Nature study: mammals

I originally wrote this in September of 2010! And apparently it just sat there as a draft until now. I went looking for it when I wrote yesterday, and decided to publish it now. Better late than never.

With Ambleside Online's schedule, we're focusing on mammals in nature study right now. Our "study" is really mostly just spending lots of time outside and enjoying it. Although, we are stopping to observe and record every week now. So far, here's what we've done:

Week 1: Still getting used to school schedule and had a few days of sickness. No formal nature study.

Week 2: We had one evening just talking about what mammals are, and then painting our favorites (and sticking stickers of them, since Great-Grandma sent such wonderful ones!).

Our favorite mammals

Standing up on the right-hand side: Asya's work; also standing: Jaan's whale; lying down below Asya's: my kitty; next to it: Raia's pretty frame for cat stickers. (Oh, Jaan would want you to know that favorites are not whales. He just thought that he couldn't draw a cat, and he was fascinated by the whale in the book we were flipping through. So, he painted a whale and stuck cats on over it, too.)

Artist at work

This just makes me laugh. Long after the rest of us were done, Raia was still dashing off paintings, and then throwing them over her shoulder as she finished.

That was our first mammal lesson. Next I started thinking about what other mammals we have around here. I thought it would be nice to be able to observe a hedgehog. (Sadly, ours didn't make it through last winter's hibernation. )

Week 3: Well, we went out to our dacha, and the first night I almost stumbled over a hedgehog on my way to the outhouse. Will and I locked it up in the empty chicken coop for the rest of the night. Next day....

Foot prints

Moving the hedgehog on to the paper

The meeting of the mammals

Note the stain on the table

Asya inspects the hedgehog

Dressed for hedgehog study

Week 4: We didn't do much, except enjoy being outside. One evening I did give Jaan and Raia assignments. Jaan was to record "The Things Which My Pet Cat Does" (from The Handbook of Nature Study) and I want to transcribe what he came up with. Raia's job was to design a cover page for the mammal section in our notebook, but she got distracted with just drawing. I'll sure we'll come back around to that again.

Week 5: Rainy, grey weather outside made for a great opportunity to "travel" and learn about an exotic mammal. We watched a great documentary about whales.

Ideas:
make mammal cover page for nature notebook
read beaver book
watch skunk documentary again?
muskrat (talk about it, find old photos, draw, or even go back to Zaporozhye and look for them again)
bats

Sage!

Last year Will bought me sage seeds from a babushka at the market. I planted them, and they came up beautifully: thick, green, fuzzy little plants.

Last year

Then, this year they came back, MASSIVE! Could it really be sage?

This year!

The flowers

The plants are pretty, but I was disappointed not to have sage for cooking. I looked all through our books, and searched the internet, and still couldn't figure out what my flowers were. Then, I wrote to the man who owns this beautiful website, and he identified it right away: clary sage!

Quick question

Does anyone know what this plant is? It's the main one that changes colors here in the fall, and it's spectacular! It's a large bush or small tree, which blooms with a kind of fluffy stuff earlier in the year. The leaves have a strong spicy smell.  Can anyone help me identify it?

Viper!

We had a scary nature lessons this morning. First I'll backtrack to say that just last week a dedushka scared our children with stories of dangerous snakes in the grass. After that, I went and looked up venomous snakes for this area. So, that was last week. Now jump up to today.

This morning we went swimming. The water has turned to its summer color of GREEN, not just green, but opaque, pea-soup GREEN. We were all in the water near the shore, when a snake head popped up right near us. I thought it looked like what I had just recently researched, so right away I told Jaan not to grab it. It swam around us, disappearing and reappearing in the green water.  Now, I like snakes, but I found that rather disconcerting.  It tried to hide up against a piece of concrete at the water's edge, but every time a wave washed away we got a great, clear view of it.  I wish I had taken the camera this morning!

When we got home, and everyone settled in for naps, I looked up the snake links again.  Sure enough, our snake was a European viper or adder/гадюка!  I got Jaan and Raia back out of bed to come look at the photos.  They were particularly impressed with the one to the right here.  They promised to stay away from anything that looks like that.  Although, Jaan's first question afterwards was, "But I can catch any other snake, can't I?"



(The photos are from the article that I linked to above.)

A peaceful day

Remember our jellyfish last year?  We went swimming this morning, and there were hundreds of them!  They seemed to stay all in one area, out where the water was almost to my shoulders.  Even the very biggest ones are only about the size of an American quarter; they're little.  Asya was especially enthralled with this new kind of "baby."  When it was time to leave, I dragged her out of the water, with her protesting and trying to tell every single jellyfish goodbye.  Unfortunately, it looks like the whole web site on them that I read and linked to before is not working, but there's a Wikipedia article.

I was sorry I didn't take the camera this morning.  Last year I took our children down to the beach quite often, almost every day once it got really hot.  This year we're spending more time at our dacha than the beach, but I still wanted to get in a good bit of swimming.  I was just a little nervous about how to do it, now that I have three active little ones to keep up with.  I mean, I had three last year, but Asya wasn't very mobile, and Jaan and Raia were very cautious about the water.  All that has changed now!  However, this year is easier than ever.  Two sweet girls from church have started going with me.  They are sisters, 14 and 10 years old, who live right near us, and are ready whenever I call.  It's almost unreal how easy it is with them helping me.  This morning I spent most of my time just sitting on the blanket, watching everyone play happily, or swimming with one child at a time.  Hopefully we'll make this a Monday tradition.

Everyone is napping now, and then we're headed out to our dacha for the rest of the week.

Beautiful butterfly!

Raia and I stalked and photographed this beautiful butterfly together.  We had never seen one like it before!  It's a Southern Festoon.

(And here are photos of another recent find.)

Horse chestnut ~ Конский каштан

The horse chestnuts are in full bloom here. The main street and many other areas are planted with them. Jaan and Raia say that the individual flower spikes look like Christmas trees, but we decided that the overall effect of the trees in bloom is like birthday cakes, with the flowers as candles.

We have had a great time observing the flowers, drawing them, and even conducting a little experiment with them. Actually, we've been watching them since the very beginning of spring. Their early buds are some of the most interesting around here: huge and sticky.  And in the fall we had a wonderful time collecting and playing with huge seeds from the same trees.  Here are some photos of what they look like now:

(See the beetle?)

Our notebook pages:
You can see them separately here.

And our experiment:
The flowers change colors!  We had noticed that some have yellow dots on the petals, and some have a bright pink-red.  We took a photo of a yellow one and tied a string around it to mark it.  The next day it was red!  (I know it doesn't show well in the photo; our particular flowers was folded down a little.  The colors shows on the others near it, though.)

And see the bright orange pollen on our fingers in the close-up photos?  That has sparked an interest in pollination and flower parts.  Jaan especially has been going around, inspecting the different kinds of pollen in various flowers and looking for their stamens and pistils.  On my part, I've been trying to learn the names of all those parts in Russian.  Sigh.  My brain moves slowly these days!

SPRING dacha days

After being away from our dacha for about a month (!), we've had two wonderful days there recently.

On April 2 we planted

• mustard greens (I hope Will likes them as much as he says!  We have a whole row.)
  
• spinach (So excited to find that here!)
  
• marigolds
• some old salvia seeds (Not too much hope of seeing any results there.)
• baby lupine plants, along with some old lupine seeds
• the poor lavender plants that have been wanting to go into the ground for so long
• peonies!
• and peas for the children.

The greens that we had planted under a window frame so long ago were up and looking great, but none of the little bottle "greenhouses" were successful.

Yesterday we planted

• morning glories
  
• two kinds of petunias (Jaan)
  
• calendula (Raia)
  

And we did lots of exploring, observing, and wallowing in dirt.  We had also lost a tree , so Will cut it up.  The most amazing part was the flowers!  When we got there in the morning, I could tell that we would have a few blooms soon.  I went around and took pictures of a fat daffodil bud and some on the apricot tree.  They looked like they would be blooming the soonest.  And by the time we left in the evening, they were open!

And of course, a day outside wouldn't be complete without a nature discovery.  After lunch, Will put the girls down for naps, and I settled down to read outside.  Jaan was supposed to just be quiet, so he was sitting up in the top of a tree.  We've been curious about the small holes in the ground that we've been seeing around here lately.  There were several right near me, and I saw movement in them.  I waited, and soon a beetle poked its head out of the one nearest to me  As soon as I moved, he hid again.  I called Jaan over, and we set the camera up, aimed at the hole.  When the beetle started to come out again, we got this photo:

We also watched one of these beetles cut off a dandelion leaf and drag it home.  And then we dug one up to show the girls when they woke up.  Asya was especially thrilled to have a new "baby" to play with.

Last night Will and I figured out what the beetles are: Кравчик-головач (Lethrus apterus). Unfortuntely, they're a vineyard pest.  Yes, they're concentrated around where our grapes grow.  I don't think they'll be a problem, though.  We have enough grape vines to share.  We started out thinking that maybe our beetle was a kind of scarab beetle, but the body shape wasn't quite right.  And why would it have been carrying leaves?  So, we kept searching and found this.  The article I linked to is quite interesting.  (Sorry, it's in Russian, though.)  I'm planning to read it to Jaan and Raia.

I put the rest of the photos from yesterday in a Facebook album.  (You should be able to view them, even without a Facebook account.)

Second spring flowers :-)

Raia chose the next flowers for us to study, and they're not even any that I had on my short list of what we've seen so far.  (That is, lesser celandine, violets, the little yellow stars and dandelions.) We had a wonderful day at our dacha yesterday, and she discovered them there.  Our new flower is very tiny, blue, and it's called Veronica, at least in Russian and the scientific name.  I think Raia's is probably Veronica persica (Bird's-eye), but I'm not entirely sure. I wish you could have seen Raia's face when we found "her flower" online.  These flowers are so tiny and low-growing, that you probably wouldn't even notice them, unless you bent down and looked closely.  I was really impressed with how Raia carefully dug up a few small plants and carried them home, all by herself.  I didn't even suggest it!  She and I planted them in a pot this morning.  We can't draw the flowers right now, because they all closed up from the stress of being moved, but it looks like they'll be back soon.  I also want to have Jaan measure one when they open up, just because they are so incredibly tiny.  So, I'll probably come back later to add our drawings and measurements and any other observations here.

The photo of Raia is actually her picking violets a few days ago, and the flower picture is from Wikipedia.

First butterfly!

We saw our first butterfly of the year today! Asya was especially enthralled, because this is the first butterfly that she would remember seeing. All little creatures are "baby" ("ляля") to her, so this was "баба ляля."

First spring flowers!

We're finally seeing some flowers around here! Lesser celandine (Чистяк весенний) was the first to start blooming.  I loved the literary references in the Wikipedia article.  C. S. Lewis mentioned this plant, and Wordworth loved it.  Here's part of a poem that he wrote about it:

There's a flower that shall be mine,
'Tis the little Celandine. . . .

Ere a leaf is on a bush,
In the time before the Thrush
Has a thought about its nest,
Thou wild come with half a call,
Spreading out thy glossy breast
Like a careless Prodigal;
Telling tales about the sun,
When we've little warmth, or none.

. . . Spring is coming, Thou art come!

Here the lesser celandine actually started blooming a few weeks ago, at least in the places where there are hot water pipes under the ground.  I really wanted to get closer to take some photos and look at it, but the babushki are so protective of that area.  Some of the celandine has taken off by itself outside the flower bed, and I was thinking of trying to sneak one of those wild plants away.  Then Will solved my problem by buying me a beautiful bunch of it at the market.

So, today we studied the plant that we have.  We looked at its roots. . .

trimmed off the old blooms and potted it,

did some research in our books,

and, of course, drew it:

We've also seen a few more flowers!  Soon there will be too many to keep track of, but so far, it's easy.  The first was this celandine.  Then yesterday we found violets and a tiny, yellow, start-shaped wildflower.  I was so excited!  I especially love violets.  And today we saw the first few dandelion blooms.  Can anyone help us with identifying the yellow star flowers below?  That's a little bulb root, if you can't see it well.

Owl pellets

Even before our big night-owl adventure, we dissected the owl pellets that we had found that first time out. It wasn't as gross as it sounds. (If you want gross, go to this video that we watched just before we got started.)





One of the tiny skulls that they found
This was so funny! The "great scientist" kept dropping his magnifying glass to count on his fingers.

"THIS is a backbone."

There were about two voles (полёвки) in each owl pellet. I kept calling them mice, but Will said that their faces were too short, and of course, he was right. He knows about these kinds of things. We just didn't know what they were, if not mice. Once our little scientists went down for their nap, I started looking on the internet. This chart looks exactly like what our owl had been eating. That helped me to identify the kind of owl, too. Apparently Short-eared owls eat lots of voles. After nap time, Jaan and Raia enjoyed matching the bones that they had found with the chart and then turning to a human anatomy lesson, too.

Jaan and Raia are still so excited about owls! Raia wanted to take the bones to Sunday school the next day to show their teacher. And today we had a guest come over. They couldn't even wait until she was done with tea; they brought bones and the leftover pellets to the table to show her.

Next post on this topic: Owl art. . . .