The Release and Springs

Posted by Cindy on May 29, 2008

After about four days of observing the little critters we brought home from the pond, we decided it was best to return them to their rightful home.  Why?  Well, one one variety of little critters swimming around was mosquito larvae!!  No, thank you for them finishing their life cycle in my house!

We also believe we had tadpoles, caddis fly larvae, water louse, some sort of teeny tiny black shelled snails (we saw two mating!) and unidentified microscopic black spots swimming everywhere.  That was a lot of critters in one cup full of pond water!

Before heading home, we visited two springs near the pond.  The first is a small spring flowing into a creek.  The second is a spring that was dammed up many, many years ago as a watering hole for farm animals.  Isn’t it pretty?  Does anyone know what sort of plant is growing in it?

Oh, and look who we heard, then saw as we headed back toward the truck.  If you can’t tell, its a woodpecker!

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Bird Center

Posted by Cindy on July 5, 2007

Here’s the newest summer center at our house – Birds!

The box of books on the right includes nonfiction books about all sorts of birds – everything from birds we see around here to penguins to toucans.  I’ve also included some really good children’s literature that have birds as characters – Make Way for Ducklings (Puffin Storytime), Angelo, and The Raft to name a few.

The books laying out are bird identification and drawing guides.  These will be used with their nature notebooks as they go bird watching.  That just reminded me, I need to set out binoculars.  I’ll do a post soon about the nature notebooks.  I just love these!

I found the little birdhouses at The Dollar Tree for……….$1.00!  I’ve also set out a bird memory game and some bird activity sheets that from the NaturExplorers Beautiful Birds study.  Finally, the game in the back on the left is really pushing it to fit into the bird theme.  It’s a spelling game with bird pictures on the back of the cards!  Ha Ha!  Whatever works, right?