Blog post #2-Layla

76 Fahrenheit humid 5:00pm-6:00pm

My sit spot is right at the edge of the beginning of the forest line which descents down the hill. It’s between an unidentified tree and a pine tree. There’s old trees stumps around it and yellow leaves on the ground. In the far west and north are varies species of trees that go down the hill while in the south there’s a couple of shrubs. The shrubs have red and green leaves. The air had a scent of a river due to the rain fall and the ground was damp.

The air was full of moisture from the recent rainfall making everything feel humid and attracting mosquitos to come out. In the south I heard two bird calls. One sounded similar to a Chickadee call while the other sounded quite peculiar like a laser gun. I’ve never heard such a strange bird call before. A deer came up the hill but got scared off by encountering me. A continuous buzz kept happening and at first I thought it could have been cicadas but it turned out to be dragonflies! They were flying above and going crazy back and forth. I wasn’t sure if they were hunting but they appear right after a storm had occurred. A yellow jacket landed on my journal and could of blended in if I wasn’t scaring it off. The sound of crickets was continuous throughout the whole hour almost. The same monarch butterfly flew by a couple of times as well as a bird that had similar features to a blue jay yet had gray and white as its colors.

My three items have shown some changes a bit. The thorn plant leaves look more green and there is a less abundance of leaves on the vines. They could look less dense due to an animal snacking on it but there’s not many signs pointing to that conclusion. Most of the leaves are intact and there isn’t any disturbance with the vine of the plant.  My branch happens to have some moss growing on it. It’s not a dramatic change but it’s a start. Half of my purple plant is missing! An animal has definitely been snacking on it and it dramatically different.

When walking around my sit spot, I choose to examine the small wood vines growing up a tree. They seemed to be covering the tree and I first thought it was poison oak or just some small twigs and I wanted to see if it was affecting the tree. The vines were connected to black berries that were quite dark and the looked along the lines of grapes to me. Some branches held more berries while others had almost none. The berries on the branches were quite disproportional. Towards the east side of my sit spot, I noticed how much darker the enviroment looked even though I felt my spot had more foliage. The east side also had strange bird noise that sounded like a scream that kept going higher in pitch. It felt like a completely different forest and even the amount of sunlight seemed to be different. Quite strange. I also found a cherry tree near my ground hog’s home. So many trees are providing fruit which is probably why so many animals are attracted to my yard. I would have never knew how immensely different the two environments of the forests were by their features and even animals without entering that part of the woods.

I’ve been wanting to explore a little out of my sit spot even though I thought I knew the environment since I explored my yard as a child. I did not have a strong desire to examine my yard because I thought I knew what was there already. I didn’t pick up on features before like I did while doing my sit spot and it was an enlightening experience to notice. It was fun to re examine an environment you think you already know and notice something completely new.

There’s multiply adaptations for dragonflies, deer, and mosquitos. An adaptation of dragonflies is their very large eyes that helps them with seeing color and gives them 360 degree field vision to catch their prey easier. Deer lift their tails to expose the white on their tail to allow other deer to follow them while they are running away from something so the deer can stick together. Mosquitos have light bodies so victims don’t feel them when they land to drink blood. The ability to think of adaptations for other animals but for the ones I observed took me a minute to wonder. This is probably due to the non familiarity of knowing how those animals react to their environment.