Squirrel Cuckoo, Common Black Hawk, Boat-tailed Grackle, Cinnamon Hummingbird, Millitary Macaw, Common Tern and White Ibis.

And then there were a few more that even with extensive internet searches, we have not been able to identify. Here is one of them:

It’s obviously a woodpecker, but what kind?
 
One of the ones that we had many opportunities to observe was the  Orange Fronted Parakeet. These parakeets fly in flocks and we saw them every single day. They’re very noisey birds too, so you always heard them before you saw them. At first, we weren’t sure if we could identify which parakeet it was, because there are several green parakeets down there, but we’re pretty sure we got the right one.

Zippy chose to illustrate this bird in her nature journal.

We also got to watch the Pelicans fishing. That was quite fun. The house where we stayed, was close to the water, so we just watched them through our binoculars and got to see them catch their breakfasts.

We also saw some new insects and spiders. One morning we went on a little walk up the mountainside to see if we could see any new birds. We did get to see the Military Macaws, but that wasn’t our first sighting. What we did find was a huge spider. Their spiders are bigger than ours. We stood and watched it work on it’s web, but we didn’t identify it.

I know some people don’t even like pictures of spiders, but I’m very intrigued by spiders, as long as they’re not crawling on me. I love to watch them weave their webs. We saw some beautiful insects too–butterflies. They are very hard to get pictures of though, because when they’re the most beautiful is when they are fluttering by. We saw several very large butterflies and we saw some just brilliantly painted butterflies.

So if you have arachnophobia, maybe that picture helped to relieve your anxiety, but the next one is what got to me. One of the strangest insects we found crawling on my sandals while we were eating. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing them.

It was a too-big beetle, at least for my liking, but this is one of the things that John Deere Boy was intrigued with so he drew a picture of it for his nature journal. This is another thing we haven’t identified.

We also saw many, many gorgeous flowers. There were Bougainvillea everywhere we went in pinks mostly, but also oranges, whites and reds.

Zippy chose to illustrate a hibiscus with a butterfly on it.

We also saw hibiscus and we got to go to a little arboretum that had all kinds of plants that were willing to grow in that climate. I can’t read Spanish so I wasn’t sure which ones were native and which ones weren’t, but they were all flourishing. People just have these most beautiful flowers growing on the fences along the road and everywhere. It’s heavenly.

We also saw whales spouting and jumping. That was very special. We saw humpback whales and a gray whale. We missed seeing any manta rays. We were a bit disappointed about that. Maybe next time. We were able to watch a little eagle ray swimming around once.

(That picture was taken by my father-in-law. He took a few other of these pictures. –Thanks Papa!– I did not see that good of a sighting of them. But the kids and my husband did.)

We did some tide pooling a few times to see what creatures we could find in and around the rocks. We found some types of anemones and mostly the regular things that you can find in tide pools. The kids found several shells close by. My husband took this outstanding photo of hermit crabs. I just love this photo. What do you think?

And my brother in law found this vacated urchin. I think this one is especially neat too.

The most fun that we had watching creatures was while we snorkeled. Sad to say, even though I’ve purchased multiple field guides at this point for fish, I still haven’t found a good one for that part of Mexico, so we haven’t identified the fish that we saw. We saw several different angel fish type fish. Several were yellows. We saw three kinds of puffer fish. We saw some type of rock fish. I got to see a spotted sting ray. We saw a sea cucumber. And we saw lots of other little brightly colored fish that liked to eat around the rocks. We didn’t have any underwater cameras, so I can’t share pictures of any of the fish, but here is a picture of the snorkelers!

Oh, I nearly forgot. There were iguanas and some other lizard type thing that sunned on the rocks close to the house. They are quite the animal. I’m just not really into reptiles, but they are kind of interesting. They sit there for hours soaking up the sun and then something gets their attention and they scurry away so fast, you can’t believe it. Zippy even got to hold one of the iguanas.

Besides studying things in the field of Biology, we also enjoyed watching the sky. A neighbor to where we stayed shared his telescope with us one evening. So we could see the craters on the moon. We saw Venus and we saw the nebula of Orion. That was special too. We wished we lived in a place where we could see the stars better. Maybe someday.

No pictures of the stars though, but what we did get some nice pictures of was some beautiful sunsets. Sunsets can be so beautiful over the ocean.

John Deere Boy also chose to illustrate one of the sunsets that we saw. Here is his picture:

We also saw some really neat rock formations. Isn’t it amazing that something like rocks can be beautiful? We serve a God who not only makes the flowers and birds and fish beautiful, but He can make the rocks beautiful.

And here is just, what I thought was a beautiful landscape.

We, as you may have noticed from my last post, couldn’t stay very far away from water. I’ve heard it said that it is good for our nervous system to watch water. Well, I tried to do plenty of that. I don’t know if observing water counts as nature study, but it sure is beautiful. Here are two pictures.

That last picture is my husband’s favorite from the whole trip. He took it. Those are the same waterfalls that they jumped off of that were in my previous posts.

When we take time to observe nature, we can’t help but come to the conclusion that we truly serve an Awesome Creator. How could we help but worship Him, when we see all that He has provided for our happiness?

A couple of months ago  I discovered a really great blog called The Outdoor Hour by Harmony Art Mom. Each week she has a new challenge posted for you and your children to do to learn more about nature.

The Outdoor Hour blog is based on The Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Comtock. I already had this book. I had picked it up on sale when my oldest was an infant, but I had only looked at a few times clear back then. It’s so thick I didn’t know where to start. With the help of The Outdoor Hour blog, I learned how the book works and that I didn’t need to read the whole thing. So I read the beginning section and than have started referring to the parts as I need them. This book seems really great, even though I don’t feel like we’ve dug into yet.

This week’s challenge was to see what colors can be seen in the winter. My children thought that would be fun so they took my camera and took some pictures of what interested them. We are still working on challenge #2 though about learning how to describe what they see in their own words. So we’ve combined the two challenges into one for us.

They each decided that they wanted to post about this on their own blogs. So you’ll have to visit their blogs to see what they found: ZippyArt, JohnDeere Boy.

I do have to wonder though how they were able to see as much as they did. This is a picture of what John Deere Boy was caught doing while we were on our nature walk. He’s working on a paper airplane. Boys!! Guess he needed something to work on while his sister had the camera.

I live in a place where the almanac claims that it supersedes 90F 4 days a year and it stays below freezing 4 days a year. Well, I can’t always understand the whole global warming thing, because since we’ve lived here, the almanac has been about right on the over 90F part, but we’ve had more freezes than that. I know global warming is a complicated theory and I’m looking at it simplistically, but let me just say that it’s freezing here right now. It’s the 3rd day in a row to not get above freezing. So we’ll see if the almanac proves true this year, but the weather better cooperate soon! With all that said, we don’t get a lot of freezes probably not more than two weeks a year and it doesn’t stay below freezing all day long all of those days either, so maybe the almanac is right, I don’t know. Anyway, according to our kids we don’t get near enough snow, so when it comes, it is very special. It snowed here Friday night and we still have snow. And we’re supposed to get more later in the week.

The only problem with this whole pictures is that my in-laws are supposed to be driving half-way across the country this week to see us, and I wish the weather would smile on them. We’re all so anxious for them to arrive.

Since we are having fun in the snow, here are a few pictures.

Let me tell you what I discovered yesterday about this weather–it is very time consuming. Since we get it so rarely the hats and the mittens and the snow pants are all packed away and not necessarily together. And then since we don’t have it too often we don’t have a dedicated spot for this stuff that is handy to get to, so I either leave half of it on the floor in the entry or I put it all way back. So yesterday, when the kids went out to play, it took me 1 hour to get them all dressed and my toddler was cold within 30 minutes after going out. Oh, well it was worth it!

Here is my toddler all bundled up.

Let it snow!!