Can You Recognize Poison Ivy When You See it?

When you're camping in the woods with no facilities, you need to be very careful which leaves to use for toilet paper. If you move to a new home and the back yard is full of weeds, you can't just start pulling them up willy-nilly, or run a lawn mower over them while wearing shorts. You have to take a good look in case some of it is poison ivy. Poison ivy leaves and stems exude urushiol in their sap, which will cause an itchy and sometimes torturous allergic reaction in most people that lasts for days, but it doesn't affect other animals. How well can you identify poison ivy? Take the test at Bird and Moon. You'll be shown 55 pictures of plants, and you declare whether or not the picture contains poison ivy. I missed three by identifying benign plants as poison ivy, which is safer than missing the dangerous plant. My performance on this quiz comes from years of experience, not all of it good.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Rosemary Mosco)


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Never seen poison ivy. Try poison oak. It can grow as a bush, thicket, vines that climb up trees. Loses its leaves in the winter. Can you ID poison oak without leaves? I can. But it took a few really bad cases to learn all its bad habits.
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