Last summer we were so lucky to have Sara Gagné, an urban ecologist from UNC Charlotte, share several great blog posts about exciting ways to explore the nature in your neighborhood during summer. This year, Sara is back to help us do more summer exploring with our Summer 2025 Blog Series: Explore Your Nature Neighborhood. This means you’ll need to come back here to check out a new blog post each week on summer explorations.
I should also mention that most of Sara’s upcoming posts are partnered with nature videos from the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. During COVID, Melissa Dowland’s Education team at the museum created a fantastic series of nature videos to help us all get through the pandemic blues with some sanity. Melissa and her wonderful husband photog, Mike Dunn, have just moved to the Yellowstone area for some serious science and nature action, so while we will miss them dearly here in NC, Melissa’s last conversation with me was that she would like to see something done with these videos. Enter Sara Gagné!
Hopefully, you are familiar with Sara’s blog posts from last summer, but if not, she has a captivating way of guiding you through the ecological wonderland that is your neighborhood. By the time you finish this first activity, I guarantee you will have learned something new about the wildflowers growing all around you that you may not have even noticed previously. Then, make sure you check out Sara’s book, “
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Welcome to the Explore Your Nature Neighborhood Summer Series! I’m writing this introduction from my backyard in Charlotte, where the breeze is rustling the redbud leaves overhanging my deck and robins and towhees are adding the final notes to the morning’s symphony of birdsong. Being outdoors will always remind me of the intense training I undertook as a PhD student studying birds and ground beetles (a diverse group that lives in garden soils, lawns, leaf litter, and other ground covers) in urban landscapes. I spent hour upon hour learning the songs and calls of 120 species so that I could identify each individual vocalizing very early on chilly Canadian mornings in late May, sometimes in backyards and parks and sometimes in still dark forests and wetlands. I also needed to know all the ground beetles at my sites, so I learned how to identify nearly 100 species under the microscope. Within two years, my limited awareness of nature, a product of my upbringing in a classic 1960s-era suburb, blossomed into a deep appreciation for the diversity and intricacy of life that we share our living spaces with. Once I became aware of the myriad birds and beetles that occurred in backyards and parks, I couldn’t stop hearing or seeing them. And I still can’t. Blackpoll warblers on their way north greet me from street trees on the UNC Charlotte campus and I regularly need to stop in my tracks to let a common sun beetle cross the sidewalk in front of me. My everyday world is a much more beautiful, interesting, and friendly place than it was before I learned to identify birds and beetles. This is the power of observation.
In this series, you too will learn how to observe nature in your yard and park so that its wonders are revealed. In eight installments over the summer, I’ll walk you through videos and activities designed by the teacher education team at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. These resources will help you explore and document the creatures and habitats in your neighborhood – everything from the underside of logs to soaring vultures. You’ll learn how making detailed observations in a homemade nature journal, accompanied by creative writing and drawing, develop a deep understanding of and appreciation for natural processes. Also, some of the videos explain how to participate in important citizen science programs that are helping us understand how the natural world is changing all around us. Best of all, the videos and activities are great for any age and level of experience, whether you’re a six-year-old who is making his first nature journal with mom (see below), a middle or high school student interested in developing your interest in the natural world, or just someone who could benefit from the peace and quiet of observing squirrels. Follow along as we start this week by making our nature journal and observing the parts of a flower.
Part I. Creating a Nature Journal
Nature journals are a naturalist’s must-have tool. They function by providing a canvas on which an observer can begin to organize and make sense of the variety of animals, plants, and other living and non-living elements that make up an ecosystem. Even suburban and urban yards and parks are home to an amazing complexity of life and relationships. Once you start observing who is living and what is happening in one of these spaces, you’ll be surprised at how many different types of organisms, going about their business in different ways, occur there. Taking the time to write and draw your observations of nature in a journal helps you to slow down and observe even more, thereby broadening your ecological horizons and ultimately, changing the way you see the world around you.
My six-year-old and I watched as Megan Davis, Coordinator of Teacher Education, demonstrated how to create a nature journal from household items. I grabbed a cereal box from the recycling bin and my son got out construction paper, chopsticks, and elastic bands. My son was able to accomplish most of the steps on his own. He needed help deciding how much paper to include and attaching the chopstick to his journal using the elastic bands. The best part of the activity was decorating the covers of our journals with stickers. We were both very proud of the results!
In addition to or instead of the video, you can follow the step-by-step instructions in this handout. And this handout provides guidance on how to make standard entries in a journal that will help you make sense of your observations. Use your journal as we explore nature in your yard and park in this series and for ad-hoc observations that you make day-to-day in your yard, like what types of birds are at the feeder or how your garden plants are doing. I’ve found it very useful to have a physical journal on hand to make some quick notes and sketches in as things occur around me.
Part II. Parts of a Flower
My son being the six-year-old he is, we immediately rushed out of the house to select a few flowers to observe. We chose coneflower and milkweed from our garden and pink wood sorrel and clover from the lawn. We watched as Melissa Dowland, Manager of Teacher Education, expertly dissected a simple flower to reveal each of its intricate parts. We chose the pink wood sorrel to start with because it had the simplest structure: sepals, petals, stamen, and pistil (check out this handout that defines each part). The North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox refers to pink wood sorrel as a “special, old-fashioned plant.” It’s a beautiful perennial ground cover that adds a pop of pink here and there in our naturalized lawn (no pesticides, no watering, no fertilizer).
As directed by Melissa, my son and I separated the sepals and petals of the pink wood sorrel and taped examples of each in our journals. My son really liked practicing his writing skills by labeling each flower part, aided by Melissa who did the same in her journal. If you choose a small flower like the pink wood sorrel, I recommend using tweezers for handling delicate parts and a magnifier app on your phone for inspecting them. In the case of the pink wood sorrel, the pistil, the female reproductive organ, was too small for us to handle without damaging it, so I grabbed a lily from the garden that had large stamens and pistils we could tape into our journals. My son was very proud that he covered three pages of his journal, whereas I only used one of mine!
Learning about the parts of a flower was a delightful experience for us both. My son had fun learning new facts and practicing his naturalist skills, whereas I spent the better part of an hour totally engrossed in trying to identify, and marveling at, the tiny, delicate structures that are the building blocks of beauty in the natural world. I was struck by the variation in color and architecture across the handful of specimens we collected in our yard (you can also try observing the development of a flower over time described in this handout). My close observation revealed that each flower, its hue and form, was designed to attract visitors. Imagine being an ant or a honeybee and spending most of your time in a colorful world made especially to welcome you and make you feel at home. It’s a nice thought to think of my yard filled with such generosity: gifts for insects that are also shared with anyone who takes the time to look.
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Thank you to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for partnering with the NC Science Trail.
