Category: Nature
Come See the Flowers Race the Trees
April 5, 2023Like all forests around us, the Schuylkill Center is in full bloom right now. You really have to see it to believe it. In fact, you can, if you simply walk down our Ravine Loop.
Like the red trillium (pictured below), an elusive and rare plant that New Englanders dubbed “wake robin,” as it bloomed there about when robins return north from their migrations (robins are year-round residents here in Roxborough). Or the Virginia bluebells (pictured below)-- one of everyone’s favorites, as it is taller than many of the spring ephemerals and one of the bluest of them all. You can…
Our Broken Spring
March 20, 2023Later today at 5:24 pm, a vertical shaft of sunlight grazes the equator: it’s the first moment of spring. Greetings of the season, usually worth celebrating. Not this year.
For our weirdly snowless winter has already yielded an eerily early spring. While perhaps you’ve already noticed too-early crocuses, daffodils, and even dandelions, our forests have fast-forwarded into spring.
At the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Roxborough, painted turtles started sunbathing on pond edges in February. At the Briar Bush Nature Center in Abington, red-backed salamanders were spotted out of their burrows at the end of February. Skunk cabbage popped…
Those Autumn Leaves – Leaf Them Alone!
November 8, 2022Autumn is many people’s favorite time of year, with leaves changing color and the weather becoming crisp, but not yet overly cold.
Autumn also ushers in one of our least favorite chores: Raking leaves. But before you start bagging all those leaves up for curbside pickup, two thoughts to consider.
First, those leaves are loaded with the exact perfect combination of nutrients your lawn needs to grow beautifully thick and green. One of the ironies of the season is those of us with lawns feverishly remove every speck of leaf from the lawn—and then spend too much money on fertilizer,…
The Real March Madness: Outside in Nature
March 21, 2022[caption id="attachment_274808" align="aligncenter" width="480"] Toadshade trillium in bud, one of the many spring wildflowers soon to bloom on our trails.[/caption]
It’s hugely exciting times for college hoops fans, awash in basketball games where they breathlessly wait to see if, oh, the Providence Friars can hold off the South Dakota State Jackrabbits. (OK, Villanova vs. Delaware is pretty cool.) Some $3.1 billion will be bet-- DOUBLE what was spent only last year-- and almost 40 million Americans will fill out those brackets.
Over 19-year-old kids playing hoops. Welcome to March Madness.
Meanwhile, receiving no fanfare at all, nature in March is…
Natural Selections: A fern for this season
January 5, 2022[caption id="attachment_273648" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Christmas fern, one of the few plants still green in a January forest.[/caption]
The New Year is a great time to go for a walk in a natural area near you– the Wissahickon, Andorra Meadow, the Schuylkill Center, anywhere. The walk likely helps you meet one of your resolutions– yes, get those 10,000 steps!– while being outside allows you to sidestep that accursed virus that’s been, sorry, plaguing us unmercifully for two years now. And being outdoors allows you to lower your stress levels, as time in nature is restorative and calming. In 2022, make sure…
The Nature of the Holiday Season
December 13, 2021[caption id="attachment_273523" align="aligncenter" width="350"] Winterberry holly, a native holly whose bright red berries feed many birds throughout the winter, and one of the many symbols of the season.[/caption]
Winter formally arrives at 10:58 a.m. on Tuesday, December 21, that moment we call the winter solstice, both the shortest day and longest night of the year. Our staff-- like thousands of generations of humans before us-- will gather around a fire to mark that exact moment.
Still, for a naturalist like me, one of the pleasures of the holiday season is that we decorate homes and offices with innumerable nods to…
The Winters of Our Discontent
December 6, 2021[caption id="attachment_273514" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Wissahickon Valley Park under a recent winter's thin coating of snow. What will this winter bring?[/caption]
Last winter, Philadelphia received over 22 inches of snow at the airport, just a hair above the long-term 20.5 inch average. But that’s 73 times the amount that dropped during the snowless winter before; if anything, our weather has become erratic and prone to extreme mood swings like this.
So I was intrigued by the Old Farmer’s Almanac prediction that this winter would be a “Season of Shivers.” The new season, they wrote, “will be punctuated by positively bone-chilling, below-average…
Another Fall in Philadelphia
November 8, 2021[caption id="attachment_273384" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The changing leaves on our trails.[/caption]
I drive into work one Monday morning in October, enjoying the intense green of the trees here at the Schuylkill Center, and am greeted by a shock of yellow leaves covering the sweet birches looming over the driveway. Further down, I notice that the poison ivy winding up the cherries, too, has turned to gold since the previous Friday. A week later, the maples and sumacs turn to impossibly intense shades of scarlet and amber. Firewood reappears at the grocery store, pumpkins materialize in every shop, and I suddenly develop…
The Amazing Monarch Migration: A Status Report
October 18, 2021[caption id="attachment_273343" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] How are this year’s monarch’s doing? Join us and National Monarch expert Dr. Chip Taylor for our free, virtual event to find out.[/caption]
The monarch butterfly, that large insect perfectly decked out for Halloween-- or a Flyers game-- in its orange and black cloak, undergoes one of the most extraordinary migrations in the animal kingdom. Butterflies across America and even Canada.
The monarch butterfly defies logic, for embedded in a small collection of nerve cells generously called a brain is a GPS directing the insect to fly from Roxborough all the way to a mountain valley…
New Mystery Illness Killing our Birds
August 2, 2021[caption id="attachment_272993" align="alignnone" width="880"] A robin that has passed away from the new mystery bird illness sweeping across the country. Photo courtesy of Tamarack Wildlife Center.[/caption]
Listen to Chris Strub, Director of Wildlife rehabilitation on WHYY's Radio Times discussing this disease (starts at 32:00)
For bird enthusiasts, this spring had an ominous touch of COVID deja vu. Young birds were falling ill with alarming symptoms and dying-- and no one knew the cause. Most commonly impacting starlings, blue jays, and grackles, the illness typically shows up with weeping, crusted-shut eyes and neurological symptoms. And like COVID, some birds are asymptomatic,…
