I liked the kids from the day I had taken a few snakes to talk to them at their school about the ecological value of snakes and how to be safe around them. I mentioned to the teachers at Merryhill School, and to Marylee Thomason, who had arranged all this, that I’d love to show the kids around at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve. We had a chance to do that on March 3rd.
The first couple of days of March were sunny and warm, and then a front came through with rain the night before our walk. At 9:00am on the 3rd it was 63 degrees, a little breezy, and cloudy. I tested some trails; going to the north pond was not going to work because of mud. We could still walk the sandy trail up to the bluff, and we could visit the south pond because of the boardwalk.
But much that lives at the preserve was dug in and sheltering. The butterflies were nowhere to be seen and the turtles were probably staying underwater. The birds were going to help – down at the south pond I recorded calls of blue jays, a Lincoln’s sparrow, a song sparrow, northern cardinals, an American robin, and a red-bellied woodpecker. And they continued to be heard from time to time after the kids arrived.
We talked with the kids about what to expect, and one boy asked with a note of nervousness whether we might find brown recluse spiders. As a recovering arachnophobe myself, I could empathize with what he was feeling. I said it was possible, but really you’d have to handle them or press against them to get bitten out here. The reassuring general rule about just about everything at the preserve is, watch from a little distance and everything will be fine.
We started at 10:00am, walking up the south face of “Kennedale Mountain” and noticing how the sandstone that’s below the surface wears down and creates the beautiful, soft sand in the trails there. We noticed the thorny stalks of prickly ash and I told the kids why it’s also known as “toothache tree.” Up on the bluff, we talked about lichen, and Marylee described how a fungus and an algae work together to create the cool blue-gray ruffles that live on many of the tree branches. We also touched on the history of the place. Laura Capik (Friends of SCNP Vice-President) mentioned how Caddo people once lived here as well as members of the Comanche people, and the bluff appears to have been used as a lookout and as a place to burn signal fires when needed.
We came back down and I asked, “who wants to see a pond?” All the kids called out “yeah!”, and so we headed for the south pond. The kids looked for fish in the water, but while somebody may have gotten a glimpse of a sunfish, mostly they stayed in deeper water. The turtles, too, were nowhere to be seen. On a sunny day, we would probably have seen several of them, pulled up on pieces of wood and basking in the sun. We talked about the fish we weren’t seeing, and mentioned a few birds, too. I said we had a belted kingfisher that we often saw, with their big heads and mohawk crests. I wish we had seen him today.
At the end, everyone sat around the picnic tables to do a little journaling. At each table I asked what they would remember today or what they had liked. They also let me have a look at some of their writing and drawing. A few drew fish. One boy showed me a spider he had drawn. A girl said she would recall the spikey plants, remembering that discussion of prickly ash. Samantha had been delighted at the mosses she had seen and told me about a moss she had bought that was not very green right now, so she was worried about it. Isn’t that delightful, the range of things in nature that capture kids’ attention? I love mosses, too, with the beautiful green colors and velvety clusters of leaflike structures. Clumps of mosses among rocks can take us to miniature worlds as we look at (or touch) them.
I hope to see those kids again some time – come back when the Texas spiny lizards are hanging out on tree trunks and dragonflies are hovering over the pond!