A little more into the thicket.

Time in: 9:08 am, time out: 10:17 am. 9/30/19

As soon as I walked towards my sit spot, I noticed that there has been some changes. To begin with, I felt like the grass had been cut and the bushes had been cleared. During my first visit, the day was a little gloomy and this time it was bright so maybe it was just me finding it different. My sit spot is a few yards away from tinker right along the Oyster pond. As you walk towards the creek from the pond, there is a single huge sycamore tree right in front. My sit spot is exactly opposite to that tree.  The pond itself is very interesting with various aquatic animals but I did not choose it because it in an open space and I knew I would get easily distracted by the vehicles or just people walking by. During my quiet observation, I could see that a lot of leaves had fallen already. I could smell the fresh grass and the light breeze that blew gently.

View from my spot

 

The water fall without any water falling.

After my 15 minutes of quiet observation, I hurriedly jumped down to the creek to have a closer look at the mini waterfall which didn’t even feel like a waterfall anymore. This made me feel really sad because the waterfall was the major reason I fell in love with this place and I was very surprised to see such a drastic change in just 2 weeks’ time. There were only tiny droplets of water falling from the edge of the step. I could see that the water on top of the step was very still with absolutely no movement and even as the creek continued, the water downwards was not flowing as rapidly as it used to before. Could it be because the season is slowly changing?

As I walked along the creek, I saw that there weren’t as many organisms near my sit spot. There were various species of trees but not many animals or insects. Moving on to further observations, the umbrella shaped tree which I wanted to explore further had started growing fruits (small, tiny berries). I later found out that the tree could be a peg wood (cornus sanguinea) tree (through a phone app and I don’t know if it can be trusted or not). It is a plant that buds in fall, and this fact will make it easier to look into it in the upcoming days. I could see lots of birds flying and I was hearing them a lot more compared to my previous experience. Maybe because I went in during morning this time.

dry fallen leaves

My third thing that I wanted to examine further were the broken trees and to my surprise whatever I predicted earlier, exactly the same happened. There were moss growing on the damp sides of the trees. I could see that it was expanding slowly. In order to find organisms and their adaptations, I had to work a little extra hard. I wanted to find both animal and plant species and their adaptations.

The creek

The first one that I saw and found really cool was an insect that was walking on water. It looked like it was hopping but very effortlessly. It is probably due to the surface tension of the water and because it has some special adaptations which allows it to survive in areas like the creek (it was extremely difficult to get a picture of it but i tried). Another cool adaptation I witnessed was by a tree which stretched its branches horizontally instead of growing vertically. It did so in order to get sunlight and nutrients which were otherwise blocked by the tall trees in the area. Lastly, the third adaptation I saw was done by a plant that grew on the bark of a tree. This is an example of commensalism but I think it is also a cool adaptation because the plant stretches out its roots down to the root of the tree to get water and hence grows upwards.

The berries on my umbrella tree

The label on the tree

I think this time I had more fun than my first time because I was already familiar to it. It felt very relaxing to go there and spend some time alone and just observe everything around. I am glad I could experience these changes and I have an opportunity to keep a track of it. I look forward to observing further changes on my three things that I chose to examine more. Fun fact: I also found a label on one of the black walnut trees which is right in front of my spot. It was written on a piece of metal and I thought it was very cool.

The water strider

The branches

The plant growing on the bark