Greening the Nature Centre with Native Plants

Today we had another beautiful sunny day for our meeting. The first thing we did was head to the pond for our monthly photo. The pond photo can be seen here.


Next everyone pitched in and planted some native plants around the nature centre:

After planting, everyone had a chance to update their journals and we talked about sightings people had during the past month.

Sightings:

raccoon, Harbour Seal, Jellyfish, black bear (Vancouver)

Sturgeon

Deer

Cooper's Hawk

Skunk

Bunny, Bluebirds

Groundhog

Monarch Butterfly

Turkey Vulture

Osprey

Robins

Praying Mantis

Reminder - Program October 29th

Come and help ‘green’ the nature centre with some native plantings. Bring gloves (we will provide shovels). Learn about different seeds and spores and how plants disperse them far and wide!

We have a special opportunity that is in addition to our regular November
meeting:
On November 5, our Young Nats club will be joining the Guelph Field
Naturalists at the Guelph Lake Nature Centre as part of a joint program by
WILD Ontario to see some real live birds of prey! The program would run from
10-12. Carpooling will be arranged closer to the date if there is interest.
This is outside of our regular program offerings and there would be an extra
$10 cost for those interested families to cover our participation.

Pond study and water quality - Sept 24

What a great turnout we had on Saturday. The weather was beautiful and perfect for gathering creatures from the pond!

It was nice to meet all the new members that have joined the Young Naturalists club this year and welcome back some returning members.
During the first part of our meeting we shared the following sightings: Piping Plover, Pileated Woodpecker, coyote, deer, snake, seal and gopher.

We're going to try something new this year. Each time we meet, we'll take a photo of the same spot at the pond so that we can see how that spot changes from season to season. Each young naturalist will also have a journal where they can write down the things they did and saw during each meeting!

While we were at the pond, we collected water to measure the water quality. The results were:
Air temperature: 20 degrees, Turbidity: 40 jtu, Water temperature: 18 degrees, Dissolved Oxygen: 4, pH: 7. Because of some problems with the sampling, the results were not submitted to the water monitoring website. If you would like to read more about water sampling, here is a link to the website: http://www.worldwatermonitoringday.org/

It looked like everyone had fun collecting creatures at the pond:

List of creatures collected:

crayfish

leopard frog

water scorpion

giant water bug

tadpole

scud

dragon fly nymph

damsel fly nymph

scavenger beetle

water boatman

water mite

fisher spider

backswimmer

water strider

stickleback

caddis fly nymph

See you in October!

Kelly