I’m a bit behind on these weekly blogs- tomorrow we head into the woods for week 6 and this post is about week 4. As I write this, on election day, we’ve past the mid-point of fall and on cue the weather has turned chilly and wet. The days are markedly shorter and these photos from just two weeks ago look like another season.
But as I recall, it was a little chilly that morning, so we decided to go far a walk in the woods and see some new areas before sitting down for the day’s field science lesson. Up we went, to one of our best established forest plots, to see what the kids could notice.
Soon they found the tree tags, carefully nailed to each tree in the 60ft x 60ft plot. These trees were measured years ago, and soon this group will get to update measurements on this plot.
They found the Throne (a cut tree that makes a nice chair) and it was amusing to see this simple chair was as exciting to this group as it had been years ago to the last BCEs.
As we wandered at the higher elevations we came upon an old-growth tree that was cut many years ago. It is filled with life and breaking down in fascinating patterns.
We even noticed you could see the growth rings on a branch that was delaminating- which was a great visual for the discussion we’d had earlier at the forest plot about how a tree adds wood year by year.
The mushrooms were just starting to emerge.
After our forest walk, we sat down to look at our water quality data and make sure everyone’s table contained all the data we had collected the week before. We discussed what was expected and surprising about the results. I’m looking forward to collecting the same data again sometime in the winter to see if anything changes.
Next was a discussion about watersheds. Ru had asked where Bear Creek comes from while we were exploring it, and I also wondered where: does it go?
We looked at the maps, I asked them questions and we learned about levels of watersheds. If you’re reading this on a computer, there’s a fascinating website called River Runner that lets you follow a drop of water anywhere in the US as it flows to the ocean. Check it out!
Next up was a research forest maintenance task- upgrading the mounts for the HOBO temperature dataloggers in the stream, pond, and Bear Creek. I love that this task called for knife and bushcraft skills- the kids each found a stick and carved a stake.
The Amanita muscaria were just starting to show their little round heads around camp.
The HOBO in the pond is named Balrog and was algae-covered and barely still attached to the rock that holds it underwater. Definitely time for a system upgrade!
The kids worked together to clean Balrog up, and attached it to an aluminum ‘pumpkin’ (metal scrap from Ben’s work) with a thin paracord.
We pounded a stake into the ground on the edge of the pond and carefully lowered the logger so that it rested 12″ below the surface, just like before.
There was a moment of celebration for our upgraded temperature monitoring setup!
Next we did the same thing for Treebeard, the logger that lives up in the steam above main camp. All our actions were recorded in the field notebook, and it was time for lunch.
After lunch, I got out the knot bag, and we tried our hand at a couple of basic knots: square knots and half-hitches.
Soon everyone had two good square knots on their strings making a loop… that looks like a smile!
Half-hitches, the kids helped me learn, is easier to teach when you stand by a tree.
While we stood there something very unusual happened- a deer walked up! Where I live in the south hills of Eugene, having a deer walk up and stand a few feet from you is not at all surprising. But out at the Bear Creek Wilderness the deer are much more wild, and I’ve only seen them from a distance. Maybe this was an urban deer, unconcerned about running into a group of humans in the forest?
I told them the old adage- one half hitch will hold nothing, two half hitches will hold a horse, and three half hitches will hold the devil. Well, apparently these kids are planning to hold something more powerful than the devil (maybe a Balrog?) because they just kept half-hitching away!
Not content to stop when the string ran out, these overachievers just kept going!
We only had a short time for fort building after the busy day, but their structure is coming along.
