martinzoo

GB and I decided to go back to the beginning of Barb’s challenges. It seems more traditional to start at the beginning, rather than in the middle. Dontcha think?

So, her first challenge was to go outside with your child for 10-15 minutes (longer, if they like) and just observe nature. After you come inside, sit down and discuss what you saw on your walk. After the discussion, come up with two things to investigate further.

We had taken pictures of our walk, and here they are:

Outside, on our deck, partaking of the feeder, were these adorable American Goldfinches.

We recently planted a poplar tree in our yard. And it looks like this cute little bluebird has taken a fancy to it.

One thing we noticed in our walk around the yard is that we have tons of woodpecker evidence. We only walked around our yard today because I am under the weather; terrible headache and stomach ache. So, we didn’t venture far.

This tree is left over from damage during Hurricane Isabelle, in 2002.

And this stump used to be a tree, before the hurricane. As you can see, time, bugs, and woodpeckers are cleaning up natures dead stuff.

Another woodpecker hole. This year we’ve seen red-bellied woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, and hairy woodpeckers.

Since we have so much evidence of woodpecker activity, we discussed why woodpeckers must like our yard so much.

1. We still have dead trees laying on the ground in our woods left over from the hurricane. GB thinks we should not do anything about them now, because they provide nice homes for bugs and birds.
2. Our neighborhood is very bird-friendly. There are many avid bird-watchers who use any means they can to attract a variety of birds. In fact, all the streets in our neighborhood are named after birds.
3. We have five bird feeders in our own yard. And the woodpeckers seem to really like the suet feeder.
4. We have several dying trees. The drought that we experienced after the hurricane has succeeded in killing off many of our nice oak trees. As the tree begins to die, bugs come in to break it down, and then woodpeckers find the bugs.

GB found this bug under a log, so we decided that we would investigate it further when we got inside. We put him under our nifty microscope, and then looked him up on the internet.

Obviously, he has gagillion legs. So, we figured he was either a centipede, or a millipede. Upon further investigation we found out how you can tell the difference between them, no matter the size. If it is a centipede it will have one set of legs per body segment. A millipede has two sets of legs per body segment. Because they have so many body parts, they are technically not insects, since insects only have 3 body parts and six legs. Centipedes are considered arthropods. Centipedes have venom in their front legs, which they use to attack and paralyze their prey.

Now that we knew he was a centipede, we had to figure out which kind of centipede. Well the best way to figure that out is to remember where you found them. We found him under a log– so– a soil centipede made sense.

All-in-all, I’m sure we were outside for over an hour. That’s the way it goes with us. But GB loves it so much. He is desperately hoping that we will find some more tadpole eggs this year. So every day he goes to check the water source where we found them last Spring. Cross your fingers! We’d love to do tadpoles again this year.