Ellerbe Creek

When should a naturalist NOT hug a tree?
When it is covered in posion ivy!

This morning we went on a nature walk through Ellerbe Creek. Ellerbe Creek is right beside Indian Trails Park, which is just down the road from Oval Park, which is a few blocks from our house. Ellerbe Creek is a beautiful example of nature, with wooded trails through wetlands and forest. Louisa, Mom and I hiked through the trails to study our local environment. Mom says that we do this to start our week off in a good way.

This morning I saw a hummingbird. It was so quick that I didn't get a good look at it. It was getting nectar from flowers, but whizzed off when we came. There were also some berries that reminded us of bloodberries at the ARA in Uganda. We smushed one to see what the insides would look like. They looked just like bloodberries, very gushy but were sunset purple instead of blood red. They were less juicy than bloodberries but Mom said they could still stain our clothes. If you were wondering about the joke at the top of this, we saw many poison ivy vines wrapping their way around trees. Most were as thick as my arm and super, ultra hairy. We read a sign explaining how to recognize vines and trees by looking at the bark instead of craning our necks to look up fifty feet to see the leaves. Before the sign we almost touched a big hairy vine of poison ivy, beacuse it looked cool. That would have been a mistake we would have been itching to stop.

Unfortunately many of the plants there are non-native and spread quickly. This is a problem becasue it kills off native plants, giving animals that are specialized for this area less good food to eat. This happens because people plant non-native plants in their gardens, but these plants have left their specialized predators behind in their native countries. Soon these plants spread to nearby fields and woods and choke out the native plants. For example, this has happened with English Ivy and Honeysuckle vines. (We learned about something similiar at Zion National Park. There is a type of grass, choke something, that burns very quickly but grows back even quicker. This continues to burn and grow back until it is the only thing left in the area, because native grasses can't grow back as fast. It came to that part of the country because its seeds were used to pack china plates in.) After learning this we are considering destroying the hill of ivy in our front yard and planting some native plants instead. Mom learned that the berries like Ugandan bloodberries are actually elderberries and can be made into a jam. Louisa is learning about slugs and snails, because she found a slug on the trail.

What living creature has hairy limbs?
A tree covered in poison ivy.

By Joe
Age 10