Nature Walk

Today we spent the morning doing a lovely nature walk with one of my naturalist friends, Sue H. We hiked the Steve Easter trail. It was about 2 hours of walking all told and the children are very tired. :-) She helped us identify birdsongs we were hearing and lent us a CD called Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs: Eastern Region which we can listen to in the car. We also saw a bald eagle's nest. During our walk we taught the children to recognize poison ivy, mayapple (many of which had flowers in full bloom), sycamore bark, jack-in-the-pulpit and ferns. We saw lots of fiddlehead ferns unfurling.


Leah and Rebecca also discovered anthills, deer tracks in the mud along the trail, and a small stream. We found a little pond which used to have frog, toad, and salamander eggs in it according to Sue but all had hatched. We didn't see any tadpoles in the water. My children also discovered a few morel mushrooms. They are a delicious edible mushroom (although we didn't tell the children that, not wanting them to begin popping other mushrooms into their mouths) and have a very short season, April 15 to May 15. We also saw a pawpaw tree in bloom -- they have a very unusual brown flower.