Forgot I was supposed to be doing these, so Ill just quickly go through some of my walks. Lots of observations if you go during the middle of the day, the Great blue heron tends to fly in during the middle of the day and stalk around the pond edge or the rivers outer edge facing away from the park. When they're near the pond they hunt near the beaver den. Ive seen one of the beavers that supposedly live in the den but I have since heard that they found one dead (probably the local muskrats they're super vicious or a dog) Its always easy for me to get pictures of plants because I wear my heavy boots out and dont get stung by any of the nettles in the area. Birds, and other animals are tougher I still havent mastered the whole sneaky thing to get good pictures of them. On my first walk I got divebombed by a red winged black bird (more on that later) but apart from that and the heron nothing super interesting happened. my second walk was basically more of the same, though I did get to scout out some areas for me to do my projects.
My third walk was an utter disaster, here's the setup: I had ordered an all weather notebook which never came so I had gone to staples where they did not have any instore, I managed to find a water resistant notebook in the store and decided that was probably good enough. Cut to my third day when I decided to do an early morning walk, it was lightly raining but I assumed my book would be able to handle it, I was proven very wrong, literally not an inch of this book was water resistant. I had to cut that day short unfortunately and had to re-write some of my notes in the notebook that were completely soaked.
Experiment 1 was a bit of a mess from the start, I finally worked it out down to doing a study on the bugs in the area, creating simple bottle traps out of 2L bottles and pegging them into the ground with garden pegs. I just collected those today and they were a huge success all of them were still standing this morning despite the storm last night and the dogwalkers.
Experiment 2 was much smoother, I went out with my mom to set up my quadrats, take my pictures, and estimate percent cover. We both got divebombed by several redwinged blackbirds in the area and finally learned a possible cause! Bird houses were set up (possibly to help the Tree Swallows in the area nest), these birdhouses entrances are too small for Redwinged black birds to enter but they make nice perches for them, the tree swallows who are nesting in the houses do not take kindly to this and thus they're constantly at each others throats which is stressing out both species I imagine. The other option is that redwing blackbirds have always been kinda jerky and this is just the first time ive noticed.
Experiment 3 was a welcome change of pace, It was birdwatching so I set up a chair in front of my transect and just recorded what birds were showing up, noting big events. Despite the rain on day 1 I saw several different species and even saw a few snapping turtles.
Here's an image of the snapping turtle I saw during experiment 3, saw it again yesterday when finishing up my birdwatching. They poke their heads out of the water when they get near shore to look out for people. On the 7th this one popped its head out of the water, saw me, left then must have gotten out upstream, walked down the path for about 3 minutes till it was almost directly behind me and then started peeling off for the pond area. Then when I was packing up it was wandering back towards the river. Its actually sad to see them since the dogs that are let loose in the area destroy their nests, the city has started to have people go out to collect the eggs for incubation before they're grabbed but even last week I heard a new nest got destroyed.
