matttyros's Journal

For this nature walk, I went to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. It was about 6:30 PM, and it had just stopped raining. It got dark outside significantly earlier than I thought it would, which made it very difficult to find fungi to observe. Due to the recent rain, I observed many slugs on my walk, which was interesting because normally I do not see slugs often at all. In terms of fungi that I was able to observe, I saw many variations of earthballs/ dyeballs scattered across the ground in various areas of the reservoir trail. I had also seen a large amount of lichen on the rocks leading down into the reservoir. Lichen are made from a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae, and I thought this could be an interesting example of a fungus.

For this nature walk, I went to the Pine Tree Reserve on campus. It was pretty cold out during the walk, especially since it was after the sun went down. The walk ranged from around 6:40 to 7:10 PM, which meant that the darkness caused it to be somewhat difficult to find species to observe. However, I was able to find all four types of plants (Bryophyta, Polypodiopsida, Gymnosperms and Angiosperms) on the walk; the bryophyta observed was a moss growing on a tree, the polypodiopsida was a fern, likely of the genus Dennstaedtia, the gymnosperm was a pine tree and the angiosperm was a New England Hawkweed. Overall, it was an interesting walk attempting to find observations for each of the 4 main groups of plants.