Kingfisher Tree Club

Houston Mill

We apologize for the blurry photo, but it was the only one we took. Hopefully you can still get a feel for the shape of the leaves. The box elder is a type of maple, but it looks much different from most of its cousins. Its leaves look VERY similar to poison ivy. The only two differences is that the leaves are part of a tree and not a vine and some leaves have five leaflets rather than three.

Though it's not easy to see in this photo, one of the defining aspects of the box elder is that the tree puts out shoots from its truck (particularly at its base), so sometimes these trees seem bush-like. Though it can be mistaken for poison ivy, just remember - if it's clearly not a vine, then it's probably a box elder.

Surprisingly, we found one mountain laurel plant on the path between Hahn Woods and Lullwater Park. This plant grows mainly in higher elevations and is VERY poisonous. Don't put any part of a mountain laurel in your mouth, no matter how pretty the flowers are!

Laurel bark is characterized by a stringy, peeling exterior. It looks very similar to rhododendron.

The Christmas Fern has simple leaflets without teeth or complex fractal patterns as seen in some other ferns. This is a very common fern to the Atlanta-area. And because it's spring, we found some fiddle-heads (new growth) that were beginning to uncurl..

Orange azalea (rhododendron austrinum) is one of the few azalea native to the southeast. Though not as showy as its Japanese sisters (which are commonly planted in people's front yards), it has a sweet smell similar to honeysuckle.

A dash of pink among the gray branches tipped us off that we were among redbuds. These trees flower before growing leaves. And their small red flowers grow directly out of nodes on the bark of the branches and trunk. We were not able find a redbud close enough to the ground to take a close-up shot or to sample their edible flowers.

Maple seed pods are sometimes known as "helicopters" because they spin to the ground when tossed in the air.

Here is a close-up of young maple seed pods. They will eventually turn brown, dry out, and fall off the tree - their aerodynamic design helping them float far from their parent tree.

Though the students had identified beech trees many times throughout the year, we had yet to make it one of our focus trees. Beech is a perfect tree for winter identification because of its smooth, light-gray bark.

Beech can also be identified in the winter because it keeps many of its dead, dry leaves rather than dropping them to the group as most trees do. If you keep your eye out for a tree with light brown, papery dry leaves in the winter, you can assume it's most likely a beech.

We learned that evergreen trees do lose "leaves" (needles), but they lose and regrow them year-round, thus allowing them to stay green all the time.

This tree had more lichen than other loblolly trees. But the geometric shapes and deep canyons in the bark are common to this type of tree.

The loblolly pine has 3 needles in each "bundle."

There were many small red cedar trees growing near the Arabia Visitor's Center. We looked closely at the needles and found that instead of bundles of straight needles (like the loblolly pine), cedar trees have needles that fork and branch.

The bark fo the red cedar is stringy and dry. Excellent for helping start fires. It smells good, too.

Diamorpha (it is red in the winter and early spring)

Yucca

One of the easiest evergreens to identify, the holly tree has waxy broad leaves with prickers on the ends! Be careful when you touch them!

Holly's bright red berries are an excellent way to identify the tree in winter. But don't eat the berries!

The southern magnolia is kin to rhododendron, but grows much taller. Its broad, waxy leaves are well known to most southerners.

Sycamore

Rivercane

Climbing rocks is one of the students' favorite activities!

We explored a small bamboo grove in the Preserve.

The sycamore trees are losing their leaves, but we found one that was easy enough to identify with its broad leaves with multiple points.

The easiest way to identify the sycamore tree is by its bark, which is very flaky. Often, the bark is smooth like a beech tree at the top, but it's usually very flaky at the bottom.

Maple is one of the more recognizable leaves because of the Canadian flag. The leaves look similar to sycamore, but significantly smaller. The students also noticed that maple leaves have many more teeth than do sweet gum leaves.

Here is a close-up of maple tree bark. Though this is not a sugar maple, we talked about how sugar maples can be used to produce maple sugar and syrup in northern states like Vermont.

While searching for a geocache, our group found a giant old Tulip Tree growing at a very strange angle.

On student found a recently-shed snake skin. We met a ranger who said we could keep it, since the Preserve has plenty of snake skin in its visitor's center.

Our group had a nice nice watching turtles, ducks, and geese swim around the lake at the Reynolds Preserve.

Though we didn't take photos of sourwood leaves, we learned that sourwood trees are very good at growing towards light in the canopy. Therefore, if you see a tree growing at a funny angle (like the one in this photo), there's a good chance it's sourwood.

The most obvious physical difference between the leaves of red oak and white oak are that red oak (on the left) has pointy lobes whereas white oak's (on the right) lobes are rounded.

RED OAK: pointy lobes. (When identifying red or white oak, always be sure to look closely. Sometimes undeveloped red oak leaves look rounded, but if you look closely, you'll see little barbs at the end of the lobe if it's a red oak.

WHITE OAK: Rounded lobes. White oaks produce sweeter acorns than red oaks, but they produce a heavy crop of acorns only every three years, whereas red oaks produce a heavy crop every other year.

Students climbing on boulders in the Nature Preserve

Students show off their muscles after climbing up a large boulder.

A student with a particularly large big-leaf magnolia leaf.

Big-leaf Magnolia leaf with teacher's hand for perspective

A back-lit photo of dogwood leaves. We were not able to get close enough to take a photo of the red berries that appear on these trees in early autumn.

Can a dogwood bark? Ha! The students found that the polygonal shapes of the dogwood bark made this an easy tree to identify.

Sweet Gum Leaf

Sweet Gum Bark

Pokeweed

Tulip Tree Leaves

Tulip Tree Bark

Wild Grape Leaves

Grape Vine Bark

Wooly Beech Aphids

Jewelweed