We Speak for the Trees!

Today, the Urban Naturalists visited Blackstone Park, once again, to assess the trees in the area! We learned how to identify quite a few species of trees! Jacqui took us on a tree hunt in Blackstone Park where she introduced us to a variety of good-smelling trees.

Jacqui talks to us about bark shape
and color

Some of the trees in our forest are
pretty tall!

Jacqui shows off her favorite tree!

Armani was pretty excited to find a
Sweet Birch, which smelled
like peppermint!

Urban Naturalists getting pumped about trees!

Posing with some trees!

We were able to identify 3 trees in the forest: 

• Black Birch (also known as Sweet Birch) smells and tastes a bit like peppermint when you peel off a bit of its bark
• Beech trees are known for having very smooth bark covering their trunk 
• Mountain Ash has a compound leaf! This means, their leaves are made up of many groups of smaller leaves

We took some notes on these trees and even did some bark rubbings! 

Urban Naturalist John did a bark
rubbing on a the Black Birch

Urban Naturalist Sophia did a GREAT
scientific illustration of the tree

We then ventured closer to the Seekonk River towards the bottom of the hill to see what trees we could find below. We found a few fun specimens:

• Sumac - not to be confused with poison sumac! The sumac tree has the most beautiful red leaves during the autumn and grows big clumps of berries! 
• Sassafras - the leaves of a sassafras tree looks like a dinosaur footprint or a ghost. Even cooler than that - the tree smells like Fruity Pebbles if you scratch it! 
• Red Maple - also called a Swamp Maple. This tree turns a beautiful red color in autumn and is our state tree!

Checking out our Sassafras Tree!

It smells like Fruity Pebbles!

Finally, we finished up our day by playing Nature Ninja! It's a game of quick reactions and tactical movements. Check out the start of our game - where everyone must jump back and yell as loud as they can before becoming silent statues: