Missouri Master Naturalist Field Trip (2)
/Continuing the blog about the Missouri Master Naturalist (MMN) field trip taken last weekend…
My second rotation was nature journalling. I made a Mindmap on the page of my journal during the intro – and decided to do some leave rubbings first. I had brought a stool for the session (a lesson learned from last time when I stood the whole time…and wore myself out). I quickly discovered that the journal book did not have a hard enough cover to support rubbings. I managed to use my phone to provide a more sold surface for the notebook and did 4 rubbings. I found some leaves with galls and other spots…decided to so some macro photography with my phone. I couldn’t resist documenting what the inside of a spicebush seed looked like.
I walked around taking a few pictures of the surroundings…remembering to look up! All the while I was making notes in the journal about what I was thinking as I took pictures.
Then I noticed a shed with moss and leaves on the top. I took some pictures of it…remembering the concept of intimate landscapes from a book read years ago and decided to so some of that kind of photography.
The black walnuts in various forms of blackness were an obvious subject. I took several different black walnut ‘landscapes.’ The one I liked the most was an empty husk in the moss with a violet and some brown leaves….did a squirrel take the nut? The second favorite was a group of plants that formed an arch…with red fruits. It looked like a good start for a fairy house.
The last rotation was at the stream to look for macro invertebrates. It was my first time in my river boots since we moved to Missouri…they didn’t leak but I need to practice walking in them!
The water was very low and that made it harder to effectively use the seines although we did find a lot of water pennies. The other group found a couple of small hellgrammites…but the big find was right at the end: a dragonfly larva that looked like a leaf! What a great finale for our field trip activities.
