Exploring the Wetlands

I’m trying to incorporate more nature study and outdoor learning opportunities this year.   We’ve already been camping and will hopefully get to go again before the cold weather sets in.

We went on a little morning excursion to a local wetlands area.   It’s been pretty dry here, so the wetlands weren’t very wet.  We’ll try again in the fall after the rains set in.   We were able to find some of the mosses, fungi and liverworts that Lindsey has been studying in science, so it was not a lost cause.

We went off the beaten path and found some old relics hidden in the underbrush, like this old car.

This old irrigation system was pretty interesting.   The rock lined walls have partitions built every so often.   The partitions can be removed to allow water to flow through the walls to get from the pond (at the top of the photo) to be other side of the property.

The elevated pathways were lovely, and the views were great.

We followed the sounds of flowing water until we came to the underground spring made it’s way above ground.  As you can see, it’s very dry here too.

If you look REALLY closely in the bottom left corner of this next photo, you can see some minnows that were stranded in the shallows.

The signage along the trail said the wetland area is home to beavers, black bears, heron, snapping turtles, foxes, possums, bull frogs and a host of birds and insects.   On this trip all we saw were some crazy squirrels and lots of swallowtail and monarch butterflies.   Hopefully we’ll have more luck running into animals next time…except for the bears.