Paint Chip Play

Spring wildflower season is a great time of year to whip out your paint chip rings for fun color matching with your tiny explorers! A Caliso favorite :)

But while at our local improvement store, we couldn’t help but notice the variety of names to be found on paint chips. Looking through a section devoted to childrens’ rooms, we found several fun descriptions that reminded us of our own “little sprout.”

We collected a few examples to bring home and had little fun with collage making using a few family photos.

Collect a few paint chips the next time you’re picking up a pack of lightbulbs or new plants fo the garden and spread them out on the table. The visual of plenty of color along with their descriptive names will inspire an hour or so of collage making for your child. Or use the names & colors as prompts for your little ones to create some unique drawings or for writing poems and stories. After studying a bunch of paint chip names, you can also have your child come up with their own descriptive names for colors found in your yard or on the trail!



A random handful of paint chips can get

the imagination flowing, try connecting

a bunch of paint color names in a silly

story or poem:

I was taking my turtle named Pudding

for a walk when I came upon a Princess

dressed all in pink. She was very upset

and when I asked her what was wrong

she cried, “I shall not be allowed to eat

Mac and Cheese tonight nor grape juice

popsicles because I oops-ccidently got a

grass stain on my pretty pink overalls

and on the toes of my preciously pink

Ballet Slippers!”

“Oh dear that is a shame,” I sighed. I 

scratched at those two freckles on my

wrist when I suddenly got an idea that

would help Princess Pink! “Hush, Hush”

I comforted her. I can help…



Try This For Nature Fun!

A common shape.

Recently I had fun running around an oasis searching for the "familiar" in an somewhat unfamiliar environment. Unfamiliar in the sense that looking for the common words or descriptions I was in search of, one would not normally consider a natural environment to find these things.

It was a great morning for all of us who participated. We retrained our eyes and brains to observe nature by its components, individual pieces that when looked at them with a different "eye" would present something before us that was actually quiet familiar. For example, natural components like branches became letters of the alphabet, palm fronds became a face, an animal's burrow became a common shape.

Support



This is a great exercise to introduce children who might feel a little apprehensive about venturing into a "wild" environment. Bringing the familiar into the unfamiliar will help young or new naturalists jump into exploring their surroundings without so much of the anxiety that some may have, especially first-timers.

 

Give it try with this short list to get you started--the only rule is that there are no rules, finds are based on each individual's interpretation of that word/description! Have fun photographing your finds or identifying them with a parent partner:

• a common shape(s)
• support
• a letter(s) from the alphabet
• up
• shelter
• stripes
• reflection
• a found face
• 3-colors (in one object)
• opposites

(Don't forget to go over safety/animals/potential hazards important for your chosen environment.)



A letter from the alphabet.





A common shape.



Stripes

 

Taco, Our Desert Tortoise Emerges

Sunday, March 6th, Taco our oldest desert tortoise woke up and made his first appearance in 2011. Our local weather has been so crazy (freezing, rainy, mild, cold, hot, mild, cool-ish), we were beginning to wonder how it might affect our tortoises’ natural hibernation cycles. Particularly our most experienced burrower, Taco. After about a week of mild weather, Taco emerged…albeit slowly.

When I first spotted him, he was nestled in a sunny corner. He woke up to a tortoise yard full of mustard (thanks to our most recent two storms, boo-hiss mustard!), but also a bountiful, green and blooming apricot mallow plant—one of Taco’s favorite desert treats! The bottom layer of mallow branches were already stripped clean of their fresh, crinkly leaves thanks to his post-hibernation appetite and sharp beak. I cleaned and filled his water dish, then let him be to rest in the last of the day’s sun.

Taco polishes off the leaves

and flowers from an apricot

mallow plant stem.

Taco is slowly waking back into his daily tortoise routine. We will continue providing cactus pads and fruit, wildflowers and other desert plants from around our yard to feed his appetite.

Our other two tortoises, Guacamole and Rufus, are beginning to stir in their pet carrier where these siblings sleep out their hibernation. I expect they will be “waking up” any time now. They usually run two weeks behind Taco. They will get a warm water bath in the next couple of days if their activity stays consistent and will soon be back in their own yard.

Spring continues to yawn, stretch, and blink awake on the desert floor.



Nap time.







Wildlife Watching and Scientific Journaling

From our last "Side of Nature: Activity" where we encouraged you to tap into your inner naturalist. Practice wildlife watching like a biologist. We tend to anthropomorphize animals when watching or discussing them. We humanize or assume certain animal behavior usually by assigning human emotion, our own experience, expectation, or reaction to a situation that wouldn’t be true for wildlife whose behavior is mostly based on perpetuating their species.

A great exercise for older children and adults is to journal wildlife activity, including scientific observations, exploring the line between inference and observation. For example, what do you observe in the picture above? An scientific observation might include: bird with blue, brown and white feathers, on a wood structure, with a worm or larva in its beak. An inference would be: a bird that is tired and resting on a wood fence,  or with a worm in its beak that it is taking back to its nest to feed its babies.

This bird may not be tired, but scouting its route instead; from the photo, that fence could be a garden border, not a fence. Even if we watched this bird enter a box nest or tree trunk nest, and emerged without the worm, we still couldn't scientifically say it fed babies without actually observing that behavior or activity (it could've dropped the worm, eaten the worm itself, or fed its mate instead). Practice this type of observation to hone your wildlife watching skills--you'll be amazed at the information you can gain just by watching and learning. Then test/research your theories or inferences through books, online research, or by asking another naturalist or interpretive guide to learn more about the behaviors of specific species you have been watching.

You just might discover that your own scientifically based observations will provide a valuable contribution to a growing knowledge base about the wildlife in your area!

Wildly Romantic

Happy Valentine’s Day from Caliso Learning! We LOVE any chance to gush over our love for nature, and today is no exception. From romantic myth-busting (lobster love in the article below the two links), to life-long bonds, to our planet’s most romantic. Turns out we might learn a thing or two from our wild animal counterparts. For example...

Do you fancy your bond with your sweetheart to be the strongest out there? See which of these love pairs from the animal kingdom you and your sweetie most resemble in 11 Animals That Mate For Life 

Need some romantic ideas that will make your honey swoon? Check out the wild antics animals will employ to attract their dream mates, from flashy dance moves to giving gifts, from decorating to PDA’s in The World’s Most Romantic Animals 

Lobster Myth-busting. Despite the sweetness of the devotional lobster love we’ve watched on “Friends,” lobsters do not mate for life. But according to Dr. Jelle Atema of the Marine Biological Laboratory, lobsters do make tender lovers.

Based on over twenty years of studying lobster mating behavior, Dr. Atema will be the first to tell you that “lobsters have a touching courtship ritual that protects the female when she is most vulnerable.” When a female lobster is ready to molt, she chooses a mate—usually the largest in the area—and approaches his den, turning on the charm by wafting a sex pheromone in his direction. The lucky male responds by “fanning the water with his swimmerets, permeating his apartment with her perfume” and emerging with raised claws. She responds with playful boxing or by turning away (awww, how positively coy). This seems to calm down the male’s aggressive approach and the female proceeds to raise her claws, placing them on his head to let him know she is ready for love.

Together they enter the male’s den, maybe get to know each other a little better, and some time after, “from a few hours to several days later, the female molts. At this point the male could mate with her or eat her, but he invariably does the noble thing…”

With the female in her most vulnerable state, the male gently turns her limp body over onto her back, being careful not to tear her soft flesh. They mate "with a poignant gentleness that is almost human," observes Dr. Atema. After mating the vulnerable female stays a while in the safety of the den until her exoskeleton hardens (about a week). By the end of this brief yet touching encounter, the attraction fades, and the hard-shelled couple part with hardly a backward glance.

Source: The Lobster Society

Froggy Find!

The morning began with one of our "Fledgling Hikers" programs at the Whitewater Preserve with a great group of tiny naturalists and their parents. As always for this program, I was happy to bring my 4-year old son along, this time with the help of my mom, and because the Preserve is one of his absolute favorite places to explore! After the program, we stayed to do a little creek hopping, my son's first time jumping on and off rocks in the small stream. During previous visits, he just wasn't ready to try it, but that day, with other kids around doing it, he decided it was time!

After a few slips and falls (and still loving every minute of it), the other "fledglings" very reluctantly left; and we were getting ready to leave when we heard a frog call nearby. We followed the sound along the stream for only a few yards before we came upon this little Chorus Frog (aka tree frog). What a wonderful way to end our day! 

A King Penguin That's 'One In A Zillion'

We couldn't resist sharing this 2010 article about a King penguin discovered along Fortuna Bay, South Georgia. This rare bird, an all black penguin, has astonished and fascinated biologists. Learn what may be the cause(s) of this one in a zillion occurrence--is it environment or gene related?

Read more and see more photos of this all black penguin by National Geographic photographer Andrew Evans by clicking here.



Photo by Andrew Evans