Families Enjoy Green Spaces

Kenyon College student Matti Freiberg engages Kailee Foreman, a regular visitor to the Brown Family Environmental Center at Kenyon, in Gambier, Ohio.  (Photo by Don Comis)

Clay, 11, hunts for water creatures, along

 with  Lindsay Mills  (yellow blouse),

Olivia Mills (blue blouse),

and Hannah Mills (black shirt). 

(Photo by Don Comis)

Watching children circling mini-ponds and excitedly bringing back their hand nets full of snails, tadpoles, beetles, larvae, and a spider--along with sightings of  a green frog and a turtle--makes you realize the value of natural areas to families.

Proud mothers and a father and a grandmother shared in the childrens' excitement at their finds as they emptied their nets into water in a bin for temporary storage before release.

The excitement and interest level was written in the faces of some of the younger children like 6-year-ol Emma Parsisson and the older children like Walker Mills, 11.   Walker yelled that he had seen a turtle and enjoyed seeing both the turtle and the adult frogs he couldn't net.

But his net and that of the other children ended up filling the bin with a tree frog tadpole, a bullfrog tadpole, snails, a "backswimmer" water bug, a "giant water bug', a diving beetle, dragonfly and damselfy nymphs, and a "fishing spider".  Not to be confused with a water strider, the fishing spider is a semi-aquatic spider that uses water like a spider uses a web--to travel on and to sense vibrations of prey, which can include water striders.

The interaction between Kenyon student Matti Freiberg and Kailee Foreman so captures the value of green spaces like that of the Brown Family Environmental Center at Kenyon in Gambier, Ohio, that I couldn't resist this series of closeups, as Kailee amused and amazed me.  (Photos by Don Comis)

 

For a slightly different version, check out my website.

 

Counting Bugs to Measure Stream Water Quality

This northern leopard frog enjoys the excellent water quality of the Kokosing River in Millwood, where one of the volunteer monitoring stations is located.  (Photo by Don Comis)

When I attended a biological stream monitoring workshop conducted by "Save Our Streams" in Maryland, I was pleased to learn it was fun and easy to assess water quality by identifying and counting water creatures, mostly larvae, with the help of a one-page chart.

It's just fun for all to stand in a stream holding a seine net to catch the creatures and then count and release them.  I did it with children at our church in Maryland for about a year.

The idea is to see how diverse the organisms are, indicating good water quality, and to see if the good water quality indicating organisms like mayfly nymphs outweigh poor water quality indicators like snails and other scavengers.

This came to mind when I saw that there will be a similar workshop conducted near where I am currently, in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on May 28.  

We're blessed here to have the very clean Kokosing River and volunteers that monitor it regularly at several locations.

To learn more about the upcoming workshop, go to:  http://watercraft.ohiodnr.gov/sqm .  Also, check out a longer version of this blog at my website:  www.doncomis.simplesite.com.