Natural Environment Reference

A small songbird common to fields, deserts, and tundra with a high, tinkling song that can tumble down from heights and flights hundreds of feet in the air. Their diet consists of seeds and insects and, although common throughout North America, their numbers have declined in the last fifty years. Their name comes from the black head striped that occasionally raises into tufted "horns" atop their heads.

Bark is the colloquial term for the protective outer layer of tissue on woody plants such as trees and shrubs. The technical name for bark is vascular cambium. Depending upon the species of plant it belongs to, bark can be very specialized. It can be thick, thin, smooth, scaly, or adapted to withstand fire. Some bark, like that of palo verde trees, is infused with chlorophyll and is able to produce food directly from the sun, just like leaves.

A thin layer of particulate matter in the ambient atmosphere that makes objects in the distance appear blurry and further away than usual, or that refracts light into a diffuse opacity which also affects vision. Sometimes haze is accompanied by the scent of burning wood, water droplets, or a magnified sense of heat.

Frost forms when objects at the earth's surface are colder than the air around them. Not only are the objects cold, they are cold enough to freeze the water vapor in the air that condenses, and then freezes, onto these surfaces. Sometimes this looks like a dusting of snow.

A hard frost refers to a frost that occurs when the surface temperature of the earth remains below freezing for several hours. In this case, the water vapor in the atmosphere freezes into larger crystals than the dusting, rime, or layer of frost that forms at slightly warmer temperatures.

A slab of stone, traditionally marble or granite, that marks a person's burial place. The stone is usually engraved with the dead person's name and dates of birth and death.

The condition of being grainy or of having the consistency of coarse sand. Gritty.

Numerous summer- and fall-blooming plants found in meadows and pastures and along roads, ditches, and other disturbed areas throughout North America. Goldenrod species are recognizable because of their golden inflorescence, or the hundreds of tiny yellow flowers that ascend their slender, upright stems. Often considered weeds, goldenrods are attractive to various pollinators such as bees, wasps, and butterflies.

The golden mean is another term for the golden ratio, a mathematical concept that presents itself in nature as a range of interlinking relationships. A Greek philosopher, Aristotle, defined the golden mean as falling exactly between excess and deficiency, between too much and too little. Even though the golden mean finds quantifiable expression in numerical relationships between observable objects and phenomena in nature, it also can be expressed as a moral, philosophical, and aesthetic ideal that evokes a sense of balance, harmony, and equilibrium.

Found throughout almost every region of the Northern Hemisphere, golden eagles are one of the most common and largest predatory birds on the planet. They mainly prey on ground mammals, but have been known to attack larger animals including coyotes and bears to defend their offspring. This eagle is distinguishable because of the gleam of its golden-brown feathers because of its powerful beak and large talons.

Glaciers are huge bodies of ice that form because they accumulate more mass (from precipitation) than they lose (from melting and evaporation) over time. Glaciers can grow and shrink annually, just as they seem to expand and then retreat over the earth's surface. Because glaciers are so massive, their sheer weight causes them to move downhill, often changing the topography of the earth's surface in the process.