April Phenology Notes
April Phenology
For this Phenology Blog I wanted to focus on flowers. I wanted to get a picture of every flower I saw blooming. I succeeded in getting around 10 flowers, each prettier than the last. These flowers were fun to take pictures of. They each had such different colors, and unique shapes. Another interesting thing is that I watched them for about an hour and saw something interesting in their interactions with the bees. Bees prefer some flowers over others. Overall they just went for any flower they could get their hand on, but they did appear to play favorites.
One other thing that I tried to do for the April blog was to get images of the grass growing. I started at the beginning of the month and took one another picture in the middle of the month, then one final one at the very end. I was mildly successful. While each picture does in fact show a change in height, it is not much of a noticeable change. This was odd to me because at another house a few miles from mine where I mow the lawn every three weeks, they had growth of almost 4 inches. I only got about two centimeters. There are two things that I think could be behind this. A) Somehow this place has much more fertile soil than us and is able to triple our grass growth. B) There are hidden variables at play. The lawn I mow is someone’s backyard. They don’t use it very often, and for the entire month, were on vacation. This is an untouched grass field with optimal space and time to grow. The grass I took photos of was different. Firstly, it had different growth patterns, but I won’t get into that right now. The main difference was that the grass I took was on the sidewalk. Every day it was subjected to people and animals trampling on it. Whether it’s a dog pooping on it, me bouncing a basketball on it, or my neighbor dragging her garbage bins over it, this grass got a much worse lot in life. I think that this overuse is what was the main contributor to the fact that this grass grew so little over the one month period.