Looking Up Again

The last guided hike of my day was at Bagley Nature Center. A professor named Jessica Savage gave us a talk on her phenology project using nature's notebook. If we volunteer for this project we will learn about trees such as paper birch, balsam fir, tamarack and shrubs such as red twigged dogwood. After looking down at mushrooms it felt good to look up again.

We had to guess how many of the birch leaves had turned color or fallen. How many birch fruit are up there? Less than a hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? My binoculars were in the car. A journalist from the Duluth paper had a camera with a super long lens and he wasn't even part of the master naturalist group but we may have convinced him to join. His camera found fruits we couldn't see. He was very funny and I might be in the paper tomorrow unless something more exciting happens. I also might be on the 9 p.m. Fox news or some other news show at 10. I wore so many layers today I can't even remember when I took which layers off. I started off with a winter hat and now I am wearing a sun hat. Oh well, at my age looks don't matter as much.

Bagley nature center is beautiful. That pond looks like a Monet painting. Also the mallards in the water were very distracting. Oh, a bald eagle flew by. There goes a squirrel! Focus on phenology and botany and ignore the squirrels. There is a puffball mushroom!

These are tamarack seed cones; not tamarack pollen cones. Some of the cones had needles growing out of them. A tiny tree was growing in the cone. That reminds me of an apple Offspring #2 ate on Isle Royale. The seeds inside the apple had sprouted. Nature is crazy sometimes.

 

The maples in the shade have less color than the maples in the sun. The color in the leaves acts like sunscreen. If I want to join this volunteer project I would inquire in the spring because it runs May through November. I would look at specific trees here at Bagley, down by the shore on the Lakewalk near the Rose garden, or at Boulder Lake Environmental learning center. Some women in the master naturalist group claim they attain total Zen mood when staring up at their ten trees at Bagley. I enjoy a total Zen mood too. Right now my neck is tired of looking up in the sky. I am going to go home and look straight ahead.