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).

During a nature walk on the Kip Trail one of the girl scouts from the Nikentsiaki Service Unit in Canton-deKalb spotted this little garter snake slithering across the trail. This one is an Eastern garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis), a subspecies of the common garter - or garden - snake. 

This even started at 2pm and went until ~6pm. Each walk had a specific topic and had presenters from either St Lawrence, Clarkson or the Cornell Cooperative Extension. The topics included edible/medicinal plants, fungi, herpatology and ornithology (birding). It was very informational and really fun. During our bird walk we got to see a young bald eagle and a large amount of ravens. The fact that this event was free makes the experience even better.

Friday the 15th of September our Intro to Environment and Society Class met with Professor Tim Messner from Suny Potsdam for a bow drill demonstration. A bow drill is a prehistoric fire starting tool. There are several steps that are very important when using a bow drill. The main pieces are a hearth board, the bow, the spindle, and the bearing block. I, Summer Scovil, was unsuccessful creating fire with the bow drill even after working all period to attempt to make fire. It is very exhausting physically after a while of work. I, Ariel Garvin, was successful creating fire.

I've been to Wehle about three times in as many months. It is a very nice place for an easy day hike. There are dog statues everywhere because of the famous Elhew Kennels.The snakefoot trail goes along the water. There are some good views and it is very dog friendly. I would definitely recommend it to anyone in the area looking for a place to go hiking.

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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!

Quite a crowd gathered on the St. Lawrence campus for the 2017 partial eclipse. Jeff Miller, from the SLU physics department, set up telescopes and provided "eclipse glasses" - specially designed temporary shades that allow the wearer to look at the sun during the eclipse. Others brought homemade pin hole viewers and welding glass to explore different effects.

I was digging in the soil near Hemlock and Yellow birch trees and happened upon these deer truffles, or Elaphomyces species. These are hypogeous fungi, meaning they form their fruiting bodies beneath the leaf litter. Although in the same phylum, these are not the same genus as the gourmet cooking truffles that more people They rely on mammals to dig them up and consume them, dispersing their spores in the feces of the mammals. Some small rodents, such as the Northern Flying Squirrel, rely heavily on fungi in their diet.