connortp's Journal

I went to Austin, Texas over the weekend to visit some friends and they took me to Lake Travis to go swimming and boating. The weather that day was very hot and sunny with the temperature being around 90°. The water was warm and there were a lot of trails and places to hike around the lake. I went on one of these trails and saw a lot of plant diversity. Most of my observations consisted of vascular plants and I first spotted a lot of Horseweed growing near the water, which is a vascular plant belonging in the clade of angiosperms. I also found some cacti. For example, the Eastern Prickly Pear is a also an angiosperm belong in the vascular plants. As I continued to walk, I saw a lot of flowers, also classified as angiosperms/vascular plants. I saw the common lantana with its purple flowers, and the Texas Creeping-Oxeye with its yellow flowers. I was looking for some more different plants and I eventually found these Junipers which are seedless vascular plants classified as gymnosperms because they are conifers. I was surprised by this because it looked like these blue fruit balls were growing off of the leaves. My final observation was of the evergreen sumac, another vascular plant that is an angiosperm. Its fruit was red and had these hair-like strands coming out of it. Thankfully, I did not touch the fruit because it is actually poisonous to humans similarly to poison ivy. Overall, I really enjoyed the summer weather as opposed to the colder weather I will experience soon here in Boston.

I went for a walk in the Houghton Garden conservation area and then went to the Hammond Pond Reservation. It was a sunny and cool autumn day, and the fall season was even more noticeably this time with more yellow, red, and orange leaves falling on the ground. I saw a lot of fungi on my walk. The first one I saw was the common lichen, which was nearly everywhere on dead branches and trees. Then I went off the trail and next to a dead tree where I found some more fungi, called puffballs. As I continued my hunt for fungi, I found more mushrooms called Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata. I realized the easiest way to find these fungi is to go to spots with lots of dead matter because this is where the fungi are most likely to flourish. The autumn season also makes it much easier to find these fungi growing on dead matter. The most interesting fungi I found was the artist's bracket and the Trichaptum because these fungi looked like clams or some other kind of mollusk. Some other species that I thought were interesting were the American Bittersweet, which looked like edible berries, and the redshank, which were coming out of the moss almost everywhere. Near the end of my walk towards Hammond Pond, I almost ran into some poison ivy, but I was lucky to spot it before touching it. Houghton Garden is a nice place to visit and the pond there is quite beautiful.

I took a long walk through the Webster conservation area and then went to Hammond Pond near BC on a sunny and warm autumn day. It is autumn so many of the leaves are yellow and orange, and they are falling off the trees. The first thing that I observed a lot of was moss. It was everywhere on trees, rocks, and the soil. Then as I continued walking towards the enormous rocks, I noticed lots of insects, especially black ants. Then I walked some more and found a small spider that I thought looked like a wolf spider, but it was an American nursery web spider on a piece of decaying wood. As I looked to the areas off to the side of the trail, I noticed many trees that were decaying and that had fallen over. I walked over to some and found fungi growing on the trees and breaking down the dead matter. These specifically were mushrooms like the common bonnet. Finally, my last stop was at the pond where I noticed Canadian geese swimming in the pond. It was interesting to watch them swim in the pond and follow each other around. There seemed to be a leader of the group. They even walked out of the pond next to me and were shaking the water off their feathers. I had never visited these trails before and I really enjoyed walking through the peaceful woods. I wish that I had seen more animals, but all I saw were squirrels, some common birds, and chipmunks. I will definitely be returning here in the future.