vernal pool adventure

Our little Friday social group arranged a class through our favorite park to study vernal pools. So on Friday we donned our waders, grabbed our nets, and headed out to a vernal pool in the park to see what we could find! Ms. Catherine, one of the park's educators, headed up the adventure, and brought along plenty of containers to get a close-up view of our finds, and field guides to help identify them.

Zoo Boy enthusiastically plunged in, and found a variety of interesting critters, including a wood frog, a newt (in the eft stage), and a dead Northern Water Snake. He also literally plunged in literally -- he eventually fell in (inevitable, really, given that his waders were at least 3 sizes too large for him) and spent the 2nd half of the class without pants.

J examines the muck he pulled up off he bottom of the vernal pool. He found a really cool Predatious Water Beetle, as well as some mosquito larvae, and a spring peeper tadpole. Ms Catherine caught a couple of spring peepers for us to look at as well. She also brought us some skunk cabbage leaves to smell. Cracked me up how everyone was clamoring to take a whiff on her cue of "oh, this smells just awful!"

Ms Catherine helps the kids identify the critters they caught. Zoo Boy, now pantless, wanted to know the names of everything and spent quite a bit of time watching them in the tray. Before we left, we released all the amphibians back into the pool, rid ourselves of the dead water snake, and then packaged up the invertebrates and some plant samples to examine more closely back at that nature center.

Back at the center, the kids looked at some of their smaller finds under the microscope. What a fabulous class!

Later that evening, I asked the kids what they learned at the vernal pools class. J said that he learned how to catch water creatures in a vernal pool using nets, and rattled off a few of the names of what we caught. Zoo Boy said that he caught a giant salamander and rode on it's back around the vernal pool. Hm. I must have been looking the other way when that happened.