12 April Ashland
Walking up the trail to the visitor center Saturday evening, I could hear the marsh had changed over the week, with the trills of toads now the overwhelming first impression. The toads were calling well before sundown, and when I got down into the marsh at dusk, I would find many other changes as well. Or what seemed like big changes - I imagine it all sounds rather small from outside this regular, tightly focused attention I am giving this piece of land and water, but that’s interesting too - paying attention to a small area has made it immeasurably bigger for me.
It turned out the spring peepers had not relinquished the marsh entirely but were waiting for night to be nearer. When we set out on our hike, they had joined the toads and were, in fact, the easier to pick out, their calls being so distinctive. We made our way down towards the marsh, and just after I had told the group to point out things that looked interesting, one of the girls asked about the skunk cabbage. They were an older group, from the Eastern Shore, and I was surprised to find I could still surprise a couple of them with the plant. But it is always fun to share why it got its name. I forgot to mention that you could eat the leaves of the plant, which would have been good for even more fun, grossed-out laughter, but they seemed to enjoy just knowing about the plant.
When we got into the marsh, I tried to show them the wood frog eggs that have become a staple on these trips, but they were gone. Later, two of the girl scouts caught impossibly small tadpoles. They must have needed children’s eyes to be seen. Quite exciting to see them on their way.
While the wood frog tadpoles were hard to find and see, the toads, it turned out, where anything but. Towards the end of the boardwalk probably a dozen were moving around the water, some in amplexus, some males pushing other males off of females, generally unconcerned by us. I think we also heard a pickerel frog out at that end, and they should be next, but I’m not positive.
Before leaving the marsh we also happened to see a bat and a great blue heron fly past, two unusual and exciting sights. I had seen the heron before, also flying along the Red Clay Creek, which makes me wonder if it lives in the area.
Great blue herons, the largest heron on the continent, do live inland around marshes and riverbends, and in addition to fish, they eat frogs, salamanders and other things they would be likely to find in the area. They are crepuscular, feeding most actively in morning and at dusk, hunting alone with their sharp bill, primarily by sight and swallowing prey whole. Although they are solitary when active, they often breed in colonies and sleep in groups of more than 100 birds during the day.
Heron eggs are food for crows and ravens, and the birds, especially when young, are eaten by raccoons, eagles, red-tailed hawks, and, in other areas, bears. Nearly 70 percent of great blue herons die before they are a year old, although those who survive then live an average of 15 years.
They are beautiful birds to see wading in the water, and majestic in flight, their long wings, necks, legs outstretched.
From the marsh we started into the woods, and just as the night was starting to feel more dark than light and we were talking about listening for animals, we heard a rustling just off the path. I turned my flashlight on the noise and found - a toad. It really was a night for the toads, and we could hear them making their way from the forests to the water in a couple places.
The rest of the night hike was fairly uneventful. We heard plenty but didn’t see anything else, but I did have a chance to try a new teaching tool I learned that afternoon from Sheila, who coordinates the group programs at Ashland and was leading the other hike. I stopped the group under some hemlocks she had suggested and showed them a series of construction paper squares to see if they could tell the color. With the nearly full moon, they did better at this than one would hope with this activity, but it still gave us an opportunity to talk about the trade-off nocturnal animals make between rods and cones in their eyes - they have more rods than we do and can therefore see better in lower light, but fewer cones, which distinguish color. In the darkness, there is less ability to distinguish color, so those structures in the eye are much diminished.
We ended with a nice hike up Hawk Watch Hill and talked about owls and the universe until the other group arrived for astronomy. I held my own on owls and admitted I don’t understand the universe when they asked about that. But it was exciting too that two of the girls were birdwatchers and knew quite a bit about owls already. Talking about how they live and hunt at night became more of a conversation and kept us occupied almost up until it was time for astronomy.
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