Live Oak Park may not seem like the place to take a nature walk... until you begin to explore! There are trails all through the woods behind the disc golf course and a neat little lake with a few little hidden coves excellent for nature observation! It was a beautiful day! It had just rained in the morning, so it was nice and cool... and all the flowers were happy.

Taylor spotted a lot of these little plants. I'll have to do some research to find them. I thought they were just tree seedlings. Taylor showed me that if you press your finger into the middle of the leaves, they will close up. She believes that they are bug eating plants. If you look at the two stems of leaves on the top left, you can see where we tried this. They're closed up rather than fanned out like the rest.

Here's another little sign of spring. The camera didn't focus on that little flower like I had hoped, but you get the idea. :-) This flower is called a Prostrate Lawn Flower. How original.

Here's another yellow flower called an Englemann Daisy. Check out the shape of those leaves. Those would be fun to draw!

Ah, isn't this a welcome site? I grew up calling these buttercups, but the real name for them is
the Evening Primrose.
This is an excellent website to help you identify our local wild flowers:
http://uvalde.tamu.edu/herbarium/

This is another favorite of ours:
http://www.texaswildflowerpictures.com/wf_index.htm

Now for our tree study. We have decided to choose a tree to study for a year. We'll be back each season to observe changes to the tree and add those observations to our nature notebooks.

My choice was the native Huisache (pronounced 'wee sach') Tree. It is also called the Sweet Acacia Tree. These trees can be found from the Texas Hill Country down to Northern Mexico. They're easy to identify in the spring when they have their sweet smelling, ball-shaped yellow flowers.
The Huisache Tree was named by the Nahuatl Indians from Mexico. This tree was a sign that winter was over.

Upon investigating some of the branches of the tree, we discovered a lot of healthy lichens, the flat growths you see there. You know the air quality is good when it is light colored or green. It is bad when it is gray or black. I'm not sure about the leafy looking moss growing there. We haven't identified that yet.Taylor's tree was quite an impressive find! We spotted some lovely purple flowers covering a tall, but not so wide tree. My camera ran out of battery power at precisely this moment. So, I had to wait until we got home to take pictures of the flowers and leaves.
We will go back very soon to take pictures of the tree. The dark flower in the picture is not one that belongs to Taylor's tree. That is called Blue-Eyed Grass. The tree flowers have a wonderfully strong, sweet fragrance. It took me a few days to finally identify this tree.
So, do you want to know? It's not native to this country. It was imported from Asia and planted here as an ornamental tree. It does produce berries, but they are poisonous to humans if ingested. Enough clues? It's a China-Berry Tree!

We'll be back to observe these two trees in the summer, but we'll go back for some pictures during this week. The next group nature walk is planned for Warbler Woods where we'll observe an abundance (hopefully) of migratory birds!