Vermont State Parks

Looking through binoculars at a bird in the distance. Staying close to home during the COVID-19 pandemic makes any neighborhood feel small. My young daughter and I like to get out for daily adventures looking for new things to discover close to home, and it helps to have something new to focus on with each adventure, to refresh the experience even when we are visiting the same places each time.  These spring days are perfect for bird watching walks. Bird watching is exciting this time of year because all the migratory birds are returning to Vermont. Every day we see and hear a new arrival in our neighborhood. It is fun to keep track and watch for the arriving birds who spent their winter in the south.  I like making a big deal about this adventure by packing small backpacks with items we might need while birdwatching. I have a couple small bird field guides we like to carry, and we usually bring water bottles, snacks, and a notebook and pencil so we can docum...

Tiny mushrooms growing on a log in Woodford State Park - B. Steele A sign of spring you may have overlooked in your yard is mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of larger fungi growing underground, or in a rotting log. There are some cool mushrooms coming out right now that you may be able to find in your own yard because my daughter and I have been finding them. Holding a puffball. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we live right in town, but we live in Vermont so even though we have an incredibly small yard, we have an abandoned pasture to explore nearby. Luckily, we have great neighbors who share this space with us, and they had the whole pasture brush hogged late last fall. This makes it easy to explore and find interesting things like mushrooms. The first really cool mushrooms we found the other day are these round, potato looking, apple sized mushrooms. Using our National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mushrooms , we identified these as tumbling puffball ...