Our Nature Walk

Today the kids and I decided to take a little nature walk.  I'm not from the South so I'm a bit uneasy at the thought of actually taking them out into the woods, so instead we walked around our yard and along our property.  We own an acre here, and you can generally see quite a few things.

As soon as we stepped off the porch we saw a little chameleon.  We have these things living all around our front porch and back steps.  I've only ever seen them change green and brown, so I'm not sure if they change other colors.

Next we looked up in one of our river birches and saw a bird nest.  Nothing in it anymore but still a learning experience for the kids.

No sooner had Haley and I took pictures of the bird nest than Parker had found a spider web.  We have many diferent kinds of spiders around here.  This one was a garden spider, one of three that we have around the house.

About ten inches away from the garden spider was a big spider egg sac.  I'm assuming it belongs to the garden spider, although I'm not sure.

We walked around the house and came to Josie in her pen.  Haley insisted we take a picture of that too, since it was something we were seeing on our nature walk! That's our bunnies' cage on the other side of Josie's pen.

Next we saw the dead pine tree that the lightning struck and killed.  Some of you may remember my article on the lightning strikes.  They did indeed kill one of the two trees.

We also looked at the lightning strikes on both the dead tree.............

and the one still living.

Next we noticed that we have a couple of apple trees growing on the edge of our property.

After that I pointed out what my husband believes could be a Live Oak growing amongst our Carolina pine. (We hope it is, because Live Oaks are absolutely beautiful!!)

Next Parker pointed out a huge fire ant nest.  We actually saw quite a bit of them, because we haven't sprinkled fire ant killer over the yard all summer, but this one was by far the biggest one.  We took a video of them that we're going to post.

We walked along our fence bordering our property and Haley pointed out that some of our clover was growing up again.  Good news for our bunnies, Coda and Dora!

Walked along the driveway and got a shot of the blooms on our Crepe Myrtles.

Of course, Parker couldn't resist climbing one of the trees!  Haley decided she was still too little to climb trees.

Once the tree climbing was over with, we continued our nature walk by checking out the soy beans in the big fields by our house.

After looking at the soy beans and feeling how they felt, we started walking again.  Our attention was drawn to the wispy clouds in the sky.

Shortly our attention was drawn back to the ground where we discovered several puffballs around the yard.  Of course, most of these puffballs no longer look like this now!  :)

The last thing we checked out was our small patch of poke greens.  Haley and I spent the entire summer eating these!  They've now turned to seed, which will mean even more poke greens next year!  Before they get old and turn to seed, they are all green with leaves all over them.  Next they will die and just be dead stalks.

We ended our nature walk by eating popsicles at the picnic table.  Parker ate four!

It was a lot of fun taking a nature tour of our yard and the surrounding area.  It just goes to show that you don't need to go someplace extravagant or spend a lot of money to entertain the kids and show them something educational but fun.  We also saw many things we weren't able to get pictures of: a hawk, a red-headed woodpecker, a butterfly, a bluejay, and we think a black widow spider.