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Stalking Snakes in the Study Area
April 24th, 2004 On Saturday, April 24, we went on a field trip to the Study Area. The weather was nice and sunny. Our leaders were Annie, Rob, Barbara, and Diane. Of all our members, only Andy, Maggie, my sister Madeleine and I attended this field trip, with our parents and Annie's husband, Stefan.
We crossed the path and came to another pond, at the culvert. In this pond we found caddisfly larvae. They make little tubes out of things that they find on the bottom of the pond. They live in the tubes. We walked a bit more and were looking for a place to have lunch in the forest, but then we saw deer and got completely distracted! There were about twelve of them. They didn't know we were there because the wind was blowing from them to us. We followed the deer for a while and we tried to approach them cautiously. Finally they ran away. We had lunch beside a large pond. A snake came under Annie's picnic blanket and we chased it for a while but couldn't catch it. After lunch we went down a bit more and then we arrived at a small bridge. We were looking off it and we saw a bunch of fairy shrimp. We caught some in a jar so we could have a closer look.
Some of the signs of spring that we noticed were Wild Garlic (I got down on my hands and knees and grazed on it, but we weren't allowed to pick it, sadly enough), Spring Beauty flowers, buds on the trees and lots of woodpeckers. It was fun!
Past Trips
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We started out by staying on the paths except for going to flip over logs. Under the logs we found bugs like pill bugs, one
big brown spider, centipedes and millipedes and insect larvae. Rob found a Garter Snake, then a little later we found
another one that we caught and were able to hold for a while. It was a little scared and was very smelly. Then we went to a
pond where we found a 50-year-old garbage dump left by the farmer who used to own the land. We found a big lump of coal and
heard Chorus Frogs singing in a pond.
Then we went to the study trees and we looked at all of our trees. I also picked a study pond. We ate the buds off
a big fallen basswood.