What in the Woods is That?
Our biweekly guessing game!
Whatever draws us into the forest—be it birdwatching or logging, hiking or hunting—all of us are unified by the sense of wonder we feel in the outdoors. The forests, fields, and streams of our region are full of mystery, and if you stop and look closely, you’ll see all sorts of oddities.
Below find a picture of one such woodlands curio. Guess what it is and you’ll be eligible to win a copy of The Outside Story, a paperback collection of our Outside Story newspaper columns. A prize winner will be drawn at random from all the correct entries. The correct answer, and the winner’s name, will appear when the next column is posted.
This Week’s Entry
We gathered these seeds from members of the maple family. Clockwise from top, what species are they?
Answer
Mountain maple, box elder, striped maple, sugar maple.
Last week Northern Woodlands proudly announced that we finally stumped our readers in our weekly What in the Woods is That? contest, this time featuring four different seeds from the maple family in need of identification. Our apologies to the students at Newport City Elementary School in Vermont, who indeed correctly identified the maple seeds in question. Please read the students’ response to our contest below, and thank you to the students for keeping the Northern Woodlands staff on our toes!
Students’ answer:
We are the sixth grade enrichment class at Newport City Elementary School. There are six of us. We love trees! Around our school we have sugar maples, a red maple, silver maples, and Norway maples. Our Norway maples have tar spot fungus disease. Last year we learned how to identify trees with a dichotomous key.
Our answers are (clockwise from top): mountain maple, ashleaf maple, striped maple, and sugar maple. We had fun in this contest. We want to try other contests this year, too.
This week’s contest winner was A, M, E, J, C, and A of the Newport City Elementary School in Newport, VT