Smithsonian Tree Banding Project

I’m in awe of the trees again…

It seems like I’m always chasing butterflies across the field, or marveling as a mockingbird sings its unpredictable song, or hopping out of the car (when we’re already kind-of-sort-of running late) to take a photo of a spiderweb glistening with morning dew…

Today I happened upon a chrysalis forming in the garden – a caterpillar transformation frozen in time.  We even found some new butterflies we hadn’t yet classified – the little blue ones I have such trouble distinguishing between because they flit and flutter too quickly.  I seriously chase them with my camera trying to get a snapshot so I can just get a glimpse of them still.  Today I didn’t have my camera, but they had slowed down just enough…  And I found that we have two types – the Spring Azure Complex (which is a general category for several types of Azures), and the Eastern Tailed-Blue.

But the trees go unnoticed for the most part. I don’t chase them around to take photos too often.  (Except for this time of year when the mulberries are a daily celebration in our household.)  The trees just stand quiet and magnificent doing their job.  Last summer we embarked on a study of our trees so we would consistently know the names of at least five types of trees – so we could identify them no matter where we see them – from memory.

This year, we received our Smithsonian Tree Banding Project Kit and hiked the woods to tag twelve trees.  It was great to know the names of almost all the trees on our property, except for where we discovered a couple we hadn’t previously identified and pressed for the Botany Book.

Our tree studies are taking us in another direction as we study how climate affects tree growth across the world.  In a few more weeks, we will be logging our first data, and it is super-exciting to be a part of a study reaching farther than our neck-of-the-woods.  Not only that, it is a long-term study, so we will continue to acknowledge and study the trees for years to come…

…And, finally, we actually remembered the names of the trees from last year’s study!  Maybe this is an example of striving for mastery of a few things instead of surveying many.  [I made a botany book back in 8th grade and couldn’t remember the name of a single tree within a week!]  So… we’ll add a couple of trees to our Botany Book and strive for mastery there.  We’ll hike the woods, make the observations, take the measurements, record the data, and simply… discover more of God’s creation together as a family.

For more on this topic, visit our How to Make a Botany Book Page or simply muse at my silly awe over the trees God has given us.

For more on butterfly study, visit Nature Study for Beginners.  For some pretty-gross-but-fascinating discoveries at Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood, visit some of our other Nature Study posts here.