Fabulous Flora and Fauna

It can no longer be denied, spring is here! With springtime comes beautiful ( and delicious) new plant life as well as fragile and exciting animal life. It is hard to believe that only a few short weeks ago, we were scavenging for any signs of greenery and animal life we could find and now it seems, practically overnight, that the forest and fields have burst with life. We are seeing the abundant native plants to Irvine like spicebush, mayapple, bloodroot, jack-in-the pulpit and of course, fields and grassy areas sprinkled with the beautiful sunshine colored dandelions and tall, thin fragrant onion grass patches all over! We took advantage of the dandelion flowers and the onion grass and made ourselves a nice breakfast over the fire! After collecting some, Miss Paula brought some eggs, cheese and a cast iron pan and we had delicious dandelion, onion scrambled eggs! Takotas helped crack the eggs and cut the edibles into our mixture. We all agreed before we added the fire’s heat, the mixture looked like something we were not interested in eating. After the eggs were heated, we saw them change and then excitement started brewing. The FD were very interested in the change and we talked about how the invention of fire as a cooking tool was a very important part of civilization! Changes everywhere!

We then added our recipe to our journals by using real dandelions and grass. Our journals help us remember what we have done in class on certain days. Some Takotas add words and stories to their entries while others ask the teachers to label their drawings. We have been making good use of our journals this semester and they will hopefully become nice keepsakes for them!

This week also brought talks of new life. Miss Sophie brought in some tadpoles. We will keep watching these little guys as they go through their metamorphosis, which we learned meant ‘big body change’. Although we will all grow up, we found out that we won’t doing any metamorphosizing as far as we know! We took this time to draw tadpoles and their eggs in our journals and talk of the life-cycle.

We had heard that there were places on our property that were brimming with frogs in all stages of metamorphosis. We decided to head all the way down to the meadow to a place we had never been- the wetland area! Unfortunately, there was a team of people working down there with machines and we were disappointed to deduct that the frogs would have been scared by all of the noise and movement. However, Miss Sophie did manage to catch us a nice frog! We spent some time exploring a new part of the stream in the wetland area and had snack there.

Lastly, we found another animal friend that had passed away- a beautiful robin. The robin reminded us that even in midst of new life, there is always a cycle to every living thing. Although it made us sad to see, it was a good opportunity to see a bird like that up close and wonder about its passing. Did a coyote family need this for it’s new babies? Did the robin get sick? So many questions that we can ponder just from one small find.

Keep Inquiring, Forest Flora and Fauna Finders!