Fall Nature Walk

This week we took our children on a nature walk to observe the plant and animal life now at the beginning of the harvest season. We went back to an experimental farm a mission agency runs, which we had visited a while ago, because it has a few acres of space and some paths we can walk on without having to worry about getting lost.

We saw tons of grasshoppers or locusts hoping all around as we walked down the path, sometimes grazing your shoulder. We found strange bright red pods or flowers growing low to the ground, with green balls inside. The millet tops had mostly been harvested and stacked in piles. We discovered the seeds/grains come off the cone pretty easily with a few rubs of the hand. We looked closely at the difference between the long cone shaped millet (cat tails) and the more fanned out papyrus-looking sorghum. We found a big cement block wall at the end of the property! We sat under a tree where we found a bird kind of like a toucan, but with a thin hooked beak which made a coo-cooing sound. We had no problem finding lots of prickers and dried out shrubs to catch our feet on (Smile On observes that the yellow dried out leaves often mean it could be a sharp plant). There were also colorful butterflies and some type of spider/ant making cone depressions in the sand by sending up a tiny shower of sand in a circular motion. All the plants seemed bigger now, but the biggest difference from the last time we came is that the thick fields of bean plants we had seen growing a month ago were all harvested and now a dried out yellow color sitting in piles in the fields.