Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost
fall, photography The autumnal equinox has come and gone. The garden is done growing (I wish the grass would do the same), the fall colors are starting to come out, and most of the week has been dark and rainy. That's fall, and I love it. This is one of the best times to go hiking. Spring is good, too—when nature is twitterpated and busy, and signs of life can be heard and seen throughout the forest—but fall, with its rich colors and warming scents, is also inviting. The insects are busier in the fall, and there is more nature to collect, like nuts and seeds and fallen leaves.
Having just ditched the sniffles of a cold, and seeing the sky brighten between showers, we took the risk of getting wet and set out for the field near our house, collecting "basket" in hand. Calvin calls the open nature area there the deer field because we find so much of them there—tracks, scat, and bedded areas. It's really just an undeveloped part of our subdivision, and with the housing market being what it is right now I'm hoping it stays that way. Having the completely uncultivated area just a neighborhood block away—open field for hiking, forest for looking, boggy areas for listening—has really been a treat.
This trip wasn't as rewarding as most. With all the rain and with the grass still being high we found only two deer tracks today. But we counted a multitude of hues in the flora, and discovered other signs of fauna in the several obliterated nut shells we found along the path. Someone found a bounty. The catbird was a noisy companion on this trip. Calvin remembers seeing her on our paved footpath this past spring, but we can't recall ever noticing her before this year. I wonder if she is new to our area, or if we are just paying closer attention than in the past. There are many things that have previously escaped our notice and have only recently become known to us. That is the beauty of discovery.
In the end we had to cut our hike short upon the arrival of the showers that had been threatening all day. We fled the deep meadow, jumping over the puddles we had gingerly stepped around on our way in, forgetting to notice the deepening of the colors on our way out, and jogging the final block to the cozy, dry refuge of our own home. Then on to the next experience, good old kitchen science and some demonstrations of matter.
nature, photography A day of pleasantly warm sunshine to break up days of chilly fall rain. Although I've always thought of September as being the month to usher in fall, this is the first in a long line of years that I remember it being quite so chilly and actually fall-like. This isn't really a bad thing, although since the new furnace doesn't go in until tomorrow there were a few rather chilly nights in the house last week when temperatures outside dipped below forty degrees. Brrr.
Today I was faced with the bare fact that a discussion of evolution must bring with it a discussion of mating. Years of conventional thinking causes a spark of indecency when this lesson comes to mind, and yet I see nothing unnatural in the progression towards that topic. For now, though, I am going with the time tested tradition of providing information on an as needed basis. Steve Jenkins, in his book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, says simply that "Many living things reproduce sexually. This means that there is a father and a mother and that each baby has a mixture of the qualities of the parents." For now this has answered our needs and sparked no further questions.
We re-watched BBC's Walking with Monsters, penciled in a timeline of life on earth, and read a few books on the subject, most notably the above noted. We also went to lunch with family, shopped for winter clothes, groceries, and craft items, went on a nature walk, practiced the piano, tried out some map scaling worksheets, took notice of the warm sunshine, and straightened the house for the sake of the people who are coming tomorrow to put in the new furnace. October is a lot closer than I keep thinking.
Evolution, Moose, fall, photography, piano Cormorants in the pond
Peeking duck
Fishing Great Blue Heron (just watch him get that fish!)
The duck family outing (but how will they reach the ticket window???)
Psssst... (cinereous vultures or lovebirds?)
Riding the train, engineer style
Check out those two new crazy engineers...
And this is why we came...to take Jon through Dinosauria
T. rex photo bomb
Zoo, photography, wildlife 
The last of the county's summer kids programs was this morning. Since they have been like a compass around which we have organized our weeks I'm saddened to see them end, and it reminds me that, for one, I need to get Calvin signed up for fall story times at the library, and two, it's time to start searching for the area homeschool groups. But for one last time today we gathered with a county parks guide and other moms and kids, several of whom we've been seeing weekly there all summer, for an hour of nature exploration.
I know I wrote about the mom at one of the earlier outtings in the forest who was deathly afraid of bugs. That was annoying for sure, but not surprising like the park guide leading the dig in the dirt class today who was afraid to touch a worm. Calvin and a couple of other kids helped her with that, while many others were encouraged in their own squeamishness.
The display of squeamishness was possibly the most interesting thing that happened in this event, which turned out to be a disappointing finale for the summer program. We made mud, we made wet sand, we went out to dig up worms for observation, and very quickly the class devolved into a building of canals in the sandy area around the park and filling them with water gushing from the hose. It was fun, it just didn't have the same depth that the other Thursday classes had.
But after the class event Calvin threw our lunches in the camera pack and went for our own exploration of dirt on a hike through the woods. It's been much cooler lately—a welcome break—and also quite moist. The upside was an influx in really fun fungus, the downside was an influx in really not fun mosquitoes.
The majority of the fungi we found I think would belong to the genus Amanita. They go by the common name of blushers, which seems apt; many of those we saw were in the stance of young lovers caught in a passionate embrace. Pretty little mushrooms. I think that was my favorite part of the hike.
Calvin definitely enjoyed the mushrooms, but his favorite part might have been conquering the climbing wall at the playground. A real personal triumph, that. And between moments of cringing and fighting to keep my hands from shooting up grab him, I was excited for him.
Nature Thursdays, milestones, nature, photography 