Week 2

Tuesday April 15
9-10am
Partly Sunny, 55 degrees Fahrenheit

After a beautiful weekend of sunny weather I was excited to return to Ravenna Park and see how much had changed in the week since my last journal entry.  Walking through the city it has become apparent that the flowers of spring are really kicking it into high gear, beautiful displays can be found all over from gardens to roadsides and it was my hope to see more of this blooming activity in Ravenna Park, and I was not disappointed.  I was pleased to hear that our class would be meeting in Ravenna Park on Tuesday, this would give me a good opportunity to have an even greater explanation of a lot of the plant life found here in addition to presenting me with time to document and record changes in the parks ecology.

During our walk around of the park our instructors helped us to develop the necessary identification skills to spot all the different species of trees that were found in the park.  In our time here we were able to successfully locate and identify Douglas-fir, western hemlock, western redcedar, red alder, bigleaf maple, grand fir, western white pine, sitka spruce, ponderosa pine, and Pacific yew.  One new development I had noticed was the size of the bigleaf maples' leaves had begun to grow, and their dangling flower groups were very apparent.  In addition many flowers were really starting to shine, the small pink flowers seen in last weeks blog (which I have now identified as salmonberry) were even more prominent.  In addition, other flowering plants such as red-flowering currant with it's multitude of small bright pink flowers that grew in bunches was also very beautiful right now.  The amount of insect life I noticed this week also seemed to be up from last week, I encountered a number of flying bugs such as a bumblebee and mourning cloak, in addition to some creepy crawlers like the daddy long legs.  Like last week, a multitude of songbirds could be heard and the parks interior seems to returning to a time of plentiful life, and will most likely become even more beautiful as the spring season progresses.

A new growth of bigleaf maple leaves comes to life along with its flowers.

A mourning cloak butterfly sits on a grand fir tree.

Artists fungus growing on an old bigleaf maple tree.

This fuzzy bumblebee seemed to be enjoying the beautiful spring day perched on this dandelion.

We found this rather strange looking plant and identified it as devils club.

A daddy long legs had made itself at home on this leaf.

For my first set of sketches this week I have decided to sketch out a rather beautiful plant that seems to be at peak bloom right now, the red-flowering currant.  

For my next set of sketches I decided to do a memory sketch of a red alder tree, a quick gesture sketch of a red huckleberry branch, a contour sketch of a grand fir branch, and a memory  sketch of a western red cedar.  These were all species I was able to locate within Ravenna Park.