We were at the nature fest for about hours and Alexandra made friends with this little girl. Here, they are playing a game where you match the paw print to the animal. They played it 3 times!
On the insect walk, the guide took a net and went through a field of tall grass. She came up with LOTS of spiders! Then, the kids (Alexandra and her friend were at first the only kids - then a school group of about 40 kids joined us!) started finding all kinds of things on their own - including this large spider (over 1.5 inches long) and a little frog. The guide (a naturalist) told us it was either a grass spider or a nursery spider - you can't tell without looking at some internal organs.
Here's a very wiggly chrysalis that one of the girls found - she told me she did not pull it off of a tree branch, but I wasn't so sure. One of the guides put it up in a tree and hopefully it will emerge OK.
And, I don't think I've ever seen someone holding a scorpion! We learned something from her, too. The bigger the pinchers, the less venemous a scorpion is! She had a little bitty scorpion with small pinchers and she said he was much more venemous. Because they have large pinchers, they don't need as much venom.
This isn't as nice a photo - it is focused on his pinchers, though, and you can see hairs on the pinchers! Anyway, you can see the venom sack (I don't know if this is the correct term) by his stinger!
Here Alexandra is holding a hermit crab.
And, we learned from last year to go fishing FIRST! The fish get full and don't bite well in the afternoon. While we were at the pool for about 10 minutes, 3 kids caught catfish which are then put back in the pool. But, unfortunately, Alexandra didn't catch any.
3 comments:
I'm learning all these nice cool places to go to next year. I'm keeping track of all these parks so we can do that too.
That looks like an amazing outing. I am sure that both you and Alexandria had a great time. I loved the animal heads photo. You don't see something like that just anywhere. I would have been terrified of the scorpion, but did not know that the smaller the pincer the more the venom. We learned about the male and female cricket this year while studying insects, and couldn't wait to get outside and distinguish between them. Glad to see that y'all had such a good time and sorry that she didn't catch any fish. :0(
What a fun looking trip!
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