Category: We LOVE nature

HAIR ICE!

This past Saturday I went for a walk in Lynn Canyon on the North Shore here in Vancouver.

We kept seeing clumps of something brilliant white on the forest floor that looked a bit like snow … but not really!

When we looked more closely, this is what we saw:

Very strange! It looked a little like the inside of bulrushes except it was brilliant white. I figured it must be some type of fungus.

Back at home, I decided to try and find out what it was and was delighted and amazed to find it was ice. More specifically Hair Ice!

It’s actually quite rare and only occurs under certain conditions.

When there is high humidity and the temperature is around 0 to -2 degrees C, ice will form on dead branches lying on the forest floor, on the patches where the bark has fallen off. This is caused by the moisture in the branch freezing, expanding and being squeezed out of the branch. If there is also a particular fungus present in the branch, then instead of forming a film of ice on the branch, individual hairs of ice are formed.

This phenomenon only occurs in forests that are around the same latitude as Vancouver and the hair ice is often hidden by snow or else it melts as soon as the sun hits it.

I feel very lucky to have seen such an amazing and beautiful natural sight.

 

Seeds – UPDATE (Nov 9, 2020)

These are seeds and seed pods that Darby, Yannick and I found in the garden at Canuck Place in September 2020.

We thanked each tree, bush and plant for sharing their seeds and pods with us ❤

Update November 9, 2020 – Bruce Bried, a wonderful volunteer who is very supportive of the school room, told me that the seed pods shown below are from a TREE PEONY!

UPDATE (Oct 7, 2020)

There is still lots of things I don’t know about these seeds, and I’m very curious, so I will be doing a lot of research over the next couple of weeks!

I did learn today though that not only can you eat the seed of a Fuschia, you can eat the flower too! What a pretty garnish it would make!❤

Keep a look out for seeds when you’re out and about and perhaps collect some to share in class one day! Or send me a photo of them! Don’t forget to thank the tree, shrub or plant!

Carpenter Ants 🐜 and Carpenter Bees 🐝

Recently, I posted a video that one of our Volunteers, Bruce, took of some carpenter ants making a nest in an old piece of Fir (see below.)

Then I found a video about Carpenter Bee nests. What was particularly fascinating about their nests is that they are very similar to Mason Bee nests, some of which we maintain in the Canuck Place garden in Vancouver. When I have access to all my materials again, I’m currently working from home, I’ll post about our Mason Bees!

Unfortunately the video about Carpenter Bee nests cannot be played anywhere other than YouTube. You can search it by it’s title:

Carpenter Bee Tunnel and Development by Peter

 

Above is a video Bruce took of some carpenter ants making a nest in an old piece of Fir.

Bruce, often leaves interesting objects in the classroom for me to share with the children; mostly things he’s found in the garden! Lucky for us, Bruce is still sharing things with us even during this time of social distancing!

Carpenter Ants  make nests in wood by chewing sandpaper-smooth tunnels and chambers in wood. They cannot eat the wood. The wood is discarded as shredded fragments of coarse sawdust ejected from the nests. The sawdust may contain dead ants and bits of dead insects that the carpenter ants have eaten.

If you’ve seen a “big, black ant” outside your house, it was probably a carpenter ant. Carpenter ants serve a useful purpose in nature.  Their nests consist of tunnels and chambers chewed into soft wood.  The openings and hollow spaces they create contribute to the natural decay of stumps, logs and dead limbs.  Without recyclers such as carpenter ants we would be up to our necks in dead, un-decomposed organic matter in the landscape and woodlands.