A UVM blog Phenology- Jager

Hello! Welcome to my blog, my phenology site is nestled right in Centennial Woods. I chose this spot because I knew I wanted somewhere very accessible to me that I could get to very easily, so once I knew that I started walking down the trail till something caught my eye. As I was walking these two curved branches as pictured below caught my eye and I saw a dead tree lying across that I could sit on and I was sold! To get here you follow the Centennial trail until there is a fork and you can go right or left(go left) and keep walking until these two curved trees appear.

The vegetation surrounding consists of many ferns, maples(I saw sugar and striped), birch, black cherry, beeches, and lots of leaves and pine needles on the ground, there is not really any spot where you see soil, it’s all needles, leaves, and ferns. Something I saw that was pretty cool was this completely white fern, I’ve never seen that before, I looked it up and it says it could be a winter white fern? or that it absorbs all of its nutrients and that’s why the color is gone, I put a picture of it below.

This first phenology assignment was pretty fun, I really enjoyed sitting in the woods by myself for a while and winding down, there were lots of sounds around me that I didn’t realize until I sat down and focused, it really reminded me of this mountain semester that I did in high school and it was awesome!