Seasonal Highlights

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Rock Creek Park

Spring Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Fresh pale green of new emerging leaves
  • Pink or pinkish blooms of mountain laurel (late spring), pink azalea, hillside blueberry
  • Red blooms of red maple, black huckleberry
  • White blooms of flowering dogwood, common serviceberry
  • Green moss with long thread-like appendages that support tiny spore-bearing fruiting bodies
  • Migratory birds arriving or passing through
  • Nesting birds setting up territories, building nests
  • Veery calling in the middle of the day, when most other birds are quiet
  • Gray squirrels feeding on the buds, flowers, or seeds of red maple  Ecobit: When Black is only Gray

Summer Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Pink or pinkish blooms of mountain laurel (early summer)
  • Red blooms of black huckleberry
  • White blooms of striped prince's-pine, partridgeberry—low to the ground
  • Dark berries of hillside blueberry, black huckleberry
  • Red berries of common serviceberry
  • Nesting birds actively collecting food for young birds. Baby birds learning to fly and following their parents around, begging for food
  • Gray squirrels energetically flirting, chasing each other through the tree tops (very early summer; their second annual litter of 3-5 born in August or September in leaf or twig nest in crotch of tree)

Autumn Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Nuts (hard mast): oak acorns, beechnuts and occasional pine cones
  • Striking color contrasts—Gray rock outcrops, dark soil, green moss, light gray or dark brown trunks, colorful leaves
  • Yellow leaves of American beech, American witch-hazel
  • Red and orange leaves of blackgum, red maple
  • Purple and brown leaves of flowering dogwood, oaks
  • Dark green leaves of mountain laurel, American holly
  • Yellow blooms of American witch-hazel
  • White blooms of white wood-aster
  • Dark berries of mapleleaf viburnum, roundleaf greenbrier
  • Red berries of partridgeberry, flowering dogwood
  • Red fox hunting for mice
  • Migratory birds leaving or passing through and winter resident birds arriving
  • Some years, abundant white, wooly strings of the “Boogie-Woogie Aphid” on beech twigs Ecobit: The Boogie-Woogie Aphid Look for caterpillars or other predators eating the aphids

Winter Highlights

Plants & Landscape

Animals

  • Rugged landscape and rock outcrops stand out!
  • Fallen leaves make studying leaf shapes easy: three-fingered leaves of sassafras; scalloped leaves of chestnut oak
  • Tan, dead leaves on tree—American beech
  • Evergreen leaves—mountain laurel, American holly, pines
  • White-and-green mottled leaves of striped prince's-pine (small plant)
  • Green, bare twigs of hillside blueberry
  • Dark contorted stems of mountain laurel
  • Gray smooth bark of American beech
  • Dark, deeply furrowed bark of chestnut oak
  • Fat, onion-shaped flower buds on flowering dogwood tree
  • Winter resident birds such as dark-eyed junco, ruby-crowned kinglet, golden-crowned kinglet, hermit thrush, yellow-rumped warbler
  • Gray squirrels noisily chasing each other through the tree tops in late January and February—part of courtship and mating