laineamb's Journal

This was the most difficult nature walk I have been on. I walked around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in the afternoon. The weather was really nice and a lot of people were walking outside. It was in the 60s and there were leaves all over the path. It was extremely hard to find animals, and even when I did find them, they would often move and I would either not get a good picture or not get a picture of them at all. I found a lot of flies, but they were so small that they did not always appear on camera, and they were also very easy to lose track of. The animal I found the easiest to take pictures of was birds. Birds did not move as much and they were bigger so I found more success taking photos of them. I notice that there is a large diversity of animals around the reservoir. They do a really good job of hiding, which makes it much harder for them to be hunted. Something that separates animals from other organisms is that they are able to freely move, which definitely made locating them much harder. Although we learned in class that there are the most insects out of any animal species, I still had trouble finding them since so many of them are very small. I noticed that since it was fall, there were less animals than there would be in the summer when it is typically warmer. Overall, animals are much more difficult to take pictures of because they are able to freely move, but they are also much more interesting to observe than other species that only change gradually.

It was a nice and sunny 70 degree day on my walk. I went again to the Pine Tree Preserve on Boston College Campus to find some examples of the four main types of plants. It was shady and there were many brown pine tree needles all over the paths. There were also brown leaves all over the plants. It was difficult at first for me to differentiate which plant belonged to which group. There was a lot of diversity in the plants and they are definitely much more abundant than fungi. It was helpful to try and find plants of different types in order to understand their differences better. In class, we talked about how there is a lot of variety in plants and how they reproduce in different ways. It is interesting to see these plants in real life and the locations where they are most abundant, and how all of the types can coexist in the same ecosystem. I realized that there is a difference between lichen and moss, and the image that I took trying to find moss was actually lichen. There were probably examples of moss in the preserve, but I did not manage to get a photo. It is also interesting to think about how the huge trees create shadows below, resulting in different smaller plants being able to survive with limited sunlight.

I took a walk through the Pine Tree Preserve for about 30 minutes today looking for fungus. I had walked in this area before, but I had never realized how much fungus there was. It was difficult at first to find any fungi at all, but I found that they tended to appear in patches and a lot on broken branches or tree stumps. It was hard for me to identify all of the types of fungi, and some of them looked to be the same as each other. It was a pretty cold and windy day at about 50 degrees during the walk, and there were a few other people also on the trail. It was a shaded area so the wind was not too bad in the area of the preserve. I went off the trail in order to find the examples of fungi, and I again did not find many animals. It was peaceful and calming on my search, and it was fun whenever I found an example I needed. I only took photos of different examples of fungi that I found, although there was a lot more biodiversity present in the area. I found a variety of mushrooms in the grass and fungi growing on wood which are included in my observations. Overall it was an interesting experience and was a nice break from the rest of my day.

I went to the Pine Tree Preserve on the Boston College campus that overlooks the chestnut hill reservoir. I went around 10 am and It was about 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and pretty muggy. It had just rained less than an hour before, so many of the plants were damp. It was on the brink of fall, so there were some leaves on the ground, and a lot of pine needles. There was a path to walk on that went around and up the hill with plenty of plants on either side. There was a variety of tall trees and smaller plants. There surprisingly were not that many bugs when I went, but there were a few squirrels that I did not manage to get a photo of. It was a pretty peaceful and well shaded area. You could hear some bugs humming, but also cars from the nearby roads. There were plenty of big rocks throughout the location.m, and many of them were covered with moss. Most of the plants seemed like weeds on the ground, but there was a good variety. Overall, if you looked closely, there was a lot of diversity in the plants at this preservation. There were not many visible animals, although I saw a few squirrels and heard bugs throughout the walk. It was a peaceful experience and it was nice to be able to take a break for 30 minutes and walk around nature for a change.