The Outdoor Insider
Maine Outdoor School's Quarterly E-Newsletter
Issue #30
april 2024
"[Having a MOS program series for a class] can almost guarantee that children may play and explore the outdoors more often than the child without this [series] in their life. Maine Outdoor School has figured out how to make school not feel like work. It's the most natural and serene experience, while learning with children."
- Hancock Grammar School teacher, March 2024
Tracks:
How did MOS leave its mark this quarter?
George Stevens Academy Junior Liberty Farmer with a deer skull
OWL outing group participants at Roque Bluffs State Park
Airline Community School K-2nd graders on a field trip at Baker Hill
Jonesport 1st-grader on a field trip to Backfield Park
MOS is celebrating its 8th birthday this month!
We moved! Our office is now located on Oak Street in Ellsworth.
Launched a new logo thanks to Zeraph Dylan.
Guided 3 OWL outings: birding at Birch Point Trail, studying winter adaptations at Roque Bluffs State Park, and winter phenology at the Frances B. Wood Preserve.
Taught program series at twelve schools!
Taught three programs for local homeschoolers on weather, winter phenology, and maple sugaring
Confirmed Katahdin hikers for the annual Summit for a Cause, peer-to-peer fundraising campaign to benefit Incredible Edible Milbridge.
Opened registration for two of our summer camps, Forest Camp with Downeast Coastal Conservancy and OWLette with Women for Healthy Rural Living.
Welcomed local high school student Liberty Farmer to join our programs and support us with some projects, like cleaning and fixing some teaching skulls, for her independent study project. Thanks Liberty for all your help!
Check out the “MOS in the News” page to see where we’ve shown up in the press!
Community Commendations:
Bernadette, in an orange t-shirt, at Forest Camp in July 2023
This quarter we are honoring the memory of Bernadette Eyerman. Bernadette participated in OWLette camp, Forest Camp, and joined her mom on an OWL canoeing outing with us over the past couple years. She was a nature-loving, wise girl, and we were lucky to have known her.
Please read her touching obituary that includes advice for all of us about how to live more meaningful lives.
Our hearts go out to the Eyerman family.
Biomimicry:
Beaked hazelnuts are quite tasty if harvested with care, but it is neither the nuts nor the beaked quality of this shrub’s fruits that are useful or interesting this time of year. What comes before the nuts—in fact, what allows for the nuts to emerge at all in the long term–are the shrub’s flowers.
Before the bright green leaves burst forth from their buds in the coming weeks, two types of flowers emerge from its branches. The yellow-brown male catkins hang like pendulums, ready for a gust of wind to carry their pollen away. Above the male catkins appearing from the twig tips are the female flowers, which for the most part are quite inconspicuous, but for the fiery fuchsia feathery fibers spilling from its tip. These tiny yet colorful flower parts are the styles—the part of the flower that serves as a tube for the pollen to enter and later fertilize the flower so it can form a fruit (those nuts we were talking about, to be exact). The placement of the female flowers above the male catkin is a clever trick to help minimize self-fertilization, which can harm a species’ population over time.
So the next time you’re feeling impatient about spring, you could explore forests and field edges in search of the tiny, bright pink flowers of beaked hazelnut. And if you take note of the spot, you could return in the fall to sample one of our native hazelnuts.
This edition of Biomimicry is an adaptation of an episode of The Nature of Phenology, a radio show that Hazel and Joe produce weekly for WERU-FM. You can read or listen to entire past episodes here.
Resilience Tip:
Excess screen time harms child development, but providing alternatives to screens, like outdoor play time, is much more effective than just taking screens away.
Learn more about the effects of excessive screen time in this study.
What's Upstream:
See us at summer school! MOS is currently scheduling our summer school programming. If you are interested please contact us as soon as possible.
Register a camper for one of our summer day camps.
Come to an OWL Outing for women ages 16+: Flowers at the Pike Lands in Lubec 5/18, and Spring Plants and Birds at Taft Point Preserve 6/15.
Learn Orienteering Skills at our "Mother's Day Mapping" event on May 11th.