Spring Time!!

Hello!

BUGS
Today my mom showed me these creepy bugs that we have never seen before. They are called wheel bugs which is a type of assasin bug. The bugs are good for your garden so don't kill them if you have them in your garden. In this picture they are hatching out of the nest that sort of resimbles a bee hive.

TOADS AND FROGS
During the middle of April the usual toads and frogs were back to lay more eggs in our ponds. Only 5% or less of the hundreds and hundreds of tadpoles survive, thanks to snakes, birds, the sun,(they can dry up on rocks with little water), peole, etc...
The sound (above) is the sound of a toads mating call. The sound is very very loud and sort of sounds like a telephone ringing.

BIRDS
Last week there was a 3 hour bird hike at the community Leatherwood Park. About 20 people were there in all. The guide J Pat Valentik had a lot of knowledge about birds. We saw turkey tracks and saw one kind of migritory bird (birds just passing through to get somewhere else)the Kentucky warblur. The Kentucky Warblur is yellow with black Elvis looking sideburns. Mr. J Pat had a small hand held computer ipod kind of thing. He had some bird calls recorded on it, and if you heard a bird sound that you had never heard before the computer thing would record the sound and identify the bird making the sound! We also saw piliated woodpeckers and a great blue heron and a Northern Parula, a small bird only 4 1/2 inches tall, but it makes a very loud sound for such a small bird. Saturday morning my mom and I sat by the window for 1 hour and identifyed 26 different birds! Some we had never seen before such as the Red Breasted Grosbeak and we even saw a female painted bunting! The Indigo Buntings are here this spring, we have two pairs at our feeder and they come back for more food every day!

Mr. J Pat has a science blog too.... www.natureofeureka.blogspot.com

~~National Wildlife Federation~~

December 7,2007

We entered our backyard as a certified wildlife habitat! I went to a website called National Wildlife Federation, and certified our backyard. To do it you have to have a certain number of things in your yard. For instance, you have to have at least 3 water structures, like a bird bath, a pond, a lake or ocean, a stream, a river and so on. You also have to have native plants, shrubs, trees, and places for animals to have babies. It is important because you can help nature. You can also see more animals if you have the right habitat in your backyard.

#####BACTERIA#####

Ewwwww...Bacteria is number 1 out of the 4 types of microbes. Number 2 is protists,3 is fungi, and 4 is viruses. Viruses can make you sick, with measles, rabies, chicken pox and lots of others. They can make almost any type of organism sick. Fungi is no fun guy. Fungi is mostly seen on old rotting logs. It is also everywhere from old stuff to newspapers. Like protists fungi have a nucleus. More than 100,000 types of fungi are known to man kind. Mushrooms are the most common known. There are 200,000 types of protists and are classified into 3 main groups, algae, protozoa,and slime molds. Bacteria in my opinion are the grossest. They can be found everywhere on your body. There are 4,000 types of bacteria. For a science experiment I am growing bacteria. I have 4 petri dishes filled with gelatin. On the gelatin I have bacteria from 4 different places. Kitchen door knobs,Alena's toes,my armpit,and my spit. It has been about 5 days since I first started growing it. Right now they have little white spots all over the gelatin. I did this experiment before a couple of years ago. I can't wait to see how big the bacteria will get!

December 5, 2007

My bacteria grew very well. The one that grew the biggest in my opinion is Alena's toes. just think if you never washed your feet how gross and stinky the would be. Let this be a lesson for all of you folks and be sure to take showers....a lot.

**EYES**

For science I studied eyes. Eyes are one of the most complexed parts of the human body. A few weeks ago I went to the eye doctor to get my first eye checkup. The doctor was very nice and said my eyes were perfectly fine. Then he dilated my eyes(don't ask why). Then my eyes were not perfectly fine. I felt like a blind person, and I had to ware the ugliest pair of sunglasses I have ever seen. I also had to draw the human eye. It is very complicated to draw. One thing that is very interesting is this.....from the moment you're born until you die, you see things upsidown, but your brain switches it around. Your cornea is how you see in colour. Eyes are the greatest.

Friday our home school group came to our house to dissect owl pellets. It was really messy! The pellets were barn owl, and they had lots and lots of little bones inside them. The bones were covered in blackish gray fur. When we started braking them open we realized that the pellets had straw on them which meant that the person who gathered them must of found them in a barn. You could see lots of tiny bones, we figured out that they were rodents, but we never found out exactly what type. The pellets were really stinky. I found a couple of skulls, it kind of creeped me out. It was neat seeing all the little teeth. I liked trying to find out what bone was which. I have always wanted to find a pellet and maybe one day I will.


If you want to read a good book look for One Mans Owl which is a non fiction story by Bernd Heinrich. It is his actual journal with great sketches. It is a story of a man(the author)who finds a great horned owl in a blizzard and takes him home to raise him. He decides to call him Bubo. It is a really funny story about how he teaches Bubo to fly, eat and defend himself in hope that one day he can set Bubo free.

These are owl pellets. The one in the midddle is a barn owl pellet.

Owl pellets contain fur, bones and mucous and other gross stuff. Most people think that pellets are owl poop but they are wrong. Owl pellets are an owls dinner, they digest as much of it up as they can but the rest is regurgitate remnants of the animal. For science during the next month our home school group is going to dissect owl pellets. We are ordering them from online. Most owls regurgitate 1-3 pellets per day. When an owl first throws one up they are smelly and covered in mucous. I have never found one before. People say that you have to look around dead trees with holes or nests in them. Most pellets are between 1-5 inches long. It depends on the meal.

OWLS

This is the eastern screech owl.


This is a young screech owl, see the horizontal stripes on its chest.


This is where the eastern screech owl lives.




The other night we heard Eastern screech owls. There were three of them! For the next two weeks I am going to study Eastern screech owls. Their scientific name is, megascops acio. They eat rodents, salamanders, insects, and bats. They hunt all day, from dawn to dusk, and throw up 2-4 pellets every day. Screech owls are so small snakes, skunks, raccoons, mink, blue jays, and even bigger owls like to eat screech owls. The males make a low trill to attract females. The females make a loud hoot or barking sound and the young make a peeping sound when they are hungry. When they are young they have gray horizontal lines on their chest, and the mature owls have vertical lines on their chest. During the mating season, which lasts from March through May, the male calls to attract a female. If he is lucky he will blink at her. If she is not impressed, she will go on to find another mate. When they build their nests they usually build it in an old woodpecker hole about 50 feet off the ground. They live to be between about 10-20 years old.


September 27,2007


Today I did more research on eastern screech owls.
They have a great sense of smell, and even better eye sight. I looked up the Classification System.

Kingdom - Animalia
Phylum - Chordata
Class - Aves
Order - Strigiformes
Family - Strigidae
Genus - Megascops Asio
Species - Eastern Screech Owl

I also looked at a gold finch feather under the microscope. It was really cool!
The part in the middle of a feather is called a shaft. Barbs are the thin thread like things growing off of the shaft. In between each barb are tiny net like things that lock the barbs together. The feather we looked at was a wing feather. The way I could tell is simple; if the shaft is close to the outside of a feather, it means that is from the front of a wing. All bird bones are hollow which makes it easier for them to fly.

Chrysalis

This is the chrysalis that the caterpillar will form in.

The anatomy of a caterpillar!!

THIS IS THE STAGE BEFORE THE SNOWBERRY CLEARWING CATERPILLAR PUPATES.





THESE ARE ALL THE STAGES OF THE SNOWBERRY CLEARWING CATERPILLARS.

Caterpillars

Earlier in the week we noticed that there were caterpillars all over our pink honeysuckle bush, and we think that they are hummingbird moths. We caught some and put them in my butterfly cage to observe them easier.So far we have learned that they are black when they hatch from their egg. As they get older they turn a light green color. When they are about to pupate they turn a beautiful pink color. We looked at some of their poop under a microscope, and found it very interesting. I went to check on them this morning and their poop changed from black to yellow. I think that they changed their diet. We found one that was still black, and it has gone from 1 1/2 cm, to 2 1/2 cm, all in one night! They sure do poop a lot!

August, 29 2007

This morning I did some research, and found some really interesting facts! They are not hummingbird moth caterpillars, they are snow berry clear wing caterpillars.
Their scientific name is Hemaris diffinis. The adult is sometimes called a bumblebee moth, and the moths are often confused with hummingbird moths. They don't pupate until the fall. We are running out of honeysuckle and that is the only plant they eat! I cant wait until they pupate.

September 1, 2007

Today I measured the little black one again, and it is 1 1/2 inches long. We also discovered that some of the pink ones have made a little net in the corners of the cage. We think that they are their chrysalis. The nets are a kind of reddish color. We don't know if the caterpillars are going to metamorphoses. They sure do eat a lot of honeysuckle. I have to fill their cage up with more honeysuckle once every other day. They keep on falling off of the leaves and start wriggling on the floor so I keep having to put them back on the twigs. I researched some on caterpillars body parts, and I learned that they have twelve eyes. Six on each side of their head, and that they have 13 body segments. The scientific term for Caterpillar poop is frass.

September 5, 2007

Now there are three little nets in the cage. It looks like the caterpillar inside the net is forming a chrysalis. The stuff is really sticky I could tell because it built it's net around a twig and I tried to pull it out but I did not want to hurt the caterpillar so I left it there.
I researched the Classification System.
KINGDOM - ANIMAL
PHYLUM - ANNELIDS
CLASS - INSECTA
ORDER - LEPIDOPTERA
FAMILY - LIMACODIDAE
GENUS - ACHARIA
SPECIES - SNOW BERRY CLEAR WING CATERPILLARS



SEPTEMBER 12,2007


I researched what eats a caterpillar. Caterpillars camouflage to hide from predators so they won't get eaten. Some caterpillars don't have great camouflage while some do. There is one caterpillar whose camouflage looks like bird droppings. Some have fake eyes on their heads to scare away birds, reptiles and mammals such as armadillos, shrews and other pesky animals. everywhere you look outside there is probably a caterpillar hiding.