Poison Ivy

[catsittingstill]

No, I haven't gotten it recently (yay.)

In the past few years Kip and I have had some Adventures with poison ivy and I'm very much in favor of people (especially me) not getting it and I know the canonical "leaflets three let it be" but goddamn if it doesn't look like EVERYTHING has three leaves sometimes. So I never know if I'm overreacting to everything green or blundering into obvious patches and I don't find out for four days so it's hard to learn. Well.

Some GENIUS has come up with this poison ivy eye-training quiz that you can take anytime you feel like it, with 50 pictures of plants comprising different shapes and shades of poison ivy mixed with harmless plants, so you too can hone your suspicion index without increasing your sensitivity.

Bird And Moon's Poison Ivy Quiz

As a result of this quiz I have noted a couple of areas in my neighborhood that seem to be absolutely full of the stuff, and which I intend to give a wider berth.

Comments

[patoadam]

Thank you! This is very helpful. I was scoring below 50% at first.

[xap]

Agreed - thank you! :)

[gorgeousgary]

I did surprisingly well - 42/55 (76%) correct!

In addition to the "leaves of three" saying, I remembered - probably a bit of Cub/Boy Scouts that stuck with me - that poison ivy leaves are usually glossy/shiny as well. So a number of my mistakes were things that were glossy but were not poison ivy. A couple of mistakes were poison ivy that extended partway up a tree, rather than being closer to ground cover.

But definitely useful as my son likes to wander off the paths in the park behind our house into the brush. No time is good to have an "adventure" with poison ivy, but right now is particularly bad. (For the same obvious reason I keep telling him "now is a really bad time to put yourself in the hospital" every time he tries to do something that could end in a sprain or stitches.)

[thymidinekinase]

So useful; thank you!

[bigbumble]

I got 53 of 55 on the first go around. Lots of training on what poison ivy looks like as a day camper at the Kalamazoo Nature Center when I was a kid.

[tigertoy]

I live in an area with so much poison ivy that I recognize it instantly, but I was just taking a walk with a friend and realized that I was having more trouble than I thought I would explaining how to recognize it.