More than 25 students and community members came out to the St. Lawrence Sustainability Site on Saturday Sep. 30th to spend the afternoon discovering the various flora, fauna and fungi present on the 33.5 acre farm. The afternoon's back-to-back naturalist walks included a wild edible plant walk with Paul Hetzler (Cornell Cooperative Extension), a fungi expedition with Claire Burkum (SLU), a hunt for reptiles and amphibians (herps) with Tom Langen (Clarkson), and a bird walk with ornithologist Susan Wilson (SLU).

St. Lawrence students in the Sustainable Communications class joined Nature Up North on campus to learn tree identification and to start collecting data for the Monitor My Maple citizen science project. After a tour of the four maple species found on the St. Lawrence campus - sugar, red, silver and norway - they jumped into data collection, pairing up and exploring campus trees on their own. While clearly still suffering from the recent tent caterpillar outbreak, maple trees near the SLU fitness center are bursting with seeds and already starting to change color!

ALWAYS SOMETHING TO SEE

Last picture in series of newts still in eggs was taken on May 19th. Have been checking pool ever since and was rewarded yesterday!

Came inches from destroying the spider's web with my face. Happily I noticed it just in time and then was able to instead provide it with a small portion of the blackfly cloud I travelled with:)

Out with the dogs, encountered a lot of bullfrogs, green frogs, and others, but most jumped away before I could get a photo. This one sat staring at me. On the return, my eye caught sight of a turtle in the water, swimming hard upstream. I looked more closely and saw this painted turtle. After looking at it, I put it back and it returned to swimming; I noticed a second turtle in the same spot swimming when I returned this one, unharmed, to the water.

Slogging around in the vernal ponds with Joel Danko from the Massena Nature Center is always an adventure, he can find all the critters!!

My drive back from Ottawa this morning was full of fascinating nature encounters. Before crossing the border I noticed a porcupine high up in the limbs of a tree beside the highway, and spotted a Male Pilliated Woodpecker as it flew across the interstate just before my vehicle. The image below shows some frog fences that were installed beside route 68 north about 5 miles north of Canton. These fences were constructed by students beside route 68 near certain wetlands with the purpose of deterring migrating frogs and amphibians as they travel during mating or hatching seasons.