martinzoo

Our challenge today was to mark off one small (12″) square and really study the life that went on in that tiny, little square.

These bluish, whitish flowers are called bluets or quaker ladies. I like the name quaker ladies, because I think it’s cute.

We saw this fern-like plant, but haven’t identified it yet.

Our notebook kept having little visitors. I’m not sure what this tiny guy was. He was actually moving pretty fast. I’d say he was about a 1/3 of an inch long. And he sort of had a centipede-like look to his body. But it was hard to tell in the 10-15 seconds that he spent on the page.

I couldn’t tell if this was a spider or an ant. So I blew the pic up a bit.

And I still can’t tell. It looks like a spider to me. But GB and I have checked Google, and Google images and can’t seem to find one that looks quite like it. Poor GB, I’m not a good bug researcher.

I DO know what this sucker is. And he, along with 11 of his little friends prompted a tiny argument between GB and I. This is the second time in less than a week that GB and I have had altercations with ticks. I took 12 off of GB yesterday, thankfully none had penetrated the skin. But the one that I took off earlier in the week was in a very delicate place. No need to elaborate. So I was annoyed by the little varmints. And I may have made a not-so-nice comment directed at God, that went kind of like this:

Me ~ “I don’t see any dadgum reason why God would have created these foul little critters!”

GB ~ “Are you saying that God made a mistake? Because I don’t think He would like that. I’m sure there must be a reason for ticks to live. Like, maybe they are food for some other animal.”

So, I was properly chastised. We came inside, looked ticks up on the internet, and found out that there are three basic groupings of ticks.

The American Dog tick

The Deer tick

And the Lone Star tick (we see plenty of these)

We also found out that ticks are arachnids, cousins of spiders.

AND we found out that some birds, including robins (that’s poetry, I tell you!), eat ticks. And fire ants eat ticks too. In fact, in some locations fire ants have decimated the tick population. Hmmmm…….. which would I rather have? I’ve never actually had an interaction with a fire ant, so I guess I can’t say.

For this challenge we were supposed to come up with a field guide for our focus area of study. We are studying trees. A few months ago I made some trading cards for GB to go along with our Iditarod Unit. So we decided that trading cards would be good for a field guide too.

Here is what we’ve done so far:

This is the program I used to make the cards. Trading Card Maker

I figure we’ll start with the trees in our yard, and then broaden out as we become familiar with them. We can also add to, or modify these cards as we learn more about the trees.

GB and I did not intend to skip ahead in the challenges. But we got kind of carried away today with an investigation. We started the day by going to our neighborhood pond. We were looking for tadpoles because we raised tadpoles to toads last year and it was so interesting that we want to do it again.

So we traversed our way around some of the perimeter of the pond looking for tadpoles or even some eggs. GB used his new dipping techniques that he learned in our nature classes.

He even checked the gutters that feed into the pond. No luck…. We’ll keep looking though.

We did find this cool looking thing hanging on a tree. So we snipped off a little branch and brought it home for further investigation. There must have been about 20-30 of these things.

We also found some seed pods. These are from a maple tree. GB decided to plant them because he likes maple trees.

This is what they look like under our stereo microscope at 10X magnification. You can see all those little lung bombs pollen bits along the stems in in the cracks and crevices.

Next we decided to look at this pretty little thing. From our field guide, we were able to identify the tree as being a white oak tree. You can see a bit of the leaf on the plate of the microscope.

I thought this was just stunning! This was at 30X magnification. And it really looked like fiber-optic glass; especially with the light shining through it.

This was at 10X magnification.

We thought it was so cool and pretty that we wanted to figure out what it was. So we looked through the Handbook of Nature Study and decided that maybe it was the beginning of an acorn. I mean, who knows what an acorn looks like in the very beginning. I’m sure lots of people do, but this was our thought process at the time.

So then we looked on the internet because we wanted to see a color picture to match up to our pictures. But we couldn’t find anything in Google using “oak+tree+acorn+female+flower” But when I switched to ‘images’ I found several that portrayed ‘galls.’

So that was our next path on the investigation. We started looking for ‘oak tree galls’ and found lots of them. Oak trees get lots of galls. We finally found out that this is a wool-sower gall. Here is what else we found out:

Wool-sower Gall - a fuzzy ball about an inch in diameter found on a White Oak twig. If you split the gall open you find seedlike items. Wool-sower Galls are fairly common in some parts of the country. The gall is made by a Cynipid Wasp, Callirhytis seminator. Cynipid Wasps, members of the Family Cynipidae, are 4-6 mm long (0.16- 0.24 inch), so they are much smaller than the wasps you see buzzing around gardens and house eaves. They are black and shiny with roundish abdomens and thoraxes, with a sort of hump on the back. Lots of gall-making wasps are found in this family. Some species live in galls made by other organisms!

Well, that was really interesting! So we thought, “What happens if we decide to dissect this sucker?” We wanted to see if we would see any of these wasp larva. So…………

Don’t worry……… we were careful……… I’m not sure that Pampered Chef products were ever intended to be used in precisely this way though…..

This is the gall split open. You can see the tiny little parts that look like seeds.

GB wanted to look first. We went outside to dissect the gall because I was worried that some strange flying wasps might fly out at us when we punctured the gall……..even thought I knew they would be babies of sorts. Wasps are wasps…… that was my fear. But they didn’t. It looked pretty harmless……. so we ventured on with our investigation.

This is the inside of the gall. You can see the little seed-like pods near the twig.

And this was at 30X magnification.

Funny thing……… When I was peering through the lens of the microscope, I thought I detected movement. So I wiggled the gall around a bit and changed the focus. And I DID see movement. It was a tiny little wasp larva! So I put my camera up to the lens of the microscope and got this video:

This is him, all grown up.

Cool, huh? I’ll tell you what, that Pampered Chef stuff got a thorough cleaning! And NONE of the gall material made it back inside the house.

Using our focus of ‘Trees,’ our challenge today was to go out and make some kind of list. Well the obvious list to create is one that includes all of our trees. So that’s what we did. We went around the yard and made a list of all the trees we could identify. There were a couple that we are not sure about. Actually I’m not even sure if they are trees.

We put our list in the back of our nature journal so that we could add to it as we identify even more trees.

This is what we have so far:

1. slash pine
2. sweet gum
3. red maple (my favorite)
4. pear
5. weeping willow
6. white pine
7. crab apple
8. american holly
9. tulip poplar
10. weeping cherry
11. red oak
12. white oak (GB’s favorite)
13. dogwood

And yes, I wore my funny little mask again!

And just to bring you up to date on the new lives at the martinzoo:

The top photo is from today…. And the bottom photo was only 3 days ago! Voracious eaters, aren’t they?

And these are our new, darling baby bluebirds. Aquagirl wants me to quit calling them cute. She says they are not.

But I think they ARE! I mean, really…. look at that little upturned face….. just begging for your love….. See his tiny little beak? I think he’s smiling at you, Aquagirl.

This was Tuesday, and now they’ve all hatched.