First Day of Spring Scavenger Hunt

To be honest, we didn’t do our spring scavenger hunt on the first day of spring. We had a bit of winter weather move in and so we waited a little bit. In Nova Scotia, there are not really a whole lot of signs that spring is here. The sun is definitely warmer when it is out, but the grass is still brown and dead, the tree buds are still pretty firmly closed, and although there are bulbs poking up in the garden, we have snow on the ground.

We went out with a list of things to find:

• buds opening
• melting
• plants coming up
• insects
• blue sky
• something green
• something colourful

Here’s what we found:

Buds still closed up pretty tight.

Melting

Plants coming up

Believe it or not we found an insect – a snow flea

Nice green moss and if you look closely you can see the sporophytes.

We did find some old rosehips and berries, but this lichen was colourful and more interesting.

Gorgeous blue sky!

So there you have the first day (or so) of spring in Nova Scotia.

Happy Spring everyone!

Nature Walk:

Take a walk outside where you live and find some signs of spring. Make a page in your journal for the first day of spring, and draw some of the things you found. Take a bag with you on your walk, and see if you can collect a few small pieces of moss to bring home with you. Use this to make a little moss garden for your nature table.

Add a poem to your nature journal. We dabbed some acrylic paint in the colours of the forest this time of year onto a page and scraped it around using an old credit card.

Print out this poem – The Wood Pool, cut it out and paste it on top.

Moss

Moss is a little plant that often seems overlooked even though it grows almost everywhere. It does not have the showy flowers or great stature of other plants, in fact it is quite different.

Moss is non-vascular, meaning it does not have the means of carrying water and nutrients from one part of the plant to another. Instead moss absorbs water and nutrients from the air through its leaves and stems. It can absorb 20 times it’s weight in water. This is why moss made such great diaper material for the first nations people, and why it was used as bandages when regular bandages were not available in WWI, and it has the added bonus of being anti-bacterial.

Moss also lacks true roots and instead has root-like filaments that attach it to the surface it is growing on, but do not actually conduct water.

Research:

Find the answers to these questions and any others that you may have:

1. Since moss does not produce flowers like most plants, how does it reproduce?
2. Is a cushion of moss one plant or separate plants?

Here is a video that looks at the moss life-cycle under a microscope:

Books:

It was difficult to find picture books on this topic. I looked at several on American forests and most of them barely mentioned moss. But you may enjoy looking through this website which has heaps of wonderful information, paintings, and a little book on moss you can buy if you like: The World of Mosses.

Nature Journal:

Try to draw the moss life-cycle and note any interesting facts you have learned about moss.

Making Maple Syrup

This is the time of year when the sap starts moving in the trees again: nights when the temperature drops below freezing followed by days when the temperature rises above freezing. Many maple syrup farms today use tubing to collect their sap rather than the traditional tap and bucket.

My sister taps a few trees on her property in Ontario and here are some photos from her little operation.

A sugar maple. Other maple trees can be tapped, but the sugar maple takes a little longer to open it’s buds which means a longer run of sap.

Approximately 40 litres of sap need to be collected in order to make 1 litre of maple syrup.

It may take up to 12 or so hours to boil the sap down to the right sugar concentration (about 66%). If it gets boiled too long, it will turn into maple sugar.

Perfect for pancakes!

Outing:

If you live in sugar maple country, visit a sugar farm and see how it’s done. Draw the process in your nature journal and make sure you make some pancakes and maple syrup!

To learn more about the Maple Tree, take a look at this post I wrote earlier: The Maple Tree.