Day 3 of Volunteer Naturalist Training

Day 3 of training was all about plants, trees, and forestry… I learned a heck of a lot and have been spewing out interesting facts on hikes for the past week.

I remembered to take picures in class this time …
Here’s one amazing fact…
Did you know the Aster Family which is what this sunflower is in …

is actually made up of thousands of little flowers!? Each seed in a sunflowers face is actually a flower itself!? What?!

They gave us a flower to dissect and see for ourselves…

All those little pieces are the flowers! Crazy! This blew my mind…

Look at that cute little flower!

Quite a different plant from this lily, a much more obvious example of a single flower ( :

Could you fill this out? I probably still couldn’t!

That’s a table of books the botanists suggested… Meet the Natives seemed like her favorite one because it was the most used.

They also said they really liked this lady’s book too…

I guess this book by Weber is the go to standard for most botanists in my parts.

The second half of the day was about trees and forestry. They gave us a bag and we had to identify all the conifer fronds that were inside.

Pretty fun activity actually.

And then we got to learn about our forestry division and fire prevention. Apparently people get all up in a tizzy about cutting down trees but when they show historical pictures it gets the idea across that there were a lot less trees here before we came along and stopped the regular power of the forest fires.

They have many techniques for how to deal with it the citizens really make it hard. I understand both sides. But I appreciate the art he’s bringing to it. There is fire management and then there is forest restoration… both solve the fire problem in different ways.

This is fire management -
Before:

And After:

Obviously their aren’t the same spot but you get the idea, a crowded forest that is then thinned evenly so trees are only a certain distance apart.

But check out what forest restoration looks like…

They don’t just evenly thin trees, they keep it more random like the way a forest would really be. Leaving nice sections of open grassland and meadows with clusters of trees and patches of forest. If you hike our forests you’ll see that and I for one think it’s absolutely gorgeous. And it gives the native grasses and wildflowers more room to get the sun they need!

Another super cool thing is that they chip a large portion of the trees they thin and use these to heat their public buildings with huge super efficient boilers! How awesome! But they have so much wood chip that they still have to pay 60k a year for people to haul it away. He said he’d love to find a way to use those chips and get rid of that huge disposal cost. Running crypto miners maybe?

Anyways hope you learned a little bit too!
XO –Jay Jay

Check out Day 1 of Natralist Training
And Day 2