It’s been too long since I reported on one of these. We’re outside most of the time these days, but it’s mostly doing yard and garden work. We do notice the wildflowers: how could we not!
Category Archives: Outdoor Hour
Animal Tracks in the Snow
The temperatures have soared (in the low 50s today) and all the snow is melting. Funny, how all the stuff that fell on the snow but was covered up again is now showing on top: dust, twigs and leaves, tiny seeds… whatever snow is left now is no longer purely white. But last week, before …
Shapes of Snow
: peaked egg white snow : : closer up : : pocked snow (and Amie’s boot print) : : waves of snow : : closer up : : packed snow : : drifted snow : : crusts of snow :
Tree Drawing: Winter Wednesday and Observational Drawing (Gone Awry)
We returned to the Winter Wednesday tree challenge yesterday (read our first entry here), which is about tree silhouettes. Amie decided to draw the large pine trees in our neighbor’s yard (all the trees in our own yard are too close to see in their entirety from the window). (The picture below was taken a …
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More Squirrel Shenanigans – and the OWLS!
To follow up on yesterday’s Outdoor Hour Challenge on Squirrels, here are some of today’s nature pictures. Squirrels, of course. Even though I dug out the snow around the bird feeder, they are still attempting to get up onto the baffle. The prickly bush approach must have been too painful, and it wasn’t working anyway: …
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Winter Wednesday: Trees and Their Bark
This challenge is really called “Tree Silhouettes,” but as the trees on our property and in our neighborhood are so crowded together, most of them haven’t grown into the typical shapes they would have had, had they been in an open space where they didn’t have to vie for sunlight with others. Except for the …
Outdoor Hour Challenge #45: Squirrels
Outdoor Hour Challenge #45 is Squirrels. We have plenty of them, three at least, all Eastern Gray Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis). They come out when the sun is bright on the snow. Comstock writes charmingly about squirrels, and she quotes from Thoreau, which I find always makes for captivating reading. They both seem to describe exactly …
Winter Wednesday: Snow
The theme of last Winter Wednesday was snow and well, no shortage of snow around here: a whole lot fell last night and more is on the way. I requested the book, Discover Nature in Winter, from the interlibrary loan, but it hasn’t arrived yet. But Barb mentioned the following experiment: melt and filter different …
Outdoor Hour Challenge #2: Using Our Words
Bad weather and illness delayed our second Outdoor Hour challenge – we did Challenge #1 over a month ago and it’s supposed to be a weekly challenge! But yesterday we were – and we still are (knock on wood) – healthy, and the temperature deigned to rise above freezing (though only barely), and the sun …
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Two Nature Experiments
We had two experiments going on here yesterday and part of today. First: dunking cones When we found this cone on our Outdoor Hour walk last week, we identified it as a Norway Spruce cone. It was wet and cold when we brought it in, and we (I) had observed that the scales were slowly …