Personal Journal #1 ; May 21, 2011

Today I took a friend of mine outside to experience the environment with me. We walked near a small pond and sat on stone benches that were located next to the pond. We just sat and reflected on things such as school, and we also just sat and listened to the bugs in the woods behind us. We did that for about 30 to 45 minutes before we got up and began taking pictures for my species identification. I am really upset, because usually there is some type of armadillo or something near my building, but today there were none. ): I just did my best to capture the plants and animal species in my surrounding environment. I am located in northeast Florida, so there were not really any of the same species from the species list given on Angel, so I captured some of the most prominent species in the area.

In the area I am living, there is large amounts of saw palmetto. I’m not sure this is something that is located all over the state, but everywhere I have been I have spotted it. To me these palmettos represent Florida just as much as a Sabal Palm tree does.

This plant is a fern. Ferns are perennials, and grow best in shaded areas. 

The area in which I am staying is surrounded by pine trees, this tree was one of the tallest ones in the area, and I thought it was very interesting. It towered over most of the other trees surrounding it. There was also a pinecone on the ground closeby.

I know it’s a little hard to see, but this is a picture of a baby frog. It hopped on my foot as I was coming back from my walk, and scared me half to death. I had to put it in my blog. The frog was about the size of a dime, and looks like a piece of bark- look closely at the picture to see it.

I also found a bunch of Spanish moss hanging from the trees in the area across the street from my apartment. This is one of the largest bundles of moss that I could find.

I thought it would be cool to capture the entire environment that I was experiencing, so I did just that with a video. I wanted the video to be a sort of panoramic view of what I was looking at.

Overall, the experience I had today in the environment was fun and relaxing. Although I did get bit by mosquitoes, stood in an ant pile, accidently locked myself out of the apartment, and had a baby frog jump on me, I definitely got the environmental experience this morning.