Beat Summer Heat and Other Summer Fun

Here are some tips for beating the heat:

• Play in the pool!  Great for cooling off.  Play Marco Polo, have jump contests (biggest cannonball splash).
• If you don't have access to a pool, have a water balloon fight.  It's fun!  Make it more fun by playing games, like Capture the Flag, but instead of tagging throw balloons!
• Smaller kids can play in a sprinkler.  That's always a good thing to do if they can't swim.
• When its cooler in the evening, play some volleyball, badminton, and other fun games.

Edible Plants

There are many edible plants in the wild here are some of them and a little about the plants.

Wild Strawberries

The wild strawberry is packed with vitamins A, C, and K.  The leaves are somewhat oval in shape and serrated.  They can be eaten when they come out in the spring and the berries eaten in late summer.  As the picture shows, the plant has 3 leaves on the end of each stem and the flower is white with the yellow center.  Do not eat anything other than this, there are other things that look much like the edible wild strawberry, but are very poisonous!

Clovers

Clovers have a good amount of protein in them.








Dandelions

Dandelions have a lot of vitamin A, C, iron and calcium.  The entire plant is edible.  Eat the leaves while they are young.  If you eat mature leaves they will be bitter.







Thats all for now.

Outdoor animals

These are a two of North Carolina's animals.

This is a Northern Bobwhite.  Bobwhite are related to Turkeys and Chickens.  These little birds are 10 inches long and somewhere around afoot wingspan and weighs 6-8 ounces.   They like to eat seeds, insects, fruit, and tender leaves.  This bird loves the grassy areas and nests in groups called coveys.  The male and female can be distinguished by the feather coloration on their heads.  The males have white and black head feathers and the females have a brownish head feather color on their heads.  If they need to get away from predators then they will either freeze in place and let the predator pass them or they might try to outrun them.  But they may also take flight.  When they take flight the flapping of wings and the explosion of birds is loud if you stumble upon them and they take flight.  The usual flight lasts near 5 seconds and covers close to 150 ft. 
Quail live short lives, which is around 5 years, and usually less than 20 percent live to a year.  To be 3 years old in quail standards is a well lived life.  A 5 year old quail in quail standards is very old.  The usual loss of life is because of predation.  Even the eggs are hunted.  A rat snake will eat eh eggs and if it catches the adults it will eat them too.  To counter this, Quail are high productive breeders, which is God's way of designing them.

This is, as you probably know already, is a Whitetail Deer.  These deer are strong swimmers and fast runners.  They also can run up to 30-40 miles per hour to get away from something if they need to.  Some of their favorite foods are grasses, vegetables in gardens, and acorns.  They like creek and river bottoms, woodland, and grass plains.
The breeding season (or the "rut") happens in autumn when the bucks start to mark off their territory and challenge any bucks that stray into their territory looking for does.  By the way, bucks don't have horns but they have antlers.  Horns stay there forever on the skull while the antlers fall off yearly and grow back the same year.  After the rut things on the deer calender quiet down and in January - February the bucks lose their antlers and in the spring does give birth to 1 to 2 fawns.

For more information visit: http://www.ncwildlife.org/

Learning About the Outdoors

Hi kids, and everyone!
If you are thinking about learning about the outdoors, this would be a good place to start.  I will help you learn how to identify a few trees by their leaves and learn about a couple animals.

Trees

This leaf is from a White Oak tree.  Do you know what its seed is called?  I know you know the name of the seed but maybe you don't know it comes from this tree.  The seed is called an acorn!

This leaf is from a Hickory Tree.  Its seed is called a Hickory Nut.

This leaf is from a tree called the Sugar Maple.

Animals

 
 This is an Eastern Gray Squirrel.  And one of its favorite foods is acorns!  The Eastern Gray Squirrel makes its home up in the trees by making nests and it also lives inside trees where trees are hollow.

This is a picture of a Whitetail Deer.  This is a buck, or a boy deer.  See the things coming out of the buck head?  Those are called antlers.   The does, or, girl deer, don't have antlers like bucks do.  Does don't have antlers at all.  Whitetail Deer love to eat grass and all kinds of plants, even acorns!