Let’s Chat about January Nature Study!

I live in the Great Plains, in north eastern South Dakota.  We live in a small town of 2oo people.  Our house sits on a piece of land approximately 75″ x  165″  with neighbors on either side & across the street.  We are 1,877 feet above sea level :)( this was interesting to me and a surprise)   Our visibility is 10 miles on a clear day.  Our small town sits down in a valley & they say we are in the foot hills of the Coteau hills further north of us.  We are about 2 hours from Fargo, North Dakota.  On Saturday we started out the day at 8:00 with 14 below and 31 below windchill.  Sunday afternoon we had a temp of 11 below.  We get a lot of drifting of snow so it can be challenging to know a true snowfall amount sometimes.  Our first real snowfall gave us maybe 6 in of snow.  The winds were at 40 plus mph. & left bare ground in places and 3ft drifts in other areas. This was in our own yard. It will vary by locations.

We can get a lot of fog which can last for a day to several days, which results in some very pretty frosty trees and landscape.  Last week we woke to a sunny day with frosty trees, so at the request of my son, we drove around the area taking pictures with our cameras. We printed and pasted a few choice ones into our nature book. I am just not talented enough to to even try to paint the beautiful scenes, so we resorted to our cameras. 🙂

I have also been simply recording the days temperature, windchill, wind speed, whether it’s sunny or cloudy, how much snow fell etc.

We have a bird feeder so we could also be recording down the birds that come.  We’ve had the feeder for years  and the one year we had a hawk hanging around and was catching the birds so we took  the feeder down for awhile.  It was quite distressing to my bird lover to see the dead birds it would drop or fly off with.

Last night we got to watch the Lunar eclipse.  My youngest son got some pretty nice pictures of it, so we will also be putting that into our Nature Books ( again using the camera ) 🙂   I may also try drawing it in as well using colored pencils.

If you can stand the cold, the night sky is plastered with stars on a cloudless night. We have very little lights to hinder our view.  Another son will at times go out with his phone and take pictures of the night sky.  We have a 20-25 minute drive to the closest town for shopping.  We often like to look at the night sky on the way home.

We get red squirrels & they are fun to watch.

One thing we started doing was making a title page for each new month and maybe writing down a quote or a poem.  I got the idea from Exploring Nature Around the Year  365 Days of Nature Journaling  from http://www.raisinglittleshoots.com

Adding just for the info. , the ages of my 4 children are 12-19

Thank you for the inspiration in this post! I’ve been at a loss. We’ve just moved to Kansas and I’m not used to the cold and snow. This will help me a lot! Thank you!!

I don’t have much to add to all that has been said. We are in central PA and have just gotten into the coldest part of the winter. I am only homeschooling my youngest, who is 15, and neither of us care to venture out too much in sub-freezing temperatures. We observe from inside the house or riding in the car. We recently had snow and then some rain on top of it, which caused ripples or a wavy pattern in the snow. Some places it looks like cotton balls all squished together.

Probably our favorite this time of year is watching the birds. I have a feeder which draws LOTS of juncos, as well as chickadees, sparrows, and, just yesterday, had a pair of cardinals. I’m excited because, after all these years, I have added something to keep the squirrels out of the feeder! I also have a suet block hanging from a tree branch. The squirrels would always get to that and eat it up. I actually rigged something up to keep them off the suet. I hung the suet from the bottom of a big plastic planter and hung the planter from the branch. I have watched a squirrel stretch down to the planter. I said, “Go ahead and try it!” He didn’t. I think it would have been funny if he had:) My reason for the suet is because for a number of years we’ve had woodpeckers. We really enjoy watching those. We regularly have one or two downy woodpeckers, possibly a yellow-bellied sapsucker (not 100% sure if I have that breed correct), and most exciting of all, recently we had a pileated woodpecker hanging from my 4×4 suet square!

You can obviously tell we love watching the birds. My daughter has a parakeet, so we can enjoy one right here in our house. He sits on our shoulder and will sometimes lick our cheek (I taught him ‘No bite! Give kisses! He has learned the kissing sound:), can even say a few words/phrases, gets a bath under trickling water from the faucet while on our hands, and even likes orange juice pulp left on the side of a cup.

Sorry for rambling about the birds. They are just one part of God’s beautiful creation. So, while we are stuck inside during the cold weather, that is the highlight of those days. I didn’t mention the deer. We have lots of deer around and often on our own 1+ acre, year round. Not so much now with the snow and ice. But, we like watching them as well. During the nicer weather, we even see flocks of wild turkeys. My daughter loves animals, so animals usually highlight any nature studies we have. She did notice a pretty sunset over the mountains on our way home yesterday. So, we do enjoy the beauty all around us.

Becky, I have traveled as far west as Montana, since I have a sister living there. So, I have been through South Dakota a number of times. One year we were there, we visited DeSmet, where the Ingalls lived. Driving on the interstate in SD, made me think of why Charles Ingalls wanted to move out there. I don’t remember exactly how it was stated. But, he liked that open sky. It is amazing, especially, as we saw on one trip, lightning in the sky many, many miles away. We were under blue sky, and a long way off, we could see where the storm clouds lined the sky. We can’t see that here in the mountains of PA, so that was a sight for us to see. So, no matter where we live or far away places we travel to, God pleasures us with His beautiful Creation.

Anyone else?  Even if you feel you have nothing to add, it would still be fun to hear where you’re from and what your weather is like.   The way YOU do bird studies just may be an AHA moment for somebody else 🙂  or maybe it’s not birds but something else.  Just go ahead and share!