Glorious



Where the field meets the forest and the sky

What a difference a week made! This week’s camp was glorious—cool, with a slight breeze and lots of stream denizens for the kids to catch. 70 degrees and low humidity versus 100 degrees and humid—it’s a no-brainer. I thoroughly enjoyed being in the woods and the hike to and from Beaver Creek.



The kids did well, too. They caught three frogs—two pickerel frogs and a green frog—several minnows and more crayfish than I had room in the buckets for. The two different species of frogs made it easy to show them that a “frog” is not just a frog but that this area has different species of them. I had tiny crayfish and crayfish monsters that would have been of a reasonable size for eating. The kids also liked the many ebony jewelwing damselflies that obligingly perched on knees and arms. They didn’t catch any salamanders this week, but they found helgramites and assorted other larvae and grubs, not all of which I could identify. In other words, they had a good time.

The little creek is still shallower than I like to see it, but I believe there was a slight improvement in water flow over the previous week. It still got muddy pretty fast, and I still tried to keep the kids’ feet out of the deeper pool—and they still forgot that about a hundred times—but I do think the mud they churned up cleared a bit faster than it did last week.