Friday, July 23, 2010

Why can't I have a canoe,too?

Roundtop installed a dock for the canoes at Adventure camp this season. It wasn’t in a day before Mr. Great Blue Heron was trying it out. Or maybe just waiting for the next canoe.
Yesterday was week #5 for camp and my stint of showing kids around the woods. Despite the 90 degree heat, we saw some good things:

The pied-billed grebe that I first saw here last week is still there.

All the groups got to see and catch assorted frogs and toads. Blackberries were eaten (no, not that kind. The real kind). Puffballs were poked. Squirrels were stampeded.

One group saw a very small garter snake. It might even have been the same one found the first week of camp.

One group saw a male and female scarlet tanager. I was more excited about that than they were.

Another group got to see an immature red-tailed hawk at close range. It wasn’t happy about something, and for once it wasn’t an invasion by 12 noisy and bouncing kids that had it upset. A Cooper’s hawk was nearby.

4 comments:

Jeannette StG said...

Great that you can impart some of your love for nature in kids. It's an important job!

Carolyn H said...

Jeannette: I do the imparting part. I'm not at all sure kids are catching it. Unstructured playing in the outdoors is pretty foreign to most of them. Sometimes I feel as though I'm trying to teach math using an abacus to kids who use their computers for that kind of thing.

Cathy said...

Well at least they saw something. You have to admit, catching frogs is fun. Ok, maybe the frogs don't think so.

Me - I got stuck dealing with another tornado warning again. Luckily all I got was a good downpour adn gusty winds.

Carolyn H said...

Cathy: i had the tornado warning on Sunday but it was okay at the cabin. I saw some rotating winds and vaguely rotating clouds but it wasn't anything that looked very dangerous. It was worse to the east of me where the land is flatter.

Carolyn H.