We often seek escapes to exotic destinations without realizing the wonder and adventure in our own backyard. Experience the natural surroundings with a holiday at home.
The team planning and preparation essential to any family vacation generates enthusiasm and builds anticipation. Here are a few preparation, programming, and packaging suggestions for launching a holiday at home.
Interstellar Safari
Explore earth and sky phenomena under a ceiling of stars and planets.
- Stretched out on a lawn chair or in the grass scan the daytime sky for clouds, letting them float through your mind and kindle imagination.
- Sharing sunrises and sunsets can foster feelings of joy and appreciation for life.
- Lying on your back in the grass at night use a star map and flashlight to identify stars and constellations overhead.
- Use Tinkertoys® to make models of the constellations.
- Have each family member track a different star’s position in the sky on an hourly schedule until starset.
- Gaze at the moon with your eyes and then through binoculars. Watch the moon as it slowly moves through its trajectory in the night sky.
- Frolic with fireflies, earthling stars, as they synchronize their flash to blink in unison.
- Make a temporary firefly lantern with a glass or mesh cylinder to use in hiking the perimeter of the backyard and investigating the interior rooms of the landscape.
Night Critter Crusade
Spending the night outdoors in a tent, playhouse, tree house, gazebo or screened porch brings to light mysteries of the night.
- Using a flashlight covered in red cellophane to help your eyes adjust to the dark and to not disturb nocturnal animals, scan the flashlight into the shrubs and lawn in search of snakes, frogs, toads, opossum and deer.
- Scan the flashlight above to spot moth and bat combat.
- Set the filtered flashlight base on your forehead or nose and aim it toward the ground to detect the glittery eyes of spiders.
- Watch for a flying squirrel family circus doing acrobatics among the trees.
- Silently sit listening to sounds of the night and try to identify the critters in your surroundings.
- Determine air temperature by counting the number of cricket chirps in fifteen seconds and adding forty. Compare with an outdoor thermometer.
- Sit on a sturdy tree limb, platform, or in a hammock to watch for mammals. By wearing a red filtered head-band light your hands are free to write and photograph.
Pollinator Package
Take flight with daytime and nighttime pollinators. Can you keep up?
- Photograph a variety of butterfly behaviors in your backyard from basking, drumming, nectaring, egg laying, mating, and puddling, to fluttering.
- Closely observe a butterfly’s compound eyes, proboscis, scaled wings, barbed legs, and antennae with a hand lens or binoculars.
- Take a census of the butterflies and the flowers they visit in your yard.
- Coax specific butterflies to your yard with particular plants like milkweed, fennel, and passionvine.
- Accommodate night pollinators with flowering tobacco, evening primrose, yucca, moonvine, angel trumpet and four o’clock.
- Spy on and identify the pollinators visiting the night blooming garden.
- Search for tiny butterfly eggs on the underside of plant leaves using a hand lens.
Winged Wonders
Pack binoculars and field guides for close encounters with birds.
- Stock hanging, platform and ground feeders to attract a variety of seed eaters.
- String overripe fruit on skewers for the frugiverous birds.
- Scout your yard as a bird in search of seeds, fruits, nuts, and insects.
- Sip lemonade while surrounded by hummingbirds sipping nectar from plants like red salvia, fuchsia, cleome, and nasturtium.
- Compete to see what family member can gather the most evidence of birds on your property: feathers, eggshells, fecal sacs, nests, droppings, shelled seed, sounds, woodpecker holes, pellets.
- Plant a bird seed garden to include sunflowers, millet, corn, and peanuts.
- Use field guides to identify birds in the backyard.
- Sitting silently call birds to the yard by repeating “psssh” in rhythmical patterns for 3-4 seconds. Experiment to see which patterns draw more birds.
Send homemade photo postcards from your holiday at home to family and friends. With imagination and planning a family can discover the wonder of no place like home.
The copyright of the article Backyard Adventure in Family Travel is owned by Arlene Marturano. Permission to republish Backyard Adventure in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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