Tree tales, muted colors, birds, and musings

“New Year’s” never has been that meaningful to me, coming as it does in the middle of the year’s school activity. It would seem more intuitively meaningful if it happened in the spring. But this year’s ending finds me noting some new things sprouting up even in the bleak midwinter.

For instance, we visited a new nature preserve today. It was in Elmira, and there was a nice nature center/museum with some animals and exhibits as well as 10 miles of trails. It’s been a comparatively mild December with no snow to speak of yet, and though our walk was soggy, we looked hard for things with color and found some.

In addition to moss, the russet leaves still clinging to the branches, the evergreens, and the lichens added different shades of subtle color. And the ice formed delicate leaf rubbings in many places along the way.

To me, this next photo is the coolest of all. This is an elm tree trunk, but look at the patterns carved into it by the organisms! Don’t they remind you of the Nazca Lines? I’m leaving the image large so the detail really shows.

Other tree trunk messages included this woodpecker tree with dried sap trickling from all the holes — and a nut jammed into one of them. A nuthatch’s stashed dinner?

And the other discovery was this log. Surely a pileated woodpecker has been here. Look at that pile of wood chips!

We counted a dozen red-tails in the treetops on our way to the center, but on our actual walk the only birds we saw were tiny, perfectly camouflaged, and peeping as they spiraled up the bark. We determined later that they were brown creepers. My oldest found a bird’s nest fallen into the trail and took it into the center when we got back. The naturalist worked with her to identify it and told us about eBird, a new-to-us resource we look forward to exploring.

Both daughters are turning into quite the accomplished birders, and for Christmas my oldest received this bird book after wearing out the library copy in renewals. She’s already ingested large sections of it. My youngest is getting interested in drawing birds, and we went over the 5 elements of shape in Drawing for Children the other day to hone her eye. She loved that and has started churning out bird art.

(I have always felt overwhelmed by the idea of working systematically through Drawing with Children, but she certainly responded. Maybe Mom should get her act together and give it a try.)

It felt good to get outdoors, even though the sun went under by the time we were done. There’s always something to see, and now we have a place we can look forward to investigating more in the future. I really enjoyed the exhibits at the center, especially one that explained the five layers of the forest (canopy, understory, shrub, herb, and litter), and the different stages of a hickory/oak forest. (Anyone know of any titles to study these subjects further?) So we’re ending 2011 with a seed of exploration planted for 2012.