A Picture of Summer

Summer seems nearly gone, but the young naturalist program has been purring along.  We’ve done some neat new things this year and I thought I’d share a few with you.  Seems like most of the time so far as been spent in or around the water.

Its across the border, and in a STATE agency, but we hiked two times up at Big Island State Park East of Albert Lea.  That was a nice place to walk with great trails, some nice scenery, the only drawback might have been that fact that you couldn’t escape the sound of the interstate highway.

One trail going around the “Big Island” was full of land snails.  Great big ones.  So many that even watching where you planted your big feet, I still stepped on a couple.  Some combination of habitat and surroundings must have been just the ticket for these snails. 

We found a turtle laying eggs, deer to watch, and countless birds to see.  There is a park user fee if you go, but $5 for a day parking permit wasn’t bad.

The naturalist program was able to introduce a few new people to their first ever fishing experience.  Always a treat to help someone catch their first fish.

On the flip side of that, we had our first kid-hook incident.  I had just finished telling someone that in the 20 odd years I’ve taken kids fishing, we’ve never had anybody hook each other (or me).  Well, a minute later it happened.  One person cast, and another person had a hook in them.  It was in deep, and right in the neck of all places.  Turned out the hooked party was not of legal size, so we had to put them back…  A quick trip to Mercy and the hook was out.  Hopefully, I can go another 20 years or so before it happens again.

Another high point was a fish rescue operation.  A local private quarry was being partially drained and in the process, a batch of fish were going to be left high and dry.  Just so happened I had a batch of kids in the stream wading program that week, so with nets and buckets we managed to take many of the fish out of the “going dry” part and take them over to the “staying wet” part of the quarry.  It was wet very muddy hot work, but very satisfying.

And finally, if you have a game camera, you need to get it out there.  The bucks are growing and getting fun to see.  The camera captured this trio one night.  Deer season is looking up!