NR 1010+1020 Phenology – cate bilbe

Hello from a rainy Saturday morning here at Centennial Woods and the last blog post for this project! My friend Rayna and I set out on our walk at about 11:30am in the light rain and about 53 degree temp. It has been so lovely watching my site change over the past year and see how it survived the winter and is now in bloom.

We spotted this lil slug on our way through Centennial!

The main feature of my site is the stream, and it has gone through many periods of change. When I first visited, it was a slow trickle that was surrounded by so much greenery. I watched it freeze over during the winter, and now it’s back and moving fast but with a good amount of muddy erosion on the sides of it. You can also see in the above photo that the bush is in bloom! It is a stark contrast from the sticks it was a few months ago.

I am always able to find my spot based off this tree that makes the boardwalk shift! It is not a hard spot to find but I think of this tree as a landmark of my spot. I also always look for the bend in the stream and all the rocks that jut out of it. Culture and nature intertwine here when people visit. Nature means something different to everyone and people feel all different things when they stand out here. I do consider myself part of my place. My NR1060 class talked a lot about how we are a part of nature this semester, and it has realigned my thinking. I am just another living thing among so many others at my site, so I like to think I am a part of it.

Rayna guesstimating the water temp (we think about 45 degrees F)

It has been such a joy to watch my spot grow and change the past nine months. I am thinking back and reflecting on how much I have learned since I first laid eyes on my spot and I feel so much more knowledgable on how to spot changes. Rayna and I had such a peaceful walk in the rain today and it was the perfect send off to our spots.

Here is one last amazing sketch of my spot.

Hello from the end of the City Nature iNaturalist BioBlitz Challenge! During the last few days, I have explored mostly in and around the UVM campus. I noted many species around Redstone campus, and on Sunday some members of my lab group went on a walk to Redstone quarry which is where I did the majority of my inputs! My experience using iNaturalist was good! It was nice to have a bit of prior experience using the app in NR1010 so it was very intuitive using it this time around. I had about fifteen observations with a total of eight species! My favorite things I spotted were different species of birds because it is so nice to see them after a long winter.

Above is a photo of my lab group on a Sunday walk!

Something that I found particularly interesting about incoming reports from other cities was that almost all of the US cities that were in the top ten participating cities were in Texas. I also found it interesting that these reports were coming from cities you don’t think of as super outdoories, like San Antonio and Dallas. I love how this challenge brought the whole world together around nature!

Phenology walk!

On the snowy, snowy day of Sunday, March 30th, I set out with a small group of friends to do the Phenology walk. Saturday had brought lots of snow so we were trudging through a good few inches of it. We set out around 10:00am, and it was cloudy and vaguely raining.

Since we went early on in the season, we really didn’t see lots of signs of spring in any of the trees. Only one tree had a few buds breaking, there were no new leaves growing, no flowers, and no pollen. All of the trees were basically in the same phenophase, except for the Red Maple #280, which had a good amount of breaking leaf buds.

As someone who has never really experienced a true transition from a real Winter to Spring, something I Iearned from the NPN’s website was that just because there is an early start to the spring doesn’t mean everything will follow just as quickly.

I tried to attach pictures of the trees we saw, but my computer was not letting me. I will keep trying but for photos of what the trees looked like on this day, you can check out my friend Rayna’s blog here: https://blog.uvm.edu/rlherman/ !

Over the course of a couple of days, I went to a couple of sites in Burlington to look around for wildlife signs and recorded my findings in iNaturalist, which was usually an easy process.

On the day of the great snow storm of Sunday, February 16th, I hiked down to Centennial Woods to not visit my phenology spot, but just to hike around and look at the snowy woods. Look how beautiful!

As we were walking through the woods, I looked around for signs of wildlife, such as their tracks, scat, dens, or the animal itself. About a mile into our walk, my friend Elsa suddenly went, “Look!” We looked a saw a small black rodent like animal running around in the snow! We watched in run in a zig zag pattern, burrow under a tree, and then reappear, only to burrow into the snow again!

I got a picture of the little guy from afar, and then trekked into the snow to take a look at his tracks. He was running along in a zig zag pattern, had tail drag in his tracks, was burrowing into the snow, and seemed to be a galloper.

Based on all of this and the look of the little dude, I would guess it was a shrew.

I also visited the Intervale with my NR1020 lab! While at the Intervale, we saw a variety of animal signs, including a a rabbit, plenty of squirrels, and a pileated woodpecker!

Here is a picture of the bunny tracks. Based on the size and the four defined toes, I would say this was a snowshoe hare!

We also saw lots of squirrel tracks! So many squirrel tracks!!! We could tell these were gray squirrel tracks because of the way they jumped from trees down to the ground and back up to the trees in a hopping pattern.

We also saw a pileated woodpecker up in a tree while it pecked away, but unfortunately we did not get a picture because we were on our cross country skis. However, we could tell it was a pileated woodpecker because of its red head and the lovely holes that lined the tree it was on!

On a chilly Saturday in late January, I once again hiked down to my spot snuggled in Centennial Woods. While it hasn’t snowed in days, the woods were still covered in snow and mostly ice. When first approaching my site, I didn’t even recognize it because of how different it looked all frozen over. The leaves, of course, were all gone and the trees were sticks. The stream had completely frozen over besides being a little slushy where some humans/dogs might have gone down and walked on it.

The snow completely transformed my site. It took the dead stick trees and turned them into a wintery wonderland. Besides that, it looked like it had in November, just now covered in ice and looking like it has endured the first couple of months of winter.

I looked for signs of animals, but the only thing I have to report is a possible bird track. (see below) I am not super sure what this could be, but it was just off the path right next to the stream.

Besides that, I didn’t see much evidence of animals. Lots of human and dog prints, but nothing else notable. Until the next time Centennial!

Winter is here in Centennial Woods! If I thought the woods looked dead last time I was here, I was wrong. Still beautiful though!

Any lingering leaves have left and everything has gone grey. There is a bit of green left along the stream but that’s about all the color that is left. The ground is still littered with leaves that are starting to decompose and wither away.

There was never many signs of animals that I observed in my phenology spot. The only thing I can say is that parts of the creek have started to freeze over so that would have an effect on any organisms in and around the water.

Here is a photo that I thought was gorgeous. It has been so interesting to be able to return to this same spot and be able to see how the woods have changed. I love this spot with its place to sit on the bridge over the stream just on the edge of the heavily wooded area. It’s been cool to look back on photos from a couple months and see just how much it has changed. I have really liked watching the stream slow down and prep for winter and begin to freeze over. It’s a great reminder of how things will ebb and flow but will neutralize again one day. See you next year Centennial!

Over Thanksgiving break, I traveled home to New Orleans, Louisiana. It was great to get a break from the beginnings of the Vermont winter and to be able to go home and wear short sleeves. As a very urban community, New Orleans doesn’t have many unmanicured green spaces, but there are a few if you know where to go. Nestled in City Park between roads, golf courses, and sports fields lies the Couterie Forest. It is one of the only preserved natural places in the city. It rests north of downtown New Orleans in Lakeview and contains a whole system of bayous.

My new spot sat between the walking path and a segment of the bayou. It was a little spot to sit surrounded by trees on two sides and water on another. I sat there for about fifteen minutes and watched the water for an alligator, but I didn’t spot one.

Below was my view as I sat! As you can see, in comparison to my spot in Burlington, my new spot is still very green and alive. My dog Charley came along to keep me company!

Surprisingly, my new phenology spot reminded me a lot of my spot in Centennial Woods in Burlington. There were many maple trees at my new spot in New Orleans, just like in Centennial. There were obvious differences, like the bayous, the big palmetto trees, and the coloring. Unlike Vermont, which is already deep into stick season, Louisiana is still green and full of leaves. We never lose all of our leaves, but eventually the forest will look pretty grey. One of my favorite parts of New Orleans and the Couterie Woods is the palmetto trees. You can see them in the above photo: they look like ferns and are set like big fans. Relatively speaking though, my spot in New Orleans and my spot in Burlington look vaguely similar because they are both very understory heavy and full of bushes and vines.

The Couterie Forest and the park it sits in both mean a lot to me for a lot of different reasons, one of which being that a friend of mine passed away in this park, so the Couterie Forest always makes me think of them. I thought long and hard about what gift to leave here. I ended up just taking a pretty leaf off the ground and set it in the bayou and watched it float away, and took a few minutes to sit with the grief and the love and the acknowledgement of all that this land holds.

On a chilly but sunny Sunday morning, I ventured down to Centennial Woods with my friend Rayna. We walked to my spot, sat on the boardwalk, and took in the site. We sat in silence for awhile, just taking in the sunlight and the chirping of the birds – we spotted a blue jay! After a loud weekend, I enjoyed the silence and the peace. I sat there and sketched a bird’s eye view of my site and took time to appreciate just how many living things there were just in my little spot in the middle of the woods. After about fifteen minutes, we stood up and left the woods, both feeling pleasantly refreshed.

A bird’s eye view sketch of my site.

Since last coming to my spot, the leaves have left and all of the shrubs and trees look a little dead. However, the little stream seems to have come alive in the last couple leaves. There was a lot more water in the stream and it seemed to be running faster. The ground was covered in leaves and most of the trees were completely bare. Here are some updated pictures!

If you were to walk about eight minutes into Centennial Woods, you would come across your first wooden bridge, walk a few yards down the bridge to where it crosses the stream, and there sits my phenology spot. I sat at this spot a few weeks ago during our Centennial Woods lab and I felt drawn to it. This place is a home to many different species, but I chose it because I thought it would be interesting to watch the changes between both the greenery and the stream.

Surrounding the board walk in either direction, there is the stream and many different bushes and shrubs. There are many surrounding trees in what is mostly an open marshy area on the outskirts of the woods. It is mostly low lying bushy vegetation. It is peak fall, and there are many leaves of different colors on the ground, and some trees are already completely bare.

Here are some woody species you can find in my place:

brambles

striped maple

Coltsfoot

red maple

honeysuckle

norway maple

green ash