i66 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [13:4— April, 1917 



information in the premises, I communicated with Miss Susan B. Sipe, 

 teacher in the James Ormond Wilson Normal School of this city, one of the 

 best equipped of all our Public Schools. Miss Sipe most kindly and very 

 promptly responded to my application for information. As the teacher in the 

 Nature-Study Department, Miss Sipe "requires every student to take at least 

 one walk in the country each month and make observations at the same time. 

 As most of them have done nothing of the kind before in their school life, they 

 have difficulty in seeing. They are improving from month to month. I also 

 encourage the feeding of birds by the students who live in the suburbs. The 

 two papers I am sending you show the endeavors of one of them." The two 

 papers referred to are reproduced in extenso below. 



Miss Beard being a student in the Normal School, is, of course, a 

 young lady grown. These two examples of nature-study observation are dated 

 23, I9i6and January28, 1917. The latter is a most interesting contribution 

 December and is entitled "A January Walk in the Country," and the former "A 

 December Visit to my Bird Tables." Both papers are in evidence of excellent 

 powers of observation on the part of their writer, and they show marked im- 

 provement when we consider that they were written less than a month apart. 



A JANUARY W^ALK IN THE COUNTRY 



The world was covered with a soft white blanket last night and when I went 

 out the sun had sprinkled it ^ith myriads of diamonds. But I did not go out 

 to look at the beauties of nature, I went out seeking facts. Since nothing was 

 to be seen on the ground but snow, I went to th woods to find my facts. As I 

 walked along I looked at the buds on the different trees and I found that many 

 of them are much larger than they were when the leaves first fell off, especially 

 those on the hickory, tulip magnolia, silver poplar, Judas tree, and dog wood. 

 The little round, fiat buds on the dog wood w^ere all holding tiny candles of 

 snow. These round buds are the ones which will make the flowers next spring. 

 The leaf buds are still very tiny. In the same way it is only the buds. that will 

 make the "cat-tails" on the silver poplar, which are so large now. The leaf 

 buds are still very small. The buds on all kinds of oaks, willows, black walnuts, 

 elms, and maples are still as small as they w^ere early in the fall. It was very 

 easy to tell which oaks belong to the white oak family because they still have a 

 great many of their leaves sticking on their branches. The pine trees all had 

 their needles drawn closer to their branches than they are in the summer and 

 the tips of the branches had tiny snowballs in them. I looked in the clusters 

 of needles at the end of the branches to see whether the young shoots had 

 started to grow and I found that they had not. Most of the berries have fallen 

 off of the cedar trees but I looked on the tips of some of the branches and I 

 found the tiny little waxy balls which will make the berries for next year. 

 They were not any larger than a pinhead. These were only on the trees which 

 had berries on them. On the other trees I found little yellow scaly looking 

 balls which were about half as big as one of the blue berries. These are the 

 buds of the staminate flowers. The trees which bear the berries do not bear 

 the staminate flowers. As I crossed the creek at one place I noticed that the 

 tails on the alder and hazel bushes seemed to be longer than they were in the 

 fall, and they are not so dark in color. 



