Day 6

My task today is to describe the Mad River Metropark, or at least a piece of it.  The sky is gray and overcast.  Surprisingly cool for the second day of Jun.  When we left the school the wind was blowing, but when we arrived at the park, the conditions were calm.  That helped us in listening to the environment.  We’re about to walk a path around the park.  We can see a field of grass and wildflowers.  In the middle of the path is a clump of trees.  I’m not sure what kind of tress they were, maybe that’s a task for another day.  Also not surprising, we could hear the Mad River running nearby.  The wildlife we saw was mostly limited to birds; all different kinds of birds.  We saw a blue heron fly over top of us.  There were cardinals and a smallish black bird also, but I couldn’t identify it either.

We walked as a group at a leisurely strolling pace.  We saw a man running on the path with his dag.  They passed us and continued down the path.  We took a picture of ourselves with the trees in the background.  We found some plants along the way that we thought were interesting.  One was a wild strawberry plant.  Another was a skinny and tall plant with purple flowers on it.  We had no idea what that was but pretty none-the-less.  There we some small, red berries on the plant; we tried to take a picture.  We thought we saw a buckeye tree and did see a large sycamore tree. 

The bottom of the Sycamore tree

Strawberries

Purple flowers

We walked about 30 minute sand the loop path naturally took us back to our starting point.  This class helped me learn how to look at the environment in a different way.  I don’t think I’d have noticed the buckeye tree before taking this class sand learning to look at the small details.  This tree was only about 6 inches tall.  Interesting to imagine how big it will be in 20 or 30 years.  Maybe I can come back periodically and check on it s progress.

Start and end point!