Tag: virtual field trips

Which trees make up our forest? Why do oaks, beeches or pines rule in your nearest patch of woods? It’s the rocks, soil and shape of our hills (and mountains, in neighboring states) that decide who grows where.

It might seem like all of the forest is the same. But pay attention, and you’ll find completely different trees, plants and animals living in one spot than another. Animals come to feast on the acorns in a chestnut oak patch on a dry, sunny ridgetop. But at the bottom of the hill, you can hunt mushrooms in the moist shade of hackberries and blue ash.

Learn to see the many forests within our forest on this week’s virtual field trip!

Virtual Field Trip: Friday

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, April 9 at 10:30 am

On Fridays from 10:30 to 11:15 AM, we hold a Zoom call live from the woods for anyone who wants to join. This week, we’ll take a closer look at the Appalachian Ohio trees we take for granted, hiking the forest from top to bottom!

As more and more people return to in-person school, we will stop doing weekly virtual field trips after April 16. We’ll continue to announce less frequent public virtual field trips through the summer, and to be available for private virtual field trips for classrooms and groups.

If you haven’t registered for our field trips before

Teachers: Your class is welcome to join this public virtual field trip. You can also contact us to schedule a virtual field trip just for your class

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How the hills shape the trees

A brilliant botanist named Dr. Lucy Braun studied forests in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee in great detail during her career in the previous century. She published an amazing book in 1950 about her studies, Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America, that has really helped me to understand our forests. She called Appalachian forests “mixed” forests because of how diverse the trees can be!

How diverse are our forests?

If you were to hike through a tropical rainforest near the warm equator, there are so many kinds of trees that you may see each species only once or twice on a several mile walk. In a tropical rainforest, you can be pretty sure that two trees next to each other are different species.

Travel far north to the cold and snowy boreal forests of northern Canada, however, and there are only a few kinds of trees. The same handful of species dominate miles and miles of forest. You can be pretty sure that, in the northern forests, two trees next to each other are the same species. 

Southeast Ohio is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of tree diversity. Walking through your favorite forest in our neck of the woods, you will sometimes see the same tree species next to each other. Just as often, you will see different trees next to each other, because we have many tree species in our forests (Ohio Department of Natural Resources has about 70 tree species in their common trees of Ohio field guide). 

Why are forests so different in these examples? What are some differences between tropical rainforests, Ohio, and northern Canada? We would love to hear your answers!

 Our hills create lots of diverse micro–habitats: places with different temperatures, resources, and moisture than other parts of the forest. To figure out what kinds of trees will grow, look at:

– What rocks and soil are there?

In Athens County, Ohio, sandstone makes up most of the bedrock (the solid stone underneath the soil and plants). Sandstone is acidic and crumbly; you might have seen sandstone rock shelters like Old Man’s Cave.

But every now and then there’s a patch of limestone, and you’ll see trees and plants that are rare here! For example, eastern cedars are everywhere around Cincinnati, where limestone is common. But I’m surprised when I see one here, where limestone is rare.

The hills also impact soil. Soil might be thin or gone at the top of hills. That’s because water washes the soil down the hill. You have to be a tough tree to grow out of rock! Virginia pine is a tree that usually grows only at the very tops of ridges: straight out of the sandstone rock, where there’s no dirt, and where the ground is very dry.

Meanwhile, that soil and old leaves build up at the bottom of the hill. The soil might be inches thicker down there! It’s easier for many kinds of trees to use that kind of soil.

– How wet or dry is it?

Appalachian forests get a lot of snow and rain. It’s wet here! But it doesn’t stay wet everywhere because of our hills. The water drains down from our hills into creeks and rivers. The top of the hill is dry. The bottom of the hill is wet (there might even be a creek). There might be flat spots where the rain doesn’t drain off as well

But other trees could not survive in such wet areas. Many of our tree species

Have you ever heard a sycamore tree called a “mushroom tree”? Sycamores grow in moist ground along creeks–and tasty morel mushrooms love moist spots too!

– How much sunlight does the hill get?

Some hills face south, others north, east, or west. Because Ohio is in the northern hemisphere, the sun is always in the south part of the sky. South-facing hills get more sunlight: they’re warm and the water dries up. The north side of hills gets less sunlight: it’s cooler and wetter.

The hills also create many different microclimates: shady ravines

So some trees like growing on different sides of the hill. Look for sugar maples (which gives us maple syrup) on the cool, shady north side of the hill.

On the wet side of the spectrum, species like butternut and kingnut hickory only grow very close to creeks. Between the hickory nuts and the pawpaws growing fruit beneath them

Dominant trees

All these variations mean you find many kinds of dominant trees in Appalachian forests. Dominant trees are whatever kinds of trees are found the most often in the forest. These species include:

• many types of oaks
• hickories
• American beech
• several types of maple trees
• sweet buckeye
• basswood
• tuliptree
• sycamore
• ashes
• cucumber magnolia

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• and even more–depending on where exactly you are!

Why does it matter which tree rules? Dr. Braun wrote that “each member of the forest community plays its part.” These trees and other plants form the beginning of an amazing food chain!

In this food chain, trees and plants feed over 1300 species of moths. Then 220 species of resident and migratory birds that eat the moth caterpillars…and so on!

Meanwhile, lots of our trees make nuts

• chipmunks,
• squirrels,
• mice,
• deer,
• and even birds like wild turkeys, blue jays, and red-headed woodpeckers. 

Activities: Compare hilltops and lowlands 

Next time you take a walk in the woods, try going high and low to see the differences yourself!

1. Find a forest near a stream, wetland, or just at the bottom of a hill. Then find a forest on top of a hill. Compare them!
   1. Use your senses. How does each spot smell or look? Do you hear different birds or sounds? How does the air feel on your skin?
   2. Collect as many different types of leaves as you can in each location and compare. Are there any matches? Are there any that are different? How many different types did you find? 
   3. Grab a handful of soil from the low area and from the ridgetop. How are they similar? How are they different?
   4. Think about the questions in the post above: What rocks or soil are there? How wet or dry is it? How much sunlight does it get?
       
2. Fold a piece of thick paper in half and get it wet. Set the paper out in the sun with one side facing the sun and the other side facing away from the sun (you can also use a compass, and face one side north and the other south).
   
   Watch which side dries out faster, or even time it.  What difference might that make to plants? Try taking a compass on your next hike and see if you can guess which hills face north and which face south.

If I had to choose a favorite day of the week, it would be Sunday. I roll out of bed in my homemade pajamas with breakfast on my mind. I have more time to make breakfast, so I make French toast, waffles, or blueberry pancakes. It’s hard to pick my favorite. But the same thing always goes on top: maple syrup. 

Sticky and sweet, maple syrup adds a soft golden flavor to any food. You can buy it in glass bottles or plastic jugs to deck out your Sunday breakfasts. But before it reaches the store, maple syrup starts in forests like ours in southeast Ohio. Maple syrup and honey are the only local ways to sweeten your food!

On this week’s virtual field trip, educator Joe will show us how to get the sweet liquid goodness out of maple trees and into your belly.

Here are some options for getting to know nature’s sweetener:

Attend the virtual field trip, Friday, March 5th at 10:30 am on Zoom.

Virtual Field Trip, March 5th at 10:30 am

Every Friday from 10:30 to 11:15 AM, we hold a Zoom call live from the woods for anyone who wants to join. This week, Joe will show us how he makes syrup and how to identify maple trees.

If you haven’t registered for our field trips before, register here to get the link in your email:

When you register, your registration is good for every Friday.

Teachers: Your class can join these public field trips, or contact us to set up a zoom field trip just for your classroom.

What is maple sap?

A maple is a kind of tree. Syrup is made from the sap that flows in a maple tree.

Sap is a liquid that moves up and down inside a tree, just behind the bark. Sap moves water and nutrients to parts of the tree that need it. It makes trees strong and healthy. If you’ve ever seen sticky, clear globs on the outside of tree bark, you were likely looking at that tree’s sap.

When leaves photosynthesize

All maple trees have sap inside them. The best sap for making maple syrup, though, comes from sugar maple trees. The name doesn’t lie: a sugar maple has more sugar in its sap than any other species of maple tree.

Sugar Maples

Good news for us: sugar maple trees call southeastern Ohio home. Sugar maples lose their leaves year after year, making them a deciduous tree. Most trees in southeast Ohio forests are deciduous, so sugar maples fit in.

Many other states in the eastern United States are lucky to have sugar maples, too. The green parts of this map show places with the right climate and habitat for sugar maples to grow. Notice that the green extends into Canada, too.

Your turn: Find Sugar Maples

Take a walk to see if you can find any sugar maples! They are common even in parks and neighborhoods. Joe likes to find them in the spring and summer, so he’s ready to tap them when February comes.

Sugar maples often grow on the middle or low part of hills, or near old farms (where people planted them). They do better in backyards than near the street, where cars and salt bother them.

Here are some ways to recognize a sugar maple:

• Look for opposite branching. The twigs on any maple always grow directly across from each other. The leaves do this too. Only a few trees in Ohio do this.

• Look at the buds on the end of the twig. There’s one long bud in the middle, and two short ones on either side. You can identify a maple even when there are no leaves with this trick!

Sugar maple buds are brown (like the picture above). If the buds are red, you have a red maple instead (like the picture below)

• The leaf looks like the flag of Canada. A sugar maple leaf has 5 lobes (or sections). Red maples have only 3. Another way to think about it is that sugar maple leaves are pointed

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  , not round at the bottom. What differences do you see between the red and sugar maple leaves in this picture?

Maybe picturing the Canadian flag will help you remember!

From sap to syrup

Maple syrup can’t be made year round. Sap only starts flowing when the weather is just right. The best time for tapping trees for sap is right now! Cold nights below freezing and warmer days create a freeze/thaw cycle that pushes the sap through the tree. But how do you get to the sap?

Watch this video from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to see how to “tap” a sugar maple tree to collect the sap.

Sap isn’t the same thing as syrup, though. Buckets of sap have to be boiled for a long time. Boiling evaporates the water and leaves behind the sugar. It takes 30-40 gallons of sugar maple sap to make 1 gallon of syrup!

Below is a photo of Joe’s sap boiling station. He has a thermometer to measure the temperature of the sap.

Voila! Boiled sugar maple sap makes maple syrup.

Who first made maple syrup?

It certainly wasn’t Joe! Indigenous folks have been making maple syrup to flavor their food long before Europeans colonized this land. The first Europeans to make maple syrup in the 1500s learned from the Native Americans.

Here are some early ways Indigenous people used to make maple syrup:

• Repeatedly freezing the sap and getting rid of the ice. The water in the sap will freeze, but the sugar won’t!
• Boiling the sap on hot rocks to evaporate the water out.

The Anishinaabe have a story about why it takes so much sap to make just a little syrup! Listen to an educator at Cumming Nature Center tell it:

Other Indigenous groups in the Great Lakes region

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The maple syrup economy

Humans have long depended upon the natural world for food and trade. Maple syrup is no exception. Not only do we use maple syrup as a sweetener on our pancakes and in our teas, many people make their living from processing sap into maple syrup.

Twelve states in the US produce maple syrup to sell. In Ohio, 900 people boil sap into maple sugar to sell in stores and at farmers’ markets. Those 900 producers make 100,000 gallons of maple syrup each year. Maple syrup contributes $5 million to Ohio’s economy each year. Sugar maple trees provide us with a natural sweetener, but it also provides many folks with an income to house and feed their families. Where would we be without sugar maple trees?

Next time you jump out of bed for a Sunday breakfast, thank sugar maple trees and Indigenous people who inhabited this land before us for maple syrup. And maybe after this week’s Virtual Field Trip, you can make your own like Joe.