Trees: the Trials and Tribulations!

Much of our nature study the past few weeks has been centered around trees, and today was no different.

Because we happen to have a huge, beautiful Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) tree in full view of our front porch reading spot, we began by reading a chapter titled “Sycamore” from Joan Maloof’s book, Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest. In this chapter Maloof decribes (among other interesting things) the many tiny insects that live exclusively on Sycamore leaves. The one we found most fascinating was the Sycamore Lace Bug, which Maloof describes as tiny bugs with “armor made of hardened lace, with clear panels between the lace strands.”

So, naturally we set out to see if we could find one! We were not at all confident due to the lateness of the season and the itty-bittyness of the prey.

But, after much searching…

we did find one tiny bug that looked promising! So we took a closer look with our field microscope. Bingo! We got him!

But he kept moving out of view, so to examine him in detail we took him inside to look at under the dissecting scope. What a fascinating little bug!We could have watched him for hours!

Here is what he looks like:

Like any good nature study success, we followed it up with some nature journaling.

Jbug included a computer printout of the bug, traced it’s name, and then traced around and colored a Sycamore leaf.

Superboy also included the bug photo, plus a big Sycamore leaf that he had pressed a while ago (how convenient!).

Then to round out the morning’s study, we read the Bible passage (Luke 19) about Zaccheaus, who climbed…a Sycamore tree (!) to get a better look at Jesus. Superboy printed that up and added it to his page.

But, that’s not all the leafy fun! What could we do in the afternoon while JBug napped? A nature experiment, of course!

The anticipation of the changing of the leaf colors led us to doing a classic experiment involving seperating plant pigments:chromatography!

Superboy went out to collect some leaves for the experiment and learned a lesson about stinging caterpillars the hard way! He ran across this little bugger hiding under a chestnut leaf and got a nasty sting!

This is the aptly named “Saddleback caterpillar” (Sibine stimulea) and boy, does he give a nasty welt on a tender arm! But Superboy toughed it out and continued with his experiment undaunted.

Once the leaves were collected they needed to be chopped.

The hand method was taking too long, so Superboy decided to turbocharge the process and use my coffee grinder!

Much better results!

Next he added some acetone nail polish remover to extract the pigments. Stinky!

Then he prepared the “chromatography paper” from a coffee filter.

He used a bamboo skewer to “paint” a line of pigment across the bottom of the paper. This took quite awhile as you need to paint many layers to get enough pigment concentrated on the line.

He put the paper into a jar with a small amount of acetone in the bottom,

and watched it creep up the paper…

When the acetone reached the top, he took it out to dry.

Results? Well…you’ll just have to try it yourself and find out!

Well, that was our day learning about trees and a lot of leafy fun!