Baby owls

Another beautiful, sunny morning promising soft, enjoyable afternoon temps today. Last week we went on an afternoon hike, Jon enjoying a rare respite from work in the fresh air, to go see the baby owls in Eberwhite Woods. In a nature loving, family oriented town like Ann Arbor, it didn't take long for people to find, and then news to spread about, the family of Great Horned Owls nesting in the wood adjacent to a local elementary school. With tree leaves not out yet, the nest and its growing babies have been visible, easy to find even, and the woods has seen more frequent traffic than probably any other time in its history. On our own first pilgrimage a week ago we found the owls easily, and enjoyed watching the babies peer at us intently over the side of the nest before stretching their wings and toddling around in it. 

The wonderful thing about homeschooling is flexibility. When I planning the year out, slaving over a computer calendar poolside in Stratford last summer, I commuted our science book studies in favor of hiking time for most of the month of May. Then, when good weather arrived early, and the allure of owls was too great to ignore, I swapped some April weeks for May weeks in order to free up some time to breath in teh warming air, soak up the brightening sun, and strike out into the woods in serach of owls. So that first pilgrimage was followed by several others as we watched the owls stretch and toddle with more alacrity until the first one fell out and proceded to grow and develop on the ground. 

We learned a lot from our almost daily hikes in the past week. We looked up Great Horned Owls and learned about their development—their growth, their instincts, their learned behaviors—and we learned about the goodness, or protectiveness, of the people around us. the entire experience has been incredibly sweet.

November Nature

Golden hues, the smell of crispy leaves, the rustling of digging squirrels. These are some of the things that define fall for me. That and football games, apple pie, pumpkin everything, and brisk nights, not to mention a new focus on school and studies. We combined some of the above today by taking our science study out into the field to merge it with the signs of fall.

There are certain things that we study with lesson specificity, others, though, we learn more through rhetoric and reality. To me, arithmetic is learned in sprints, while reading and writing is a marathon study—slow, steady, and more a way of living than a way of studying. Science can be either. We'll learn the periodic table in a sprint, but lessons like evolution and seasons are better trained for like an ultra-marathon. These are a fundamental way of thinking about, speaking about, and seeing the world around us.

So we learn them by doing exactly that. A book can tell us about different species, it can even define for us how their aspects evolved, but only field work and discussion can give a person a feel for what those things mean and the ability to problem solve with that understanding on their own. In the woods today we talked about the adaptations species in our area have for enduring the deprivation of the winter months. We visited about seeing these adaptations at work, especially in the trees. And we chatted about the migrating location of the sun in our sky and the aspects of our orbit that define that movement.

We are several years into studying these concepts, and our introduction to them came from the early chapters of BFSU and from reading and discussions at home, but we build on that introductory learning by living the concepts and seeing them in the living things around them. This isn't homeschooling, per se. It's life schooling, or learning through life itself. This is the way of thinking, the way of being, that we strive for every day.

 

Fall nature

I don't do well with the cold. Although I truly love all four seasons and am thankful to live in a state that provides a good sampling of each, I prefer to spend the coldest days snuggled under a blanket with a good book and a hot toddy. Until those days arrive, though, we try to get as much outdoor time as possible, hiking in the brisk weather before its frigid sister wind arrives. 

So when today dawned bright and warm, and delightful 60 degrees and sunny, we decided to take school to the park: our favorite local birding park. We hiked the trails said hi to some of our favorite winter bird species, and enjoyed the first dawning of brilliant fall colors. 

[a very splendorous place unnamed]

We are just back from our (almost) annual summer trip to [a park that shall go unnamed]. Almost, because we were frightened off last year by the promise of grizzly weather, and unnamed because in the five years since we started camping there it has become so popular that it is now nearly impossible to book sites without babysitting the bookings on the freezing January midnights when they become available for reservation. We may actually have to try that this year.

It is because of this popularity that we found ourselves camping in what I consider to be the earlier—the iffier, the chillier—side of the summer. But, while we did spend a full 36 hours huddled against high winds whipping bitingly out of the north, the majority of our trip was sunny and completely enjoyable. There's a part of me that lives for sweaty summer days, but the low-seventies were perfectly pleasant with the sun, and the icy early-summer water didn't deter the boys from swimming. Not much, at least.

There was hiking—almost mosquito free thanks to a dry summer and chilly weather. There were ice cream afternoons in town, fried perch at our favorite hole-in-the-wall bar, and putt putt on our way out of town. There were fires, and s'mores, and whittling, and doing dishes with the good old camping 2-pan system. There was snuggling up together in the tent to read at night, the lantern swaying as we were buffeted by an insistent wind. There was sand construction, and rock hunting and skipping. There were pancakes on the camp stove, popcorn over the fire, and a nip of Scotch under the stars after lights went out in the tent. 

And on our very last morning, as we enjoyed a final coffee by the lake, Calvin playing with a new friend soon to be left behind, we saw an eagle tracing overlapping circles in the air, gracing our final moments with a natural splendor. 

Until next year, [very splendorous place that shall go unnamed].

Birding (plus) log, May 2016

May has come and gone, and with it the bulk of bird migrations. Most of our summer residents are settling in for their summer routines. The orioles are just about done using our feeders, the robin is back under our deck, and we've gained a song sparrow amongst our yard residents.

This year's migration month (or two) was an odd one. We had an early warming trend followed by the abrupt return of cold, and through it all a dearth of rain. The migration was slow and we never had birds arriving in the large masses that hobbyists call "bird falls". Instead they trickled in and we had to look harder and farther to find them. 

This is only the second year that Calvin and I Have followed the migration. We saw several birds that were completely new to us (a hobbyist would refer to these as life birds), and we experienced a welcoming into the local bird culture through the county Audubon Society (we attended their guided hikes and assisted with their annual spring migration count), and through strangers that became less strange and less aloof the more we saw them on regular trails throughout the month. It became normal to stop and visit with people whose names we did not know, but whose routes and methods had become familiar to us, like the gentleman with the enormous camera I coveted, the husband and wife team that aggressively shushed birds from the brush, and the young man who hiked every afternoon following school.

This new-found camaraderie was warm and welcoming and provided us with the education and tools to find some of the birds that were new to us, but it was also a competitive and overwhelming at times. For every then helpful birders there was at least one who was jealous and guarded, not willing to share sighting location for fear someone would rival their observation numbers. And then there was the day that, on our usual early morning science hike, we ran into a birder we'd seen regularly who pointed out a pair of Common Nighthawks resting on a tree out in the open, a rare easy sighting. We enjoyed them and went on our merry way. When we left the small park an hour later the usually quiet parking lot was so full we could barely move. He has posted the sighting on a group list and within the hour tens of rabid birders had swarmed the park to see the hawks. We were not unhappy to be leaving at that point.

And now the season has slowed to a crawl. The migrators are gone, and with the leaves out the birds are harder to see, but we plan to continue our birding through all seasons for the first time this year. 

Eastern Phoebe (summer resident)

Yellow-throated Vireo (summer resident)

Cooper's Hawk (resident)

Eastern Kingbird (summer resident)

Yellow Warbler (summer resident)

Painted Turtle

Blackburnian Warbler (migrator)

Blue-headed Vireo (migrator)

Magnolia Warbler (migrator)

Philadelphia Vireo (migrator)

Green Frog

Muskrat

Palm Warbler (migrator)

Cerulean Warbler (summer resident)

Blue-winged Warbler (summer resident)

Northern Parula (migrator)

Pine Warbler (migrator)

Carolina Wren (resident)

Northern Mockingbird (my first look, and not a great picture except for the doofy robin photobomb)

Chestnut-sided Warbler (migrator and sometimes summer resident)

Common Nighthawk (summer resident)

Eastern Wood-Pewee (summer resident)

Swainson's Thrush (migrator)

Ruby-throated Hummingbird (summer resident)

Warbling Vireo (summer resident)

Canada Goose (ubiquitous resident)

Wood Thrush (summer resident)

Turkey Vulture (ubiquitous resident)