WBJ Park this Late October

As of yesterday, we've received 13.93 inches of rain. We anticipate breaking the monthly rainfall record of 14.00 inches when we check the gauge tomorrow.

Ozark Trail is almost completely submerged. Ouachita Trail sports a dead fish here and there. As it nears the Ozark junction, it, too, goes underwater. Miracle Trail is washed out from the irises to Fordney Bayou. Caddo Trail is under water from Fordney Bayou to Shettleworth Bayou on both the north and south ends of the park. Adai goes under just north of the Yatasi intersection.

Even the paved Audubon Trail shows signs of recent high water, its south bend coated with mud.

This is the "occasional flooding" of a forested wetland. The palmettos and cane are thriving. The frogs and toads are booming. Dragonflies race to keep up with the plague of mosquitoes.

The Louisiana State Fair is in town, and not surprisingly, many folks would rather be down at the fair grounds than here sloshing through the water, ducking spider webs, and fending off ticks and mosquitoes. But, from the picture windows of the Interpretive Building, the fall colors are vivid: Chartreuse leaves frame fuchsia berries; turmeric, terra cotta, rust, and sulphur highlight the forest green, chocolate, and slate palette of evergreens. It seems unfair to have this view all to myself.

Craft Solution

Problem: We’re going to the National Hunting and Fishing Day Wildlife and Forestry Festival to set up a booth. About 500 festival-goers will swim past. What can we bring that will draw them in, that will distinguish us from the other exhibitors, that will send them home thinking “I’m gonna have to check out that Walter B. Jacobs Nature Park?”

The objects we bring overlap with the fur trappers’ exhibit. The animals we bring overlap with the falconers’ exhibit as well as the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ booth with the baby alligators.

Pamphlets and fliers end up lost on the grounds of the recreation area more often than they make it all the way back to the cars.

Solution: Crafts! And more precisely, crafts that directly relate to our traveling exhibits. We have that old alligator on a stick! If we label the craft with the park’s contact information, it might just make it all the way home.

To complement the live owl, I came up with an Owl Mask. It met all the criteria in my wanted ad for a craft: It would be a memento of meeting the live owl; it would illustrate the relative size of owl eyes to human eyes; it would have the park’s contact information on the back; it would be pre-cut and ready to decorate in the interest of saving time; and it could be decorated any way the maker wanted, using markers, crayons, glitter, etc. (Okay, the glitter part wasn’t optional. We painted every eyeball with gold glitter paint.)

The mask was a raving success! All over the festival there were children wearing owl masks.

“Where did you get that mask?”

“At the Walter B. Jacobs Nature Park booth over there!”

Craft Conundrum

We have this craft in ‘the vault’ that comes out from time to time. It’s a cardstock alligator on a stick. It’s cute. It has googly eyes, zigzagged felt strips, and a brass fastener that allows its tail to swing back and forth. It was employed at Earth Camp for a number of years to complement a folk tale about how the alligator got its bumpy, scaly skin.

I took it out of circulation for two reasons: 1) Returning campers were complaining that they remembered and even still possessed the craft from previous summers; and 2) It is a step-by-step assembly that offers little room for creative expression. In fact, campers had to write their names on the crafts in order to tell them apart.

It makes reappearances for three reasons: 1) If you don’t already have one, it is a cute craft; 2) A child is more likely to get all the way home with it than he is with a brochure or flier; and 3) One of my predecessors prepared thousands of alligator on a stick crafts. Someone cut out over one thousand alligator feet, 300 bodies, 300 tails, 900 strips of felt. Someone bagged up sets of 40 crafts that included the exact number of googly eyes and brass fasteners. I do not want to waste that time or materials that were invested.

But, why do we employ crafts at a nature park? What kinds of crafts are appropriate? And how do we balance the need to be economical with our time against the need to express creativity? What a conundrum!

Here are my objectives for doing crafts:

· To create a memento of an interpretive experience
“I made this!”
“I touched a real live alligator today!”

· To reinforce concepts explored in a game, hike or presentation
“Alligators have bumpy, scaly skin that protects them from all sorts of nasty things.”
“Alligators’ eyeballs can look straight even if their bodies are tilted.”
“An alligator’s tail is half the length of its body.”

· To shamelessly promote my site
“Look what I made at Walter B. Jacobs Memorial Nature Park today!”

For me, finding or creating appropriate crafts that can be done quickly and still allow participants opportunities to do them their own ways is a constant challenge.

(By the way, if you want the alligator folktale or alligator on a stick craft instructions, send me an email or Facebook message.)

Two Checkered Skippers

For the July count, I tried to cram into my brain an inordinate amount of details regarding butterfly identification. After the count I suffered a bit of burn out, and did not revisit the subject until yesterday. Yesterday, we performed a seasonal NABA count. The old adage that says cramming isn’t learning holds true. If you want to do it, you’ve got to do it right.

Two Checkered Skippers

There are two checkered skippers in the Northwest Louisiana area: the Common Checkered Skipper and the Tropical Checkered Skipper. In theory, the ‘common’ one is more abundant than the ‘tropical’ one - but you’re not out there to make assumptions about populations – you’re out there to make observations.

It’s little and light and skips along the ground… It could be a blue… it could be a hairstreak… You track it and watch it land. It’s checkered, so it’s a checkered skipper.

Step 1: Get an up-close look with your binocular. (It may be all you get.)

Step 2: Take a photograph from a distance.

Step 3: Get closer to the butterfly and take another photograph.

How can you tell which checkered skipper it is? I call it “continental drift.”

Take a look at the images.

The top row shows male and female Common Checkered Skippers. The bottom row features male and female Tropical Checkered Skippers.

Look again.

Common Checkered Skippers have a large spot (the continent) about half-way between the body and the tip of the forewing. Sometimes there is a tiny dot next to it, but usually there is only one large spot.

Tropical Checkered Skippers have the same large spot, though it’s often a tad slimmer. Next to the large spot is a second smaller spot. To me, it looks like an island broke off the mainland and is drifting away.

There are a couple other differences: Common Checkered Skippers have a uniformly checkered fringe, whereas the Tropical Checkered Skippers seem to be missing a few patches of white in the fringe pattern. Also, just inward from the fringe, Tropical Checkered Skippers have a row of white spots that extends all the way to the tip. That row is incomplete on Common Checkered Skippers.

I’ve just received word that the trail through C. Bickham Dickson Park was mowed and widened this morning. So, the place that hosted dozens of Tropical Checkered Skippers yesterday is now devoid of any skippers at all. I hope that movie they’re going to film out there is a good one.

Natural Resource Mining

Overview:
Through game play, participants discover that non-renewable resources are finite, and that a resource is collected until it is no longer profitable to do so.

Concepts covered:
non-renewable
cost/benefit
strategy
teamwork

Materials:
1 pound of mini pony beads in assorted colors
1 pair tweezers per player
1 large bowl with locking lid
11 small bowls with locking lids

How the Game is Played:
· Teams must extract an assigned color from the large bowl filled with beads.
· One at a time, team members use forceps/tweezers to pluck one bead from the larger bowl and transfer it to the smaller bowl.
· The bowl cannot be moved, shaken, or stirred.
· When no target beads are visible, the team can choose to sacrifice a player in order to mix up the bowl and expose more target beads.
· The game ends when the sole surviving teammember runs out of visible target beads, or a team chooses to cease mining activities in order to preserve existing players.
· Points are tallied and the team with the most points wins.
1 bead = 1 point
1 player = 10 points

Wrap up:
The winning team explains how they acquired the most points.

Extension:
The game can be played again with a different target color. Scores from the second game can be compared with the first to draw inferences about probability.

Note:
Sorted beads can be acquisitioned for Water Cycle Game. Don’t you love it! Segue into Renewable Resources.

Rainy Day Activity: The Water Cycle Game Reinvented

The water cycle game shows up in a few places, and goes by a few names. In Project WET, it’s called The Incredible Journey. To take an ‘incredible journey,’ participants act as water molecules, start at one of the nine places water can be (clouds, glaciers, oceans, rivers, lakes, underground, soil, plants, and animals), and roll a die to find out which part of the cycle to move to. After a few rounds, patterns emerge that participants can interpret: There’s a lot of water in the ocean; water in the ground tends to stay in the ground; water in a glacier tends to stay in the glacier; evaporation and sublimation into the clouds are how much of the water moves from one stage of the cycle to another; and, the amount of water in the cycle is constant.

Design an adequate record sheet to accompany the activity, provide adequate guidance before and during the activity, and summarize the trends discovered through playing the activity and participants will have a worthwhile experience. But where are the tangible-intangible links? What will participants take home?

The answers are… beads! And a bracelet!

I cannot even take credit for this. One of the Earth Camp counselors got it from a ShrevCORPS team leader who got it from a Project Learning Tree facilitator. But it is so awesome! I have to pass it on:

Instead of having the participants work in teams and record each leg of their journey with a pencil and paper, have each participant work independently and collect a colored bead from each station. When they have enough beads to fit around their wrists, tie it off and it’s done. Each participant has a personalized bracelet to keep, and each bead of the bracelet represents where her water molecule has been. Talk about tangible!

About the beads…

I went to Michael’s and for frugality’s sake I purchased 1 pound of mini pony beads in assorted colors, along with 20 yards of plastic cord for about $7.00. There were 11 colors in the bag. Once sorted, there were over 200 beads of each color. One pound of beads and 20 yards of cord is enough to make at least 30 bracelets.

White = clouds
Red = animals
Orange = ground water
Yellow = rivers
Green = plants
Blue = ocean
Indigo = lakes
Violet = glacier
Black = soil
The assortment included cream and pink beads that were not used in the game.

If you’re doing this with a small group, you might consider purchasing more novel beads. Animal-shaped and plant-shaped beads, seashells, wooden beads, and semiprecious stones like amethyst and lapis lazuli are easy enough to find. It may even be possible to find cloud-shaped beads.

Ticks

The forest is full of all kinds of creatures, great and small. Ticks are some of those small creatures you’d rather not see! Ticks are in the spider family, but while spiders live respectable lives hunting for themselves and controlling insect populations, ticks are free loaders. They literally sit around and wait for someone to come by and feed them. Don’t let that someone be you:

Tuck your shirt into your pants and tuck your pants into your socks. Ticks can’t bite you and suck your blood if they can’t find your skin.

Spray your clothing with an insect repellent – especially one containing DEET that claims to protect against ticks.

Stay on the designated trails to avoid the dense vegetation where ticks usually hang out.

After your encounter with the natural world, check your body for ticks. Get in front of a mirror, take off every garment, and perform a head-to-toe inspection. Turn your clothing inside-out and carefully examine the seams. Put your clothes in the dryer on high heat to exterminate any hitchhikers.

If you find a tick, don’t freak out. He has to be attached for days in order to transmit any of those nasty diseases he carries, so you have a minute to make sure you get him off right. Use tweezers and extract his little head from your skin. If you are hosting an overwhelming number of these parasites, revert to the chigger solution: one cup of bleach in 4 inches of bathwater.

Take a few precautions and the nuisance of ticks won’t keep you from enjoying the outdoors.