Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Vigu Botany Course


A part of the Wilderness and Nature Guide education I'm currently taking consists of learning more about the nature itself. It is not only about being in the nature, but also actually knowing something about plants, animals, birds, fishes etc. This weekend it was time for the botany course. The requirements were not overwhelmingly difficult with 141 species of plants. Regarding lichens and mosses we only had the main groups to learn, since an exact species determination can be very difficult and sometimes even necessitate the use of indicatory chemicals. The vascular plants are easier to identify and the list was not overly long. I probably could identify over 100 species before the course, since I took some interest in that 15 or so years ago. About half of the plant species on the list was thus to some extent familiar for me, but there was also a lot to learn, especially the (at least previously) less interesting grasses and sedges. And I also needed to refresh things I had learnt earlier, though it is much easier to relearn something than to learn it from the start.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

A Kid-Sized Mukluk


The kids are getting big enough for real mountain bikes. The 9-year-old boy is somewhere between 145-150 cm long and at 44 kg should be strong enough to ride a fatbike.