International Rock-Flipping Day

When was the last time you flipped over a rock (or a log) to see what was underneath? You can find all kinds of cool creepy-crawly things under there, if you're lucky. Our coolest finds over the years have included salamanders and enormous beetles. You never know until you look.

In this spirit, Dave Bonta and Bev Wigney started International Rock Flipping Day in 2007. This year, it is being observed on Sunday, September 20. To inspire you to get out there and flip some rocks this weekend, we've started our rock-flipping a few days early. All of these critters (and one cool patch of mycelium) were found as we flipped the many rocks in our backyard in Silver Spring, Maryland, this week:

Now get out there and join in!

• Find a rock and flip it over.
• Marvel at what you find.
• Replace the rock as you found it.
• Repeat.
  

Remember, your rock is likely someone's home. Be gentle, and if there are critters underneath, don't squish them when you replace it. It's better to move the animals to the side if you can, then replace the rock and let them scurry back.

If you'd like to share what you find with the rest of the rock-flipping community, here's how:

• Record it in still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry.
• Load images to the Rock-Flipping Day Flickr group, post observations on your own blog, or just leave a comment on this post. We'd love to hear about what you found!
  
• For anything besides a comment here, send a link to the coordinator, Susannah Anderson at Wanderin' Weeta, via email or a comment to her post on Rock-Flipping Day.

Whether you share your observations or not, you can check back with Wanderin' Weeta to see what everyone sent her. She'll collect all the links and post them in one place.

Now get outside and flip some rocks!

LOOK FOR: Monarch caterpillars (and raise them!)

The life cycle of a monarch butterfly is pretty amazing. And you can not only watch, but be a part of helping to make it happen.

Over the summer months in our area, there are multiple generations of monarchs. Adults mate and then lay their eggs on the leaves of milkweed plants. Caterpillars hatch from the eggs and proceed to devour as much milkweed as possible for the next two weeks or so of their lives, shedding their skin several times as they grow.

When they're ready, the monarch caterpillars will look for a good place to pupate, attach themselves upside down with a strong mass of silk threads, and shed their skins one more time. Their next skin hardens into a beautiful chrysalis, like jade decorated with sparkling gold.

Inside the chrysalis, the monarch pupa takes another two weeks or so to transform into a butterfly. The night before it is ready to hatch, you can see the butterfly inside: the chrysalis looks as if it has turned from green to black.

Early in the morning, the butterfly will split open its chrysalis, crawl out, and hang from the empty shell. It must pump fluid into its wings before they will stretch out to their full size. Here's a video we made a few years ago of the whole process as it took place in our kitchen:



Want to try your hand at it? To find caterpillars to raise, look for milkweed. Try looking along roadsides, the edges of playgrounds, or other "waste" places. Remember the caterpillars can be very small when they first hatch. They're probably trying to hide from you and the birds -- look on the undersides of leaves.

Before you bring any caterpillars home, make sure your schedule will allow you to replenish their food supply (milkweed leaves) every day or two. The leaves need to be kept fresh -- the best way seems to be picking whole stems and keeping them in water like cut flowers. We usually do this in a jar with holes poked in the lid, so the caterpillars can't fall into the water (we've drowned a few).

Your caterpillars will be so intent on eating that you don't have to do anything to cage them until the end of their larvaehood. But when they're ready to pupate, they will wander. We put ours in a small aquarium, and they attach themselves to the sides or the screen on top. You can also get a container made especially for raising butterflies.

Report back in the comments and let us know how it goes -- or share your own tips for raising butterflies!

Seven Ways to Keep a Nature Journal

I started keeping a journal in third grade, when someone gave me a little blue journal with a brass lock. I didn't start a nature journal until much more recently. But I wish I'd started earlier.

There's no right way to keep a nature journal. But it is a very good thing to keep one. What type you keep depends on your personality and interests. Try a few approaches and see which works for you.

The "five year" journal. In a pre-printed 5-year diary (like these), there is typically one page for each day of the year; each is divided into five sections. You have just a few lines to write down your observations for each day. My grandmother recently received in the mail several five-year journals kept by my great-great-uncle in the early 1900's, and they were fascinating: fiddle gigs, cow mating, losing a finger in a sawmill, that kind of thing. Matt and I were inspired to start our own, focusing on nature observation. We use looseleaf paper in a 3-ring binder, and instead of having 1 page per day, we've collapsed it into 5-day windows (observations for January 1-5 are mixed together on one page). We're just now getting to the place where we started it last summer, and it's been very helpful in planning hikes, berry-collecting expeditions, and posts for this blog!

Longer reflections. Perhaps you'd rather have more space to reflect on your observations. It doesn't take a fancy book -- I've got a $1 composition book from CVS that I use to record my thoughts. The important thing, in my mind, is for it to be small and light enough that you can carry it with you, but big enough that you can write a coherent thought without having to turn the page. It can be rewarding to look back through a journal like this and see all you've learned, or be reminded of the wonderful things you've seen. You may want to keep a separate nature journal, or consider just journaling more about nature in a journal you already keep.

Detailed observations. You can also use journaling as a method for learning about individual plants and animals, in-depth. Carefully drawing a plant or animal is a fantastic way to force yourself to really observe. Watching the same individual over time, and noting your observations, you will learn even more. How do the flowers turn into seed pods? What does the plant look like when it first emerges in the spring?

Photography. Of course, photos can be another tool for recording your nature observations and making statements about what you find beautiful in nature. By taking the time to sort and label our photos (and weed them out!) every time we upload them, we've made our photography habit into another tool for remembering what to look for when. As an added bonus, set your screensaver to make a slideshow of your photos -- you'll look at them more often.

Blog. Many blogs are just online journals. We've got a sporadic one here. Same content as other journals; it's just a different format (after all, blogs started as "web logs"). It's free to set one up on Blogger, Word Press, and other sites. And you can tell your mom and your friends about all the cool things you see. The drawback: it's hard to blog in the field. And the pressure to write things worthy of public consumption may keep you from just jotting things down that you otherwise might want to keep a record of. (Ours often goes months without an update.)

Kids' Journals. Just like adults, kids can use a simplified version of almost any of these methods. Take some drawing supplies on a walk, and draw something while you take a break. Or pick one favorite thing to write about when you get back. Or write down one thing you observed for each sense: the cool water, the sour wood sorrel, the chirping birds, the musty soil, the bright red flower. You can also paste in leaves and dried flowers, make bark rubbings...anything you can think of. A looseleaf binder can give a lot of flexibility for what goes into a kid's journal; or use a sketch pad with blank pages. I promise this will be a treasured keepsake, iif you use it frequently.

Life lists. Somehow keeping life lists (a list of birds or plants you have seen in the wild, over your whole life) just for the sake of generating the longest list possible seems to me to miss the experience of just enjoying whatever comes along, wherever you are. But we do make little notes in the margins of our id books about the first time we identify a species of wildflower or bird, and where we saw it. If we find ourselves identifying the same thing again, it's somehow helpful to have that note and make the association to the last time we saw it -- usually we don't have to look something up more than twice. As another point in favor of keeping a life list, just the act of writing down the name of something you've identified can help you remember it.

Do you keep a nature journal, or just dream of doing it? Have tips on journaling? Leave a comment!

Open Your Eyes: Practice Seeing More

Our natural way of seeing the world is to focus on one thing. While you're reading this blog, you are tuning out your peripheral vision. It's an either-or proposition.

The thing is, if you spend all of your time in nature in this kind of tunnel vision, you may miss out on the opportunity to see some interesting things. Here are three exercises we have learned to practice seeing in different ways.

Shift your focus. With this method, you keep your focused vision, but you move your focus a lot more than you would naturally. Consciously force yourself to shift: near, mid range, and far; treetops, eye level, and ground level. I often make myself do this when I find I've had my eyes looking down on the trail without really thinking about it.

Soften your focus. With this method, you bust open your vision to incorporate a full 180-degree sphere. You will not see specific things as well, but you will find that you can spot motion much more easily. We often use this technique to spot birds we're looking for. To practice, hold your hands out in front of you, shoulder-level, and wiggle your fingers. Now move them apart from each other, to each side, until you can just barely see both of them at once. Put your arms down, but keep your eyes softened in this way. It's a whole different world.

Savor it. Rachel Carson wrote, "if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators." Open yourself to wonder, she said, by asking, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?" Perhaps you'd look a little longer, a little closer. Go ahead and do it now.

Do you know other tricks for opening up your vision? Have experiences to share with one of these? Post a comment!

Beat the Heat

As the summer heats up, don't let it keep you inside all day. Here are some tips for keeping cool outdoors.

More plants, less pavement. Pavement acts as a heat sink, capturing the sun's heat. Plants, meanwhile, are taking the same solar energy and using it to perform the chemical reactions of photosynthesis. They're also evaporating water from their leaves, which cools the air around them.


Seek shade. Clearly, the shade of trees will help. Also consider walking in areas that are even more intensely shaded, like north-facing slopes and creek ravines. How about Soapstone Valley in Rock Creek Park (previous post)? For a spot that gets no sunlight, ever, check out the Dalecarlia Tunnel, where the Capital Crescent Trail passes under MacArthur Blvd (map). It is deliciously cool all summer.

Find water. Being wet will help you stay cool. Find a creek to stick your feet in briefly, or make your whole excursion a wade in a creek. Just be safe -- don't wade (or swim) where there's a strong current.

Drink water. Remember to bring lots of water and stay hydrated. Even better, freeze your water bottle before you go and you'll have cold water on your hike (remember to leave room for the water to expand before you put it in the freezer).

Acclimate. Your body makes physiological changes to deal with heat. If you spend most of your time in cold, dry air conditioning and then try to spend time in the hot, humid outdoors, you'll be physically less able to deal with the heat. Spend more time outdoors, and set your thermostat to a higher temperature. It will take a few days for your body to adjust, but you should find the heat more bearable.

Go early. Even if you're acclimated, there's no reason to be out at the hottest time of day. If we're going out (or working in the garden), we'll do it early and be back inside before noon. On a typical summer day, heat will continue building until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon; after that it may start to cool off a little as the sun goes lower in the sky, but it still won't be as cool as it was in the morning.

Take it easy. Similarly, there's no reason to push too hard. If you're feeling wiped out by the heat, take a break. Listen to the birds. Sit by some flowers and watch the pollinators. You may find that you cover less ground, but see just as much.

Do you have a favorite cool spot or a tip for keeping cool? Post a comment.

Want to See More? Use Your Ears.

What is your primary experience of a walk in nature? For most people, it is what you see: the greenery, the scenery, the occasional animal. That's all well and good, but if you really want to experience nature, don't depend just on your eyes. You'll see a lot more if you use other senses to help you know where to look.

In this post, we'll explore sound: how can your ears help you see animals you might otherwise miss as you're just walking down a trail?

Bird songs. Every bird species has its own distinctive set of songs and calls. It can be an overwhelming task to learn them. Start by just distinguishing among the songs. Some are high-pitched, some are lower. Some have lots of notes, some have just a few. Once you can tell them apart, pick a song and try to spot the bird that goes with it. If you make a connection between the visual and the sound, it's much easier to remember which bird makes which noises. As you learn them, you'll be better able to decide which ones are worth stopping for. That little brown bird? Maybe not. An indigo bunting? We'll stop every time.

Bird alarm calls. In addition to their normal song, most birds also have an alarm call. If you hear several birds in a concentrated area making insistent, repeated chirps, stop and check out what they're so upset about. Sometimes, you won't be able to figure it out. But we have seen many hawks this way, as well as owls, large rat snakes, and foxes.

Other animal alarms. Deer will generally freeze quietly when they first see you, giving you no aural cue to their presence. But if they feel more threatened, they'll snort before they run off -- usually giving you time to spot their white tails in flight. Beavers will let you know they're there as they slap the water with their tail before they duck under the water. If you sit quietly, they might come back up.

Rustling in the leaves. Usually it's just a squirrel. And sometimes a tiny insect can make a big rustle. But if you stop and look when you hear something, you can also be rewarded by something larger: snakes, toads, voles, and other ground-based critters.

Try some of these tricks:

Close your eyes. It's hard to get around the fact that vision is our dominant sense. So try this: stop, close your eyes, and just listen for a while. Try to separate out all the sounds. What do you hear? Is there water nearby? A road? An insect buzzing around your head? How many different birds can you hear?

Directional hearing. Many animals have big ears they can point in a certain direction to focus in on a sound. Our ears are a more all-purpose design. But you can mimic the parabolic dish of a dog's ears by cupping your a hand behind each ear and turning your head in the direction you want to focus in on. We do this naturally when we cup a hand behind an ear when we haven't heard someone.

Be quiet. If you are talking loudly with a friend, it will be harder to hear everything around you -- and many animals will run away from you entirely. We have some friends who have agreed to spend the first 10 minutes of every hike together in silence. It's a nice way to center yourself and be present. The rest of your hike will be better for it.

Do you have other ways you use your hearing to experience nature more fully? Experiences with these techniques? Post a comment.

On Starting the Day

How do you start your day? Are you jarred out of sleep by reports from the latest war zone or traffic on the beltway? Does your Blackberry start buzzing before you're even out of bed? Do you slug down a cup of coffee and run out the door before you're late for work? Let us propose another option: start your day in touch with nature. Here are some ideas.

Find a sit spot. For the duration of the time it takes you to eat breakfast, turn off all other media and just sit and observe nature. This might mean looking out on your backyard, or a bird feeder you hang from your apartment window. If you're really concrete-bound, you could listen to a CD of bird songs or get yourself a fish tank -- or take a short walk outside.

Make yourself more time. Are you reading this and thinking, "I just don't have time to sit around in the morning"? Sure, the time is not just going to materialize out of thin air. Try going to bed half an hour earlier so you can wake up half an hour earlier. Make the time.

Turn off the alarm. If you don't have to be anywhere in the morning at any particular time, wake up to the birds singing instead of news or music or loud bleeping noises that make you jump out of your skin. Even if you do have to be somewhere at a particular time, if you get into a good sleep schedule, you may find you don't really need an alarm most of the time.

Don't check in. Does it really make a difference whether you see your email at 7:30 instead of 7:00? Once you start checking in, there may be no going back. Just don't do it. Everything will still be there when you're ready for it. And you may find you're much more ready for it if you give yourself some time first.

Try it for a week. See how you feel. You can always go back to the war-report, skip-breakfast, run-out-the-door method if this doesn't work for you.