I was sifting through my email this morning and a headline from a weekly health newsletter caught my eye, "Study: Global warming means itchier poison ivy." Curious, I read the full story.

But I had a Huh? moment when I looked at the photo of poison ivy posted with the story because it didn't look right to me. With my curiosity peaked -- and the fact that I obviously needed to refresh my memory about the plant -- I did a quick Google image search.

The images varied quite a bit and made it clear that there's more to identifying the plant than the simple rhyme I learned years ago, "Leaves of 3, let it be."

The shiny, pointy leaves are what I usually look out for on the trail, although the 3-leave bunches are less clear in this photo.

These look more like birch tree leaves to me because of their roundness. I would not have likely recognized these leaves as poison ivy on the trail.

These don't look so shiny but have the leave shape to watch out for so I might have identified them correctly.

My most recent run-in with poison ivy was last summer while geocaching with the kids. We were in the thick of it before I identified the plant. And luckily (after breaking out the baby wipes and washing our lower bodies) none of the kids came down with a rash. As for me, the itchy ankles (because I forgot to wash off my sandals) didn't last long.

So after looking through the various images of poison ivy, I went to the FDA's website to brush up on preventive measures I can take if we run into the pesky plant again - which is likely with all the hiking and geocaching we do.

And the CNN story that inspired this rambling gave me yet another reason why I want to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth when it opens in Maine movie theaters at the end of the month.

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