love bird spotting around the neighborhood through the different seasons - you start to pick up on certain areas they like more than others, certain "hot spots" where multiple flocks can be found, and noting, even without words, the differing group-styles they exhibit at different parts of the year.
on that note - my group of 4 crows became a group of 5 and i don't know why. is it a different group entirely? did a straggler need a pack? at the beginning there seemed to be a lot of animosity regarding the extra member but i don't see that much anymore.
i don't *think* it's a different group entirely, the rest of them still have a connection to me. on some days they'll still follow me, they still come up to the expected feeding spots.
i've got probably a group of 10 to 20ish neighborhood plants scattered in grasses and in between cracks of sidewalk that i'm pretty good at identifying against lookalikes and whatnot.
though, there is a group of 3-4 shared lookalikes that i really struggle to identify - Yarrow, Queen Anne's Lace (Wild Carrot), and Poison Hemlock.
Hemlock also frequently has many purple spots running all along its stem, where as QAL only has a few if any spots.
Hemlocks flowers are in little clusters spread out from one another, where as QAL's flowers are bunched close together "hemlocks flowers keep their distance and so should you" is a mnemonic
Mature Hemlock can get very tall, 10-12ft or more, but QAL rarely ever is bigger than 6ft
When their young, the best way to tell them apart is by looking at the lobe shape on their leaves
Yarrows leaves are very distinctive, and immediately differentiateable from either QAL or hemlock
@0utside0utsider i continued elsewhere in this thread with an image of some i found recently that had neither the purple nor the hair, and was talking about how difficult that made it to tell.
I think i've got Yarrow down pat, it's really QAL vs Poison Hemlock that i struggle with, and that struggle is a lot more serious, poison hemlock can mess with your head just from touch, let alone eating any on the mistaken thought that it's wild carrot.
in order: Yarrow, Queen Anne's Lace, and Poison Hemlock
the most notable part of the yarrow, in contradistinction is the fern like leaf patterns.
the difference between Queen Anne's Lace vs Poison Hemlock, as i've heard it, is that The Queen has hairy legs - the stem has lots of little hairs on it. And that the Hemlock has purple splotches on the stems.
but what i see in my neighborhood seems not to have either hairs *or* purple splotches. so i'm at a loss.