Skip to main content

Nature Observation 2

For my second nature blog, I walked around campus for a bit to find a subject I liked. Since I wrote about a tree for my first nature blog, I decided to shift my focus, and look down, for my second one. I walked to one of my favorite spots on campus, which is also one of the most underrated spots in my opinion: the sundial circle right next to Ed Landreth Hall and the Walsh Performing Arts Center. I have always liked it because it is a little garden unlike most of TCU’s other beds. Various flower bushes encircle a concrete pad with a sundial painted on the floor and a small pedestal rising up bearing another little sundial. I like the circle of dense greenery speckled with color rising knee length high, sequestering off a little astronomic sanctuary. Because the spot is nestled away from most of main campus, it is also always quiet and never busy. It always feels so peaceful when I walk by to my theater history class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.

I often look over at the aerial activity in the bushes’ atmosphere as I walk by, but today I went in for a closer look. A bee, one of the only two types of insects that I enjoy, buzzed around one bush looking for a flower to pollinate. The black and yellow fuzzball peacefully drifted around the leaves, lightly touching them. Little yellow and purple flowers spotted the otherwise densely green bush. Or at least, I think it was a bush. I could not quite tell if all the little vines were connected to one spot in the ground or if they were the result of free reign for a bunch of plants to grow into a little forest of their own. In any case, the bee had ample options to choose from, assuming the taste of that kind of flower was to his liking. There were also a couple of butterflies, the other kind of insect that I enjoy, flitting around the flowers. They looked like the classic monarch butterfly everyone is familiar with, but these were the miniature version. Black veins webbed the butterflies’ orange wings, which were only about an inch or an inch and a half in total length. They were like little pieces of paper someone had dropped, and the wind was carrying them along the flowers. 

Whereas my nature blog last week had a subject much larger than myself, this observation has much smaller content. I liked how little the flowers on the plant were. Some were yellow, and some were light purple, but all of them were the size of the pad of my thumb. Each flower was actually a cluster of twelve to fifteen even smaller flowers, each with a tiny white dot at the center. The perfect size for the bees and mini butterflies. My observation this week reminded me that the small things are as important and interesting as the large things.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nature Doesn't Wait for You

Ever since Cameron Potter from the TCU Outdoors Center came to our class and spoke about what he likes about nature, I have thought about what he said. He talked about the ethics of being in nature and sharing that space with other people, animals, and other living beings. It resonated well with our larger discussion of how humanity has treated the environment since the Industrial Revolution. His words were a good reminder that even though we feel like we have no control over governments and international supply chains, we can control what we do as individuals. We have our domain in which we live, and we can control how we behave within that. If I spend time outside, it is my responsibility to leave the place as I found it. Just as we clean up after ourselves in a self-serve restaurant, or how my mom used to tell us to leave our cousins’ house exactly as we found it when we stay over, we must simply clean up after ourselves. It is good manners within society, and those manners extend ...
1 comment
Read more

Some Mesquite Misfortunes

Today marked our third class day spent at the Fort Worth Nature Center, and it continued our hands-on outdoor learning, although it was a bit more painful than our past two Nature Center outings. Our first day, we used picks and shovels to dig trenches in the mud for a big water tank, and the second day we used large clippers to clean up the bison observatory deck. Today, however, we got to go a bit more into the ‘field,’ literally. We were tasked with clearing the mesquite trees that grow in one of the bison pastures. We gathered up our tools, the clippers and mini-saws, and got to work. Each Nature Center outing has involved a new type of physical activity that exercises my body in ways it has not experienced before, and this excursion was no different. I quickly discovered that many of the mesquite trees were too thick for the clippers, so I switched to the little saws. I worked at the trees, sometimes moving quickly from one to the next, and sometimes getting hung up on a particul...
1 comment
Read more

Blog Post 1

Tuesday, September 4 For my first nature journal entry, I will share about my outdoor experience this weekend at our family farm and how our previous class period affected my observation of nature in a new way. When my Dad was little, my grandparents bought about 200 acres of land in the middle of the Ozark Mountains in northwest Arkansas. Since then, Big Piney, as the property is called after the creek that runs through it, has become a special place where my family and friends can get away from the world. This year, my Dad bought 30 more acres of adjoining land and built a second cabin, which he amusingly calls “Pineycello,” as if it were of such architectural beauty as Thomas Jefferson’s home. Due to my working in Fort Worth this summer, I was the only family member who had not yet seen the new cabin, so I joined him for a day trip to the farm. While we were there, we drove down to the creek to cool off. I had not been to Big Piney in months, and I hadn’t been during the ...
1 comment
Read more