Happy Thanksgiving Break!
For my home phenology spot, I picked my backyard. While I originally wanted to pick a more interesting, complex spot to observe while I was home, I ultimately decided that there was no better spot to pick than my own backyard. After being away from home for a few months and finally returning home and to my backyard, I realized why it is so special to me; it is the place at home where I most often interact with the natural world. Whether it be watching the birds at the birdfeeder with my dad, laying on the hammock on our patio reading a book, watching the chipmunks and squirrels steal the birdseed from our feeder, or playing outside with my dog, my backyard is the place where I enjoy the outdoors most often. After returning home though, I realized that despite the fair amount of time I spend in my backyard, I am not actually all that familiar with the nature that is out there. This meant that through this assignment, I actually discovered the various tree species we have (when before I just saw them all as “trees”), thought about the soil that everything grows on, and just all the little natural details that existed in my own backyard.
Over the break, I spent time in my backyard and explored the ecology and phenology of it mostly by playing with my dog and her doggy cousins outside! Surprisingly, my aunt who was visiting was very helpful in my identification of the various tree species throughout my yard and figuring out the soil we must have based on the different types of plant life present! We identified dogwood, tulip poplar, oak, maple, and andromeda trees throughout the yard, as well as smaller plants including azaleas, bamboo, forsythia, boxwood, English ivy, moss, and pachysandras. Interestingly, my backyard has mostly moss covering the soil rather than grass, which I had always just assumed was because my backyard was sort of tiered, with multiple steep slopes/hills as you moved further through the yard, but after researching it a bit and talking about it with my parents and aunt, I learned that it could also be because of the acidic, compacted, and infertile soil conditions as well as the shade cover of my yard and its poor drainage. This all made sense to me; I had always assumed that the soil in my backyard probably had a high concentration of clay in it because it was so dense and didn’t absorb much water, but it could also have to do with the fact that the soil is so tightly compacted.
Apart from the plant life in my backyard, there is also a lot of wildlife that frequents my yard. Some of the most common animals I see in my yard include chipmunks (who have made tunnels throughout the stone walls of our gardens and underneath our patio), squirrels (who love to eat from our birdfeeder), deer (who eat every new plant we get), foxes, and various birds including blue jays, woodpeckers, house sparrows, robins, cardinals, and even the occasional owl.
This wildlife is mostly similar to that of Vermont and my phenology spot, as I know that deer populations are large throughout Vermont and I see squirrels and chipmunks everywhere I go, but different because most of the birds I see in Vermont, specifically the Burlington area, are seagulls rather than what I consider “common birds” like the sparrows, robins, or woodpeckers I mentioned. As for the plant life, it was interesting to see some of the focal tree species we had studied in class like the maple and oak trees in my own backyard! I also thought about some of the similarities and differences in the soil of my backyard compared to the soil of Vermont, including how both in our field trips and in my own backyard we visited sites with acidic, low fertility soil types, but how unlike my backyard, much of the soil in Vermont was sandy rather than the clay that I assume makes up the soil back home.
While there are so many large differences between my backyard at home and my phenology spot at Oakledge Park back here in Vermont, such as the lack of Lake Champlain or the extraordinary seasonal changes of Vermont with its beautiful fall foliage and frigid, snowy winters, I found a lot more similarities between my backyard and my phenology spot, and it was really fun getting to apply all the knowledge I’ve gained about the natural world back home and just exemplify all the growth I’ve had in this class over the past few months!
